Over the past year-and-a-bit, the Canadian right-of-centre (including myself) has consistently underestimated Carney’s political prowess. When he launched his leadership campaign, it looked safe to assume that his prime ministership was destined to fall into the Campbell/Turner/Tupper bin - that is, a brief interregnum that starts with a leadership election victory and ends in a general election loss. Then, once he pulled off a tight-yet-convincing win against Poilievre, the goalposts shifted and it seemed reasonable to conclude that he would wind up like Paul Martin - wins party leadership, wins minority government, governs for the following year-and-a-half, loses following general election. Now, with Carney having converted his minority into a majority (ableit narrowly) through a spate of floor crossings - which allows him to govern continuously until 2029 - plus a comfortable polling lead against a CPC consumed with internecine knife fights, the LPC PM most analogous to Carney would be Louis St. Laurent (who governed for close to nine years).

As the Black Horse recently remarked, we are living in the Thousand Year Carney Reich - an age of political stagnancy and mediocrity, characterized by exercises of raw political power. And given the generally degraded state of Canada as of present, this Reich feels much more akin to Brezhnev’s tenure as General Secretary of the CPSU than it does to the peace and prosperity of the ‘50s under St. Laurent.

All of this begs the question - how was the LPC able to pull this off? It is easy - and somewhat necessary - to blame the weakness of their opponents. As I’ve written previously, Pierre is Pwned; his temperament makes him wholly unlikeable and causes his libertarian inclinations (which don’t provide much of a defense against left-liberalism) to seem more extreme than they actually are. The early 2025 replacement of Trudeau with Carney caught him off guard, and he hasn’t been to successfully adapt to his current predicament - cognitively, he’s stuck in the triumphalism of 2024, when he was universally regarded as an inevitable PM-in-waiting.

It is also easy-and-necessary to blame a disproportionately older segment of the electorate for our eternaliberal government. As David Colleto explained earlier this week with his Security Spectrum, there is a sizable chunk of the populace - one that is far more likely to exercise the franchise than other chunks - that is “anchored”, i.e. completely secure in their station in life, harbouring no insecurities in any domains, and prone to a smug self-satisfied complacency. They, like the regime apparatchiks who vacationed in dachas during the late-Soviet period, are temperamentally conservative and wholly benefit from the existing order. Any interactions they have with the political system will be done with the intention of preserving the current structures in place. As such, they remain a profound and infuriating obstacle to anyone looking to exact systemic changes.

But despite the ineffectual nature of the opposition and the pliancy of the general public, there is something to be said about the progenitors of this state of affairs - the LPC itself. After all, everything about the Trudeau-to-Carney pivot - from the shunning of Freeland to clear the way for Carney’s leadership landslide, to the engineering of the “Elbows Up” moment, to the attainment of a coveted HoC majority - was done with a remarkable, ruthless efficiency and a thorough understanding of the mechanics of our political system. And in this process, Trudeau’s peak woke - an ideology with both many true believers and fervent detractors - was shedded in favour of a technocratic YIMBYism, a more wonkish, less emotive belief system that’s harder to effectively criticize. The LPC pulled their soldiers out of the proverbial bailey and positioned them in the motte.

So, what does the LPC believe?

A good place to start in this endeavor would be Part I of The Machiavellians by James Burnham. In it, the Trotskyist-turned-neocon examines the subtext behind De Monarchia, Dante Alighieri’s only major work besides Divine Comedy. Burnham provides an analysis of the treatise if taken at face value:

In the first place, we may note that the ultimate goal (eternal salvation in Heaven) by which Dante holds that all political questions must be judged is in the strictest sense impossible, since there is no such place as Heaven. Second, the lesser goals derived from the ultimate goal - the development of the full potentialities of all men, universal peace, and a single unified world-state though they are perhaps not inconceivable, are nevertheless altogether Utopian and materially impossible. Third, the many arguments that Dante uses in favour of his position are, from a purely formal point of view, both good and bad, mostly bad ; but, from the point of view of actual political conditions in the actual world of space and time and history, they are almost without exception completely irrelevant. They consist of pointless metaphysical and logical distinctions, distorted analogies, garbled historical references, appeals to miracles and arbitrarily selected authorities. In the task of giving us in .. formation about how men behave, about the nature and laws of political life, about what steps may be taken in practice to achieve concrete political and social goals, they advance us not a single step.

This is what Burnham calls the formal meaning - a potemkin construction meant to conceal, but ultimately express, the real meaning. To find the real meaning of De Monarchia, Burnham examines the political context in which Dante was situated, which I’ll provide a short summation of.

In the thirteenth century, Florence - the city in which Dante was born and raised - was consumed by a conflict between two rival factions, the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. The Guelphs were loyal to the Papacy, and the Ghibellines to the Holy Roman Empire. Dante, born a Guelph, was heavily involved in this conflict, and fought at the Battle of Campaldino, which secured Guelph dominance of Florence. This, however, proved not to be the end of such factional disputes, as by 1300 the Guelphs had fractured into two camps - the hardliners (known as Neri) and the centrists, like Dante, who had tried to compromise with the Ghibellines (known as Bianchi). With these new battle lines drawn, the Bianchi formed an alliance with the Ghibellines of Tuscany, and became de-facto Ghibellines themselves. Nevertheless, such support was not enough to overcome the Neri, and Dante and his ilk were forced into exile. As Burnham puts it:

Dante never re-entered Florence. The rest of his days were spent wandering among the households of the remaining Ghibelline princes in northern Italy. His revenge on his Guelph enemies had to be satisfied by thrusting them into the worst torments of his Inferno.

It is within this context that the real meaning is situated:

Eternal salvation, the highest development of man's potentialities, everlasting peace, unity, and harmony, the delicate balance of abstract relations between Church and State, all these ghosts and myths evaporate, along with the whole elaborate structure of theology, metaphysics, allegory, miracle, and fable. The entire formal meaning, which has told us nothing and proved nothing, assumes its genuine role of merely expressing and disguising the real meaning. This real meaning is simply an impassioned propagandistic defence of the point of view of the turncoat Bianchi exiles from Florence, specifically ; and more generally of the broader Ghibelline point of view to which these Bianchi capitulated. De Monarchia is, we might say, a Ghibelline Party Platform.

The formal meaning, as we see, is window dressing, florid language espousing utopian abstractions. Once it is eviscerated, we are left with something much less impressive - in the case of De Monarchia, a tract that Burnham describes as “traitorous” and “reactionary”. This method of concealment, though, despite being deployed in a 700 year old treatise, is hardly an antiquated form of political communication; Burnham notices such techniques being deployed by his contemporaries, namely the Democratic Party in their 1932 platform. It could easily, as you may have guessed, be applied to the LPC and their belief system.

Now, the precise term most suited to describing the LPC’s belief system would be, to borrow from Mosca, a political formula - an ideology that is considered acceptable, even noble or unimpeachable, by the mores of the society and polity it finds itself in, yet functions as something of a concealment mechanism. As Sam Francis says in Leviathan and Its Enemies:

Elites, in other words, do not usually claim, publicly or privately, that they are acting in a particular way because such action is in their group interest. They claim rather that their action is in accordance with the will of God, the principles of morality, the laws of nature, the national interest, the destiny of a race, the inevitable course of history, the will or good of the people or of mankind, or is a step toward some widely approved value such as peace, liberty, justice, prosperity, or stability.

With this established, it is worth turning our attention towards one of the most famous political formulas currently marshalled by a government: Socialism with Chinese characteristics (SwCC), the moniker used by the CCP to describe both its “ideology” and its policy programme. This is not to say that the LPC is completely analogous to the CCP in terms of its grip on power or suppression of the citizenry; such a claim would be absurd. Rather, SwCC serves as a useful foil to the LPC’s political formula.

SwCC, as it is usually understood, refers to China’s shift under Deng Xiaoping towards what might be described as “state capitalism”, and away from the rigid Marxist economics that so impoverished China under Mao. Such a political formula allowed China to grow vastly in economic might; however, the levers of political power in the country were still kept under the grip of the CCP, with any support for democratization or political freedoms being summarily quashed. China is ostensibly socialist, yet the term “socialist” is somewhat of a vestigial formal meaning, with SwCC concealing what the country actually is (i.e. a nationalist security state).

On a similar note, I would contend that the political formula of the LPC is, and has been since Pearson’s time as PM, Managerial Humanism with Laurentian characteristics (MHwLC for short).

To start, I’ll break down the former half of this formula: Managerial Humanism.

Managerial Humanism, as a concept, originates from the aforementioned Leviathan and Its Enemies, and Sam Francis explains it in the following terms:

As a doctrine, a formal system of ideas, managerial humanism may be defined as the belief that all men can (or should or will) be governed in their social, economic, and political relationships by the science of management, the science of operating and directing mass organizations.

Francis goes on to lay out the four “elemental ideologies” of Managerial Humanism -scientism, utopianism, hedonism, cosmopolitanism - and how these four elements bind together:

Managerial humanism incorporates scientism because the premise on which management is based is that human beings and their social relationships are analogous to the phenomena of inert nature and can be manipulated by scientific techniques in the same way. It is utopian or melioristic because it claims that a significant or complete amelioration of the human condition is possible by means of the application of the science of management (as well as other sciences) to human affairs. It is hedonistic because it rejects the work ethic and ideals of the socialized individualism of the bourgeois order, and its view of amelioration and of the utopia that can or will come into being is based on the gratification of material appetites and the avoidance of deferral and sacrifice. The scientism of managerial humanism denies or tends not to recognize nonmaterial motivations and needs of human beings or interprets such needs as ultimately materialistic in nature. Managerial humanism, finally, is cosmopolitan because it encompasses an abstract view of man that tends to ignore or reject the particularities of his historical and social existence (especially the differentiated groups, classes, and local communities of the bourgeois order) and emphasizes what is common to all men at all times and in all places and circumstances. The global or transnational organization of mankind under the discipline and ideologies of managerialism and human liberation from or transcendence of national, parochial, social and economic, racial, and sectarian categories are the highest goals of managerial humanism, and it is because of the cosmopolitan and universalist premises of the ideology that its description as “humanism” is appropriate.

MH - which could also be described under synonyms such as left-liberalism or progressivism - is the default ideology of our age among the oikophobic and deracinated ruling classes of almost all western countries. It is the water is which us fish swim, with its axioms and presuppositions seeming so self-evident to many that they scarcely need to be seriously examined or questioned. Of course, MH comes in different packages and exists on a gradient - some versions, such as those employed by Carney and the Chretien-Martin regime, rely more heavily on supply-side economics and eschew activist government, and what one might bluntly call gay race communism. Other, more virulent strains - those of Pearson, PET, and JT - lean deeper into leftism. Overall, however, there is a baseline set of policy programmes that flow from MH and which all LPC politicians in good standing for the past 60 years have be expected to support - single-payer medicine, multiculturalism, a generous welfare state, gun control, a permissive immigration system, varying degrees of environmental protection, peacekeeping, etc.

All of this, while explanatory to some degree, inevitably begs the question: what about this is distinct to Canada? Here is perhaps the greatest distinction between MHwLC and the aforementioned SwCC - with SwCC, the ideological abstractions (socialism, or technically Marxism-Leninism) are vestigial and anachronistic while the regional adaptations (Chinese characteristics) are more pronounced. MHwLC - since the LPC is xenophilic in nature - is the opposite. The Laurentian Elite - the class which uses the LPC as its political vehicle - is, as Voltaire said of the Holy Roman Empire, neither.

Yet Laurentian characteristics, as unimportant as they generally are, still exist. Bilingualism, for instance, is borne of the “French Fact” and universally beloved among the LPC top brass - a noteworthy distinction from other Anglo countries, where an emphasis on “official languages” is considered right-coded. King Charles is still technically our head of state - although, as everyone knows, he is basically a taxpayer-funded hood ornament who provides a bit of pomp and circumstance. The House of Windsor’s viceroy hasn’t intervened directly in politics since the King-Byng affairs exactly a century ago.

Other Laurentian characteristics are slight adaptations of general MH beliefs.

Westminster Parliamentary Democracy - a term that gets bandied about a great deal by LPC apparatchiks - is often used to distinguish the supposedly calm and orderly Canadian political system from the chaos of the Republican model down south. This generally tracks with the MH emphasis on “democracy” as an abstract good and signifier of legitimacy - yet the Westminster Parliamentary portion denotes the blending of the executive and legislative branches plus the separation of head of state and head of government into different positions.

Much like MH adherents in other countries, the LPC need a client group that can be deemed the Most Oppressed Minority, with that client group then being given certain privileges and entitlements as a way to compensate for past injustices, both real and perceived. In the United States, African-Americans have long filled this role, with their enslavement held up as the ultimate crime for which eternal atonement is demanded. In Canada, First Nations are thrust into such a position, with residential schools - and the dubious claims about made about their supposedly genocidal nature, which some want to make illegal to question - being made out to be the Ultimate Crime, a crime that is often weaponized in service of demolishing the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the state.

Multiculturalism, for its part, is regionally adapted through emphasis on the “mosaic not a melting pot” bromide - a phrase that explicitly acknowledges our lack of emphasis on assimilating immigrants, holds this up as some sort of moral virtue, and contrasts this with the supposed horrors of the American “melting pot”, portrayed as a draconian ultra-assimilationist regiment.

Up to this point, what I have described may seem, as most formal meanings are, rather inane - boilerplate left-liberalism hitched to King Chuckles, the French language, the oppression of the First Nations people, and some blather about “mosaics”. It is similar in many ways to Dante’s florid ramblings about universal peace and a unified world-state.

What then, you may ask, is the real meaning? To answer this question, we should turn to the moniker with which the LPC is frequently ascribed: the natural governing party. At first glance this phrase seems to be purely empirical in nature - that is, it describes the fact that of the 15 LPC leaders since Confederation, 11 have been PM for some duration of time. But “natural governing party” also contains a normative claim, one that forms the real meaning behind MHwLC: the LPC has the right to govern. They are what Curtis Yarvin calls a “hard party”:

A hard party is a party designed to take unconditional control of the state. A hard party is a party in which all members delegate 100% of their political energy to the party’s command. Joining a hard party is a political marriage, not an election-night hookup with any random politician whose name on a lawn sign catches your eye.

A hard party is a legal private organization whose goal is to become the ruling party of the next government. Like the CCP in China. Its voters will elect this government. Its officers will staff it. Its donors will host its state dinners. Its ideas will become the official ideology—the official truth. They had better actually be true!

The LPC exists to form government. It views itself as the political embodiment of Canada - the LPC is Canada and Canada is the LPC. Where goes the LPC, so goes Canada. MHwLC contains not just ideas believed by some Canadians - it is, as Chrystia Freeland once said of her political beliefs, “simply Canadian”. Going against it is UnCanadian, and means you are either emotionally incontinent or cognitively challenged. Oh, and something of a quisling to boot.

All of the various epistemological and normative claims made in the MHwLC formula have not been selected because they contain unique insights into the nature of reality; rather, they are dominant ideas - ideas that validate the use of power and serve the pre-existing self-interests of the LPC. All the constituent parts of the formula can be broken down according to this logic.

Let’s start with the four “elemental ideologies” of MH. Scientism posits that humans are blank slates whose fundamental nature can be altered via social engineering - a position that naturally gives greater prestige, importance, and control to the bureaucrats (hired by LPC governments) who will invariably do this social engineering. Utopianism, promising paradise on earth, involves a transfer of power to the LPC-aligned academics who will make this utopia a reality. Hedonism weakens the traditional bourgeois social fabric that makes it possible for people to form strong communities independent of the managerial state; this means, in the absence of a strong sense of social trust and cohesion, people become more reliant on the managerial state (which, of course, the LPC favours the expansion of) for support. And cosmopolitanism - which purports to transcend localist and tribal identities (although, in practice, the proponents of cosmopolitanism encourage tribal identity in certain groups while denying it to others) - makes it harder for opponents of the LPC to effectively challenge it by stripping away the identities under which they might organize.

What binds all of these elements together - in the context of them being dominant ideas - is that fact that they either create pretexts for giving more power to the LPC or they degrade and impoverish those would potentially seek to remove the LPC from power.

(It is worth noting that policy positions could flow from the MH elements that don’t validate the LPC’s power; these positions, though, would obviously not be adopted by the LPC as they would be regressive ideas - the antonym of dominant ideas. Those who believe in the regressive versions of these beliefs tend to gravitate to the NDP, the bastion where true believers are contained).

The LC - as I previously noted - are the ancillary half of the formula. The performative embrace of the British Monarchy put on by the LPC lends them a fig leaf of traditionalism, which they can use to conceal the fact that their ideological project for the past 60 years has slowly demolished the conception of Canada that the monarchy represents. Since the monarch is functionally powerless, there is no serious risk of their power being invalidated. Mosaic-not-a-melting-pot and Westminster Parliamentary Democracy function as ways to differentiate Canada, however pedantically, from the U.S. - ways they can satiate the anti-American thirsts of their base and increase their chances of electoral victory.

Perhaps the most blatant example of a LC that is purely a dominant idea is official bilingualism. It is also the LC that clashes the most brazenly with MH - particularly with multiculturalism - and creates some interesting contradictions.

One of the central tenants of MH in its modern form is an emphasis on “diversity”, on the elevation of non cis-hetero-white-male candidates into job positions in order to reflect the demographic composition of the country, with that composition in turn having been significantly altered through waves of replacement migration. A defining feature of these candidates, particularly those of the non-white variety, is the fact that their native tongue is often Punjabi, Mandarin, Tagalog, etc. Requiring fluency in both French and English, therefore, forces these candidates to learn two non-native languages, significantly decreasing their chances of meeting such qualifications. As I previously mentioned, stipulating that a polity has an “official language” is usually a policy supported by the right - and naturally opposed by the champions of “diversity”. Yet Justin Trudeau - the most enthusiastic proponent of DEI dogma to be PM - expanded bilingualism requirements to the Supreme Court, along with a raft of other bureaucratic positions. So what gives?

To understand this paradox, something else must be understood: the LPC, despite being a hard party, is not a monolith. Rather, it can be divided, as in 1984, into an Inner Party and Outer Party - the Inner Party being the real hard party, the Outer Party much less so.

The Inner Party - the sanctum in which actual power rests and privileges flow from - is, and has been since the LPC’s inception, a small clique of francophone upper-middle class professionals from Montreal and Ottawa, plus a few members of Toronto’s upper crust. Some degree of meritocracy is present - Alberta-borns such as Chrystia Freeland, Jim Coutts, and Mark Carney made their way into the hard party by virtue of obtaining elite educations. Yet implicit in the structures of the hard party is an understanding that those within it will hail from a particular Laurentian milieu. You can see this in the way that, until Ignatieff’s ignominious stint as leader, every LPC head was a cabinet minister in the government of the previous LPC PM - or the party’s insistence on rotating between francophone and anglophone leaders. The fact that the LPC - which has foisted multiculturalism and diversitarianism on Canada for five decades - has never had a non-white, non-male leader (not even a white ethnic leader) serves to underscore this point.

In the Canada of 2026, however, holding the support of this rather narrow and particular milieu is insufficient in terms of winning a general election - the abject purpose of the LPC, after all. This is where client groups, who constitute the Outer Party, come in - segments of the electorate that the LPC engages in brokerage with, promising specific goods and entitlements in exchange for support at the ballot box.

The veritable stew of ethnic diasporas brought in through decades of mass immigration form a constellation of client groups ripe for exploitation - many privileges, such as lesser criminal sentences, preferential hiring practices, and the promise to make importing their extended family easier, are offered to them by the LPC as rewards for voting the right way.

And while the LPC no doubt takes great pains to ensure that they stay on good terms with these groups, mechanisms - like official bilingualism - remain in place to gatekeep the ranks of the Inner Party from the unwashed masses. It is for this reason that I would contend that the LPC Inner Party is only nominally ani-white - they are anti-white, it goes without saying, in regards to anyone outside the parameters of their milieu. But - and this is perhaps the reason they have endured this long - they have enough self-preservation instinct, and lack enough oikophobia, to prevent themselves from being completely swamped by the undifferentiated masses they let in, at least until now.

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LPC client groups, I should mention, are not static. Old ones are discarded when they no longer serve an immediate electoral purpose, and new ones are courted for political gain.

Up until the Chretien-Martin era, socially conservative Catholics - many of whom were Irish, Italian, and Portuguese immigrants - constituted a client group that reliably backed the LPC. After the Pearson-PET paradigm shift - which included PET’s decriminalization of homosexuality and abortion - this group had no real influence on the policy trajectory of the party, yet still clung on as an anachronistic rump faction, somewhat akin to the Dixiecrats in the U.S. In 1996, when the Chretien government made sexual orientation a prohibited grounds of discrimination under the Canadian Human Rights act, 29 MPs in the 177-seat LPC caucus voted against the change; Chretien’s embrace of gay marriage at the end of his tenure in 2003 signaled that the LPC - increasingly powered by PMC votes in urban centres - no longer needed Socon Catholics as a client group.

Boomers, meanwhile, have emerged in recent years as a reliable client group, surpassing even the ethnic minorities in most-favoured status. Indeed, the largest swings towards the LPC in the 2025 election were in disproportionately older, wealthier ridings. In many ways, they are the ideal clients for the party to have. Being highly secure in their station in life, they are temperamentally conservative and by-and-large satisfied with the policies and power structures currently in place; TFWs, a well-funded OAS program, and a real estate bubble may be inimical to the interests of young men, but they benefit retired landowners. Unlike diaspora groups, boomers aren’t grasping for great leverage within the political system, or trying to force themselves into elite positions. Once their usefulness has expired, they can be unceremoniously MAiD’d.

The LPC’s recent courting of the boomers as their foremost client group - engineered via the installation of Carney and “Elbows Up” - coupled with the fact that the party’s top brass remains decidedly Laurentian points towards an embrace of what the X account @kunley_drukpa has deemed “Star Trek Liberalism” - here’s a brief explanation of the phenomenon:

‘Star Trek Liberalism’ then is the best, most utopian version of the present-day so-called ‘Liberal’ settlement, its end telos, ‘the kind of future its advocates actually want to bring about’. You could describe it as something like ‘Highbrow Multicultural Utopianism’. Some of its advocates might describe it as ‘Humanism’. This is in essence high-functioning utopian ‘Liberalism but only for 130IQ+ Anglos’ with the assumption that everybody on Earth (and in space) is also a ‘130IQ+ Anglo’ or that they can at least be uplifted to the state of middle-class anglodom with the right kinds of education

Gene Roddenberry articulates one of the best versions of this ‘humanistic’ vision in Star Trek. At least in earlier series you have what is essentially a Colonial British Office class emulating the culture & standards of their historical predecessors but in space. They wear uniforms and went to officer school and are all preoccupied with hierarchy and honour and fairness and discovery etc etc. It is ‘Master and Commander’ except the crew are a rainbow coalition of nationalities and species. They are out together ‘exploring the Final Frontier’, overcoming problems with intelligence and resourcefulness.

LPC client groups may form a veritable United Nations of ethnicities, religions, and nationalities - but there is something of a gentleman’s agreement within the party that a particular sect, a collection of 30-or-so well-heeled Laurentian families, should be the “first among equals” and steer the ship. Carney - the Harvard-Oxford educated governor of two central banks - may be the archetypal Star Trek Liberal. He could also be the last.

On May 9, a seemingly unimportant and mundane event occured - the Ontario Liberal Party (OLP) held a nomination contest for an upcoming by-election in the riding of Scarborough Southwest (a riding that, according to 2021 census data, is 61.4% non-white). The candidate assumed to be a shoe-in in this race was Nate Erskine-Smith, a 41-year old Oxford-educated lawyer and federal MP for the neighbouring riding of Beaches-East York (which, for the record, is 36.1% non-white). Erskine-Smith, who had been removed from his position as federal housing minister following the 2025 election, was parachuting into Scarborough Southwest as part of a planned entry into the OLP leadership race. In the run-up to the vote, he consistently pandered to the various ethnic blocks - such as the Bengali community - that make up the riding. Yet come voting time, he lost - albeit by a razor-thin 19-vote margin - to local pizza franchisee Ahsanul Hafiz, a man with no political experience who nonetheless was able to adeptly find just enough fellow Bengalis who were willing to cast a ballot for him, presumably on the basis that he was one of them.

Star Trek Liberalism - if it is not careful in erecting firm barriers - will slowly be consumed by the masses of global favella dwellers the LPC has let in to and consistently engaged in brokerage with for decades. That process, as evidenced by the Scarborough Southwest debacle, is already well underway. When Carney steps aside after the usual decade-or-so tenure of most PM’s, this carnivorous strip-mining of the LPC for parts will only accelerate.

In order to maintain their grip on power, the Laurentian Inner Party could become more explicitly aristocratic, creating blockades that go beyond a mere gentleman’s agreement - directly appointing candidates and ending open nomination races, further increasing bilingualism requirements, or even disqualifying certain candidacies outright. We already saw some of this in the last leadership race, where Chandra Arya and Ruby Dhalla - candidates who could have pulled off unexpectedly strong showings by virtue of vacuuming up the votes of ethnic blocks - were disqualified to clear the way for Carney. Arya even has his nomination revoked so Carney could run in his Nepean riding.

Eventually, though, if the Inner Party’s survival instincts wane even slightly - which isn’t implausible considering their thoroughly nihilistic aims and lack of a higher telos - these barriers could be breached and the global majority could find their way in. Contrary to the blank slatist assumptions of Star Trek Liberalism, new arrivals would, in all likelihood, not possess the same sense of realpolitik that the current LPC Machiavellians possess. Their friend-enemy distinction would be activated by not just the CPC, but by other ethnic blocks with which they have historical baggage. This would ineluctably result in a plethora of internecine conflicts - Khalistani vs. Hindutva, Muslim Socon vs. LGBT, Palestinian vs. Israeli - which would erode the LPC’s sense of their right to govern, plunging them into a Hobbesian war of all against all. Such passion for these conflicts is already present among LPC MPs - if these passions spread to the upper echelons of the party, it could be potentially fatal. Death by the favella, if you will.

So far, the picture of a potential descent into anarchy I have painted is one where the LPC loses - if not immediately at the ballot box (as client groups will still deliver them votes, at least until those client groups decide to split off and form new political parties on explicitly ethnic lines), then in terms of losing a clear sense of their right-to-govern real meaning. But how, you may ask, could they be defeated by their right-of-centre opponents? How could we not just watch them lose, but win? After all, if my “where goes the LPC, so goes Canada” maxim from earlier is true, roiling ethnic conflict within the LPC would signal such conflict occurring - probably to a far more severe degree - amongst the general populace. It will be easy to watch with schadenfreude as the LPC disintegrates; it will be another thing to build something capable of replacing it.

The CPC, far from being a hard party, is a loose agglomeration of malcontents, those broadly dissatisfied with LPC rule - libertarians, evangelical dispensationalists, soft Quebecois nationalists, and a rump handful of Albany Club Toronto Tories. None of these group, as much as they may froth-at-the-mouth in rage against the LPC, have a clear sense of destiny, of a right to govern. There is no single vision that unites them other than shared hatred and they don’t have a coherent strategy for dismantling the external organs of LPC power - the permanent bureaucracy, academia, the subsidized news media, and a myriad of NGOs.

In order for the Canadian right-of-centre to not just watch the Hobbesian chaos that comes following the Carney Reich, but actually seize power, dismantle the Laurentian leviathan, and end once-and-for-all the entropic Pearson-PET paradigm that we have lived under for 60 years, a hard party is needed. Unlike the nihilistic LPC, this hard party will need to be oriented around a clearly expressed point of principle - in my opinion, immigration restriction, since it is the defining issue of our times, would be well-suited to this role.

A hard party might need to gets its start by infiltrating the CPC - capturing EDA boards, securing candidate nominations for “our guys”, and slowly building up a caucus of MPs who act as sleeper agents. Once enough hard party MPs have been elected so as to have leverage over the CPC, the sleeper agent MPs can “come out” and be open about their beliefs. The CPC, faced with an insurgency inside their walls, will either capitulate to the demands of the insurgents or be expel them - something that would decrease the size of their caucus significantly, and could potentially cement the hard party as the dominant force on the Canadian right-of-centre the same way the 1993 election supplanted the PCs with Reform. Of course, this alone would be inadequate to affect regime change - a complete course of action in that regard remains hazy, and no one really seems to have any clear idea as to what the final steps, the steps that would involve crossing the Rubicon, would be.

Although it is fraught to speculate about such matters, a black swan event could potentially play an instigating role in both the LPC’s collapse and a hard party’s rise - such events are, of course, by their nature, impossible to predict in terms of both substance and timing. There is no use in delaying taking necessary actions in politics because of a hypothetical future event of this sort, even if one subconsciously desires a black swan event happening.

But, for the meantime, it is sufficient to understand why the Thousand Year Carney Reich exists, how it ends, and what could come along and put an end to our malaise as a nation once Star Trek Liberalism shatters. There are crowns in the gutter everywhere. It is our duty to pick them up.

Thanks for making it to the end of this piece. It might have been a bit rambling and longer than it needed to be, but there were numerous concepts that I thought needed to be ironed out, and it took some length to do that. If you enjoyed it, and have enjoyed other posts of mine in the past, I humbly ask you to consider subscribing. Already a subscriber? I humbly ask you, if you happen to have some spare change, to think about taking out a paid subscription; I set the monthly amount to the lowest substack will let me, $5, so as to not make it too onerous.

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For almost a year now, the Dominion Society has been a pervasive and polarizing force within the discursive landscape of Canadian politics - especially so within the right-of-center landscape in which it is situated. For the uninitiated, the Dominion Society is essentially a nationalist, nativist (I’m using the term “nativist” in a neutral sense, not in the pejorative sense in which it is employed by the left) organization whose central objective is the preservation of Canada’s founding-stock ethnocultural identity. According to them, the primary way in which this preservation can be achieved is through something called remigration - a multi-pronged approach to reversing demographic replacement that includes a moratorium on immigration, deportations, and restrictions on birthright citizenship.

Obviously and to the surprise of no one, the Dominion Society and the policy agenda they advance have become easy fodder for attacks from the left, with various epithets such as “racist” or “white nationalist” being thrown in their direction. The left, unrepentant after having engineering the 2021-24 migration cataclysm Canada was subjected to, still cling to the belief, borne out of the conditions of the past few decades, that such bugaboo terms are sufficient to stifle all discussion of the inevitable tribal tensions that arise as a result of multiculturalism - even if this previous reality is rapidly and thankfully fading. Since such attacks from the left are, without exception, made in bad faith - and are aimed towards the teleological endpoint of dismantling western civilization - they can be easily and summarily dismissed without further engagement.

Unfortunately - but not surprisingly - the scope of these attacks is not strictly confined to just the left. Many on Canada’s center-right - such as Jason Kenney and NCC director Alexander Brown - have also joined in on the pile-on, with many of their attempted hits directed towards the Dominion Society aping, or copying verbatim, the left’s moral language. To give you a sampling, here is Jason Kenney’s rather histrionic take on the DS:

Before I address the problems with the centre-right’s response to the DS, it is worth examining the context in which the Dominion Society arose. The CPC’s loss to Carney last year - despite its strong popular vote tally - nevertheless marked its fourth consecutive loss to the LPC. This comes despite the preceding decade of disastrous LPC rule, which included, among other things, untrammelled euthanasia, massive deficit spending, a litany of infringements on civil liberties and - perhaps most crucially - an astronomical surge in migration during the 2021-24 period, something that led to a profound erosion in social trust. Losing an election is one thing. Losing when your opponent has this kind of track record is something else. Now, to be fair, the CPC did indeed criticize the government on many of these fronts where the LPC had failed. However, on that most significant of issues, mass migration, it was completely and utterly unable to muster a substantive critique. Pierre was ever-so-reluctant to touch the issue for the longest time (with the exception, of course, of promising direct flights to Amritsar and opposing the deportation of subcontinentals with expired visas). And even when he started to level criticisms, such as his opposition to the Century Initiative, they were always aggressively qualified using blank slatist libertarian bromides about immigrants arriving with nothing but “a dream and a suitcase”.

To many, this reticence on immigration felt like something of a rugpull - yet the warning signs had been there for those with keen enough eyes to spot them. In 2022, Pierre kicked off his campaign for the CPC leadership by unabashedly embracing the Freedom Convoy at a time when Trudeau was bashing them as a “fringe minority” and O’Toole was waffling. As part of this support, he deployed the slogan “fire the gatekeepers”, which ostensibly compacted into three words a wide-ranging promise to remove from power various actors who had implemented lockdowns, vaccine and mask mandates, and even restrictive zoning laws. “Fire the gatekeepers”, though, was not purely confined to just covid restrictions and housing. In fact, it was something of a double entendre. Gatekeepers is, after all, a rather vague and ambiguous term, ripe for a multitude of applications. A “gatekeeper” could also be someone in charge of a professional licensing body; the “gatekeeping” that they perform could consist of screening out those who are potentially unqualified to practice a certain profession. Often, this means barring immigrants who were credentialed in another country. To the Freedom Convoy chud, “fire the gatekeepers” meant ending the remaining covid policies that existed as of February 2022. To the taxi driver from Punjab, it meant letting him and his cousin-brother practice medicine, as Pierre was promising to expedite the credentialing process for “high-skilled” immigrant professionals.

Now, if you had asked the convoy chud if he supported this expedition of the credentialing process, he would almost certainly have answered “no”. But the “fire the gatekeepers” slogan the convoy signed onto contained an implicit promise to do exactly that. It was a clever piece of rhetorical snake oil, meant to make two groups with near-diametrically opposed interests both think that Pierre would fight for them; the fact that Pierre was so eager to deploy such snake oil is a damning indictment of his leadership.

Yet this problem of ideological unsoundness is not unique to Pierre. Rather, it is something that envelops the CPC, and the broad Canadian right-of-centre writ large, and has done so for decades. Take, for example, Brian Mulroney - easily the most electorally successful conservative PM of recent times, being the only to win back-to-back majorities since Borden.

In June 1983, Pierre Trudeau’s government - and, more specifically, his employment and immigration minister Lloyd Axworthy - created the Royal Commission on Equality in Employment (also known as the Abella commission, as it was led by future Supreme Court justice Rosalie Abella, then a family court judge in Ontario). The commission released its report in October 1984 - a month after Mulroney took office - recommending the creation of an affirmative action program that would give preferential status to job candidates from various progressive client groups.

Given Mulroney’s overwhelming majority in the House of Commons at that time - 211 seats in a then-282 seat chamber - it would have been entirely possible for him to wholeheartedly reject the recommendations contained in this report, especially since the report was the product of a commission created by the government he had resoundingly defeated. But, for whatever reason, he didn’t.

Instead, we got the Employment Equity Act of 1986, which fully implemented the recommendations made by the Abella commission’s report.

A similar thing happened with multiculturalism. Trudeau presented it as official policy in 1971, Mulroney codified it into law via the Canadian Multiculturalism Act in 1988. This was coupled with an almost-tripling of Canada’s annual immigration intake. When Mulroney took office in 1984, 88k immigrants arrived; by 1993, that numbers was 256k.

Harper, despite his political genesis in the Reform Party - which opposed multiculturalism and, more generally, the social liberalism of the Laurentians - didn’t fare much better. His government fully embraced multiculturalism, even going as far as to make Jason Kenney (no surprise) an ambassador-of-sorts to various ethnic and diaspora communities. Immigration numbers during the 2006-15 period, while not astronomical, did gradually creep up, going from 251k to 271k annually.

This is the track record of Canada’s right-of-centre establishment. In a healthy political landscape, they would be vigorously defending the interests of our country’s heritage population. Yet, for at least five decades, they have conceded to the left that such a defense would be unnecessary at best and abhorrent at worst. They operate under an internal logic that they must eternally be in the process of “repenting” for their supposed transgressions, of practicing “moral hygiene” in the hopes that this grovelling and denouncing will get them labelled as “one of the good ones” by someone within the Laurentian leviathan. At the end of the day, a pat on the head and a cushy sinecure is what they desire most.

There are two major problems with this. The first is that such a train of logic leads to a full acceptance of the left’s framing of what constitutes “right” and “wrong”, of what makes someone a “good person” or a “problematic” one with “unacceptable views”. And if you take the framing and the axioms they establish to heart, your critiques of the left will be rendered moot and appear as uninspiring and milquetoast. You won’t be able to effectively challenge their policies if you wholly buy-in to the presuppositions on which those policies rest.

The other problem with this self-flagellation and attempted ingratiation is that it simply doesn’t work. Constantly begging on your knees and asking for your alleged moral errors to be forgiven only serves to remind your opponents of those moral errors for which - from their perspective - you are grievously and eternally guilty. This, in turn, only results in more stringent punishments for those crimes, and the dominance of leftist axioms only becomes more totalizing.

Begging also appears weak. It doesn’t give off the confidence of a group that is prepared to effectively wield power, but instead of one that is unsure of who it is, who it represents, and what is stands for. As a result of this unease with its own ideas, it decides to co-opt the ideas of its enemies in a ham-fisted attempt at achieving what is, in effect, a pyrrhic victory.

It is with this context of ideological paucity, repeated electoral defeat, and general haplessness on the part of our “conservative” establishment that the Dominion Society should be viewed. The most simple argument for the necessity of their existence is that they are merely filling the gaping vacuum left by the various court eunuchs who run the CPC and consider a myriad of right-wing ideas to be beyond-the-pale.

Now, with this being said, I have several of my own criticisms of the DS which aren’t insubstantial.

While a baseline level of anti-Americanism is inevitable in Canadian politics, the DS leans into it in a way that can lead to a sort of reflexive contrarianism, where Canada must take the mirror opposite trajectory to the U.S. in every way instead of considering proposals on their own merits independent of American politics. This has long been a weakness of the left in Canada, and the right must be careful to not replicate it. An anti-American stance also leads the DS to supporting a multipolar order that ineluctably features a more powerful China, a baffling position considering China’s malignant threats to our electoral and national security over the past few years.

Their disdain for so-called “white ethnics” and support for official bilingualism, meanwhile, alienate them from the conservative base in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Canada’s founding stock in the Laurentian and Atlantic provinces is primarily Anglo-French in nature - in the west, however, Russian, German, and Polish settlers arrived shortly after the creation of both provinces in 1905. Official bilingualism, for its part, is - in my view - rightly seen out west as a manifestation of a Laurentian tendency to assume that the characteristics of their region are representative of Canada as a whole. French fluency numbers west of Ontario are abysmally low, meaning that bilingualism requirements will inevitably have the effect of screening out most job applicants who are from outside of the St. Lawrence watershed. The most reasonable assessment of bilingualism is that it functions as an affirmative action program for the LPC’s bedrock of support - that is, the well-credentialed upper-middle class of Ottawa and Montreal.

Despite these critiques - which, I should emphasize, are friendly in nature - I want to make something perfectly clear (or, as Justin Trudeau used to say, crystal clear): the Dominion Society is not an enemy of the Canadian right. Engaging in metapolitics, as they do, makes perfect sense, as the federal electoral landscape is largely fruitless playground for anyone right-of-centre as of present. They are also correct in rejecting the rearguard action “conservatism” that has long served as the only alternative to the left in Canada in favour of a more counter-revolutionary form of politics. And while their more racialist tones may not be to the satisfaction of everyone, their attempts to renew a sense of civilizational identity in Canada are laudable. Incorrect as they may be on a handful of issues, they are nonetheless directionally correct in their broad aims and on what matters most.

All of this, while relevant in previous years, is particularly pertinent in our present moment. As of the time I write this, Canada’s mainline conservative movement is experiencing something of a broad, widely-felt malaise - a product of the aforementioned four losses to the LPC, sagging polling numbers, and a slow drip of floor crossings orchestrated by Carney’s backroom Machiavellians. A summation of this state of affairs was provided the other day on X by Poilievre’s ex-communications director, Ben Woodfinden:

Such a situation is inexorably the result of Canada’s right-of-centre - and the gatekeepers that guard its perimeters - systematically locking out the kinds of ideas that the DS promotes and focusing exclusively on a materialist libertarianism that agrees with the left on a number of core presuppositions.

And there are two ways that the CPC establishment can go about dealing with this. The first, and the path that they have generally taken so far, is to histrionically scorn the DS for its alleged crime of “racism”, continue engendering ill-will and mistrust between the two camps, and leave the ideas that could make them into a more effective political movement untouched.

The second would be to extend an olive branch to the DS, and agree to participate in a good-faith dialectic. This doesn’t mean those in the CPC need to necessarily adopt every policy the DS advocates, or that those who have previously expressed disdain for the DS need to become its biggest cheerleaders. Rather, this sort of move would simply require a recognition on the part of Canada’s Con Inc. that they have failed in their endeavor of defeating the LPC, and therefore need to consult with those they have previously dismissed. Ben Woodfinden, to his credit, seems to recognize the need for “serious discussions to help us update our intellectual basis” - yet, in this regard, he is somewhat of an outlier. Also, it remains to be seen if these “serious discussions” will extend outside of the tightly-policed parameters of neoconservatism and extend to things long-verboten - namely, nativism, nationalism, and neoreaction.

Doing this would require humility. It would require a willingness to seriously consider ideas that, if expressed in public, will make you persona non grata in Laurentian cocktail circles. It would also require courage - real and genuine courage.

Does our conservative establishment possess these qualities? I hope so. Are they willing to step over left-liberal axioms? I really wish they were. But I highly doubt it.

And as long as they are unwilling or unable to do the things they need to do, the things they must do in order to revitalize Canada, the Dominion Society will continue to be a presence in Canadian political discourse.

If you enjoyed this post, consider reading my previous post about the inadequacies of Pierre Poilievre’s leadership:

If a federal election had been held on May 24, 2026—the date of the most recent projection put out by the poll aggregator 338Canada—the CPC would have won 99 HoC seats, the exact same number that they won in 2015 under Harper. However, if you rewind just under a year-and-a-half, back to January 5, 2025—the day before Justin Trudeau’s resignation announcement—the CPC was looking to capture 236. The LPC, meanwhile, was plummeting towards a measly 35 seats—just one seat higher than their 2011 cataclysm under Ignatieff. This abysmal performance would have landed them, like in 2011, in third place, with the Bloc forming official opposition. Today, the LPC cruises towards a healthy majority of 212 seats—one seat higher than Brian Mulroney’s record total in 1984, which would make it the largest majority in Canadian history in terms of raw seat numbers1.

How, you may ask, did this happen? How did a party on the verge of a supermajority, presumed for well over a year to be a government-in-waiting, end up back at square one, back where Harper left them well over a decade ago? Why, after a myriad of LPC failures, was the party predicated on opposing the LPC’s every move unable to capitalize on the LPC’s malignant mismanagement of the country?

The answer, as you shall see, mon frère, has to with Pierre. And how he got pwned. More specifically, how his pwnage has to do with the broader ideological forces that undergird the movement he came up in politically and is defined by.

A good starting place in this examination of pwnage would be a phrase that is sprinkled and interspersed frequently throughout Pierre’s speeches and public statements: anyone from anywhere can be anything. I’ll call it AAA for short.

(Think of it like Alcoholics Anonymous with an extra “A” tacked on—Alcoholics Anonymous Anywhere anyone? Our goal is to quit Pierre’s twelve step and go back to hitting the bottle.)

As Pierre understands it, this slogan is not just a mere piece of rhetoric. It is the defining promise of the Canadian nation, the foundation on which this country rests. To him, if there is no AAA, there is no Canada.

What first jumps out at you about this phrase is the lack of constraints—anyone, anywhere, anything. There is no sense of natural hierarchy, no understanding of biological limitations and man’s fallibility. No, everything is seemingly ripe for the taking. This is the general theme on which my critique rests; however, it is worth drilling down into each word here and examining its function as it relates to the phrase writ large.

First up is anyone. The use of anyone presupposes that Canada is not a nation for some people who have a shared cultural understanding and sense of belonging, but also for those who fall outside of this circle of understanding—even, potentially, for those who are actively hostile and contemptuous towards those within the circle. Anyone negates the possibility of shared heritage being a component of national identity, or the idea that those with deeper historical ties to a polity could be considered to be more a part of that polity than those with weaker ties.

Anyone naturally opens the door to anywhere. Since there are no limits on who can be considered Canadian, New Canadians can naturally be sourced from any geographic location on the planet. To Pierre, the citizenry of Canada comes not primarily from the British Isles, France, and the rest of the European continent, but from anywhere. From Mogadishu. From Port-au-Prince. From Amritsar. Definitely from Amritsar. Might even want to create some direct flights to Amritsar. Canada, according to him, is not a distinct group of people, an ethnos created from ethnogenesis, or even a nation of people whose ancestors disproportionately hail from a certain continent. Rather, it is a land of unbounded aspirations, a place that anyone “with a dream and a suitcase” can use as a 9.98 million km^2 hotel. Maybe a hotel sans carbon tax but a hotel nonetheless. The people have no particular or distinct connection to the land that they inhabit, but instead serve as interchangeable and atomized economic units, chips on the board that can be shuffled to wherever the highest-paying widget factory exists.

Finally, we have anything. This, out of the three A’s, is the most utopian of the bunch. While anyone and anywhere characterize the composition and character of those who inhabit Canada, anything deals with what Canada’s inhabitants can achieve. Which, apparently, is anything they set their minds to. There is no recognition of IQ being a reasonably accurate predictor of life success, or, conversely, the role that mental and physical illness—or, more broadly, the inherent fallibility of man—can play in preventing certain aims from being actualized. Anything evinces a blank slatist mentality that assumes neurological uniformity across all humans, something that is most definitely false.

Now, by this point, it should be patently clear, if it wasn’t already, how vacuous and facile AAA is. It contains about as much meaning as Chomsky’s phrase “colourless green ideas sleep furiously”. Yet, you may ask, why hasn’t there been much pushback to Pierre’s usage of the phrase from the right? Why has this howler been allowed to fly? This lack of scrutiny could be attributed to a sense that AAA is purely aspirational, as opposed to an accurate descriptor of reality. But this too seems odd. Isn’t one of the core components of right-wing politics an inherent skepticism of utopian abstractions and unbridled idealism?

The reason why this is the case is that AAA, despite its faults, is the natural endpoint of the blank slatist libertarianism that has been the default mode of the Canadian right-of-centre for at least the past five decades, if not longer. It is the logical disposition of a worldview that is fundamentally materialist in nature, concerned mostly with economic outcomes and deeply indifferent to anything outside of that purview. Pierre, a byproduct of the Reform Party in terms of electoral politics and Rand/Friedman/Hayek in terms of intellectual foundations, has always, since his first forays into politics over 30 years ago, been an orthodox adherent of this line of thinking. There is no evidence that he has ever seriously questioned any of these presuppositions of his, and he has rarely strayed from them during his time in politics. Any supposed apostasy of his in this regard can largely be chalked up to political expediency.

While AAA is incoherent, the core problem with it is that, as you may have noticed, is that the axioms it operates within pave the way for leftism. Blank slatism, since it discards any biological component in human outcomes, naturally leads to those who embrace it asking what else might cause disparities between groups. Right-liberals usually offer some reluctant and cagey answer regarding “work ethic” and “culture”, but, to many reasonable questioners, these responses seem wholly unconvincing. What seems convincing, meanwhile, is the answer of discrimination, which leads the questioner to endorsing ham-fisted attempts at “equity” in order to rectify the situation. Additionally, a view of humans as rational economic units inexorably opens the door to replacement migration. If ethnocultural heritage is completely subordinate to GDP, then why not open the floodgates to TFWs and subcontinentals with expired student visas? After all, they can be paid less and treated as defacto chattel slaves, which means increased profit margins. The “rational economic units” view also lends itself nicely to a laissez-faire approach on other cultural issues, which, at best, cedes ground to the left and allows them free reign to push their agenda; at worst, laissez-faire bleeds into “conservatives” actively supporting the left’s cultural project.

Now, those in the CPC may protest what I’ve just said. We don’t support the left’s agenda! This is hokum! Woke right PPC nonsense! To which I say: on a certain level, that’s probably correct. You probably don’t endorse every granular policy prescription the LPC pulls out of its hat. But much of the left’s agenda, despite what you may think, is simply your presuppositions and axioms taken to their logical conclusions. This is why the left’s ideology appears more attractive to those inside elite institutions—when the only right-of-centre ideas on display are right-liberal in nature, left-liberalism will always win, as it’s more internally coherent.

So far in this piece, I have addressed the pwnage question mostly in terms of Pierre’s (and the CPC’s) ideological deficiencies on an abstract and conceptual level. There is, though, a very real electoral impact.

Consider, for example, the roiling saga of the floor crossings. In the last few months, there has been a perpetual drip of MPs switching parties, with all-but-one of them being in the CPC to LPC direction. Naturally, this has caused much consternation among CPC apparatchiks, who have sought to paint the LPC as a bunch of cynical Machiavellians, roping in CPC MPs by dangling shiny baubles in front of their faces so they can reach the 172-seat majority threshold (which happened last month). The ex-CPC quislings, in turn, are portrayed as consummate opportunists, willing to betray all principles and values for the perks of sitting on the government bench. All of this, to a certain extent, is true. However, a crucial question, one that the CPC much prefers to leave unanswered, remains: how were those CtL2 MPs so easily persuaded by the promise of shiny baubles? The opportunist charge can go a certain way to explaining this, but not entirely. What is missing is the fact that, on some level, the CtLs shared a baseline ideological framework with the Liberals that made even the concept of switching sides seem somewhat palatable. The right-liberalism of the CPC and the left-liberalism of the LPC and its Laurentian counterparts are ultimately children of a common mother. One is slower than the other, less coherent in its self-conception, and less fashionable among the ruling class, but it still biologically related to its sharper and more handsome brother.

The other, and perhaps more consequential, electoral impact of right-liberalism concerns its American nature, and the significance of that Americanness in the context of the 2025 election. The U.S. was founded on the sort of libertarian idealism Pierre champions, with founding fathers such as Jefferson and Paine espousing ideas of decentralization, blank slatism, and emancipatory egalitarianism. Canada, however—with the exception of the CPC base in Alberta and Saskatchewan—has never adhered to such a philosophy. Our ideological foundations are, if not collectivist, then decidedly communitarian; doctrines of individual liberty, free markets, and limited government are spurned in favour of an emphasis on order and the common good, a corporatist economic model, and a Gaullist approach to governance that includes public spending on nation-building projects.

In the context of the 2025 election, with anti-American fervor at a high-point, a right-liberal framework was doomed from the beginning. While Pierre tried to deflect from his ideological roots with an emphasis on “Canada First”, it was obvious that this shift was made reluctantly, and therefore came across as unconvincing. Carney, fufilling the quintessentially Canadian archetype of the peevish colonial governor, was a much more natural fit. Seemingly overnight, Pierre’s once-formidable command of the polls evaporated into thin air and his fate was sealed.

Now, you may ask, if Pierre’s ideology is, essentially, a milder variant of what the LPC believes, and it presents an active hindrance to his electoral chances, then why does the LPC go out of its way to lampoon Pierre for his supposed “extremism”? A component of this may be that, to Laurentians, any ideas that are thought to be American in character are coded as extreme. Then again, the Laurentians’ left-liberal progressivism was also directly imported from south of the border, albeit from Blue instead of Red America.

What I suspect is the answer is that, ultimately, the ideas a politician professes are filtered through his personality. A soft-spoken politician can be dogmatic while coming across as measured and reasonable; a brash and abrasive politician, on the other hand, can be anything but an idealogue yet come off as more of one than someone with a gentler temperament. Pierre, unsurprisingly, falls into the latter category. His nails-on-a-chalkboard persona and penchant for rhetorical combat make him seem like a dime-store Ben Shapiro. Right-liberalism, when preached by him, sounds like Enver Hoxha; when it’s preached by Milton Friedman, it sounds like Julius Martov.

Such a combination of ideological inadequacy and personal belligerence is perhaps the worst of both worlds. It gives off the false impression of extremism, which activates the LPC’s friend-enemy distinction. However, the policies that are proposed will merely rachet things back to a previous iteration of liberalism. Pierre thinks he is putting up a serious fight against the Laurentian machine; instead, he is merely falling into the Venus flytrap they have carefully constructed. He attacks, he is demonized, but he has no chance of wielding power. In other words, he is pwned.

Those of you who are subscribed to this substack will notice that I have been on hiatus for the past six months or so. Apologies for absences of this sort tend to be rather tiresome, so I’ll just say that I plan to post more frequently here going forward and leave it at that.

Yes, you read that correctly. Mark Carney—our capital-L Liberal, center-left Prime Minister—is a conservative.

But, you may ask, how? How in any way could this be true?

After all, neither Carney’s pre-Prime Ministerial career nor the past year of his governance suggests that he harbours any predilections towards conservatism. Technocratic pragmatism, sure. Centrist overtures meant to preserve the Liberal Party’s power, yes. But conservatism?

Now, here is where definitions come in. Mark Carney is not an ideological conservative. He does not adhere to any specific set of ideas that are generally labelled conservative—whether that be neoconservatism, paleoconservatism, or Red Toryism as it is classically understood. Rather, Carney is a tempermental or dispositional conservative.

Maybe a more helpful term that we could substitute in is pro-nomian. This means to be broadly in favour of rules, strictures, orders, and laws. Pro-nomians view the fence imagined by G.K. Chesterton and wonder why it was created and what value it provides; their kneejerk instinct to preserve, not demolish.

Pro-nomian, however, is not a stand-alone term. Rather, it serves as one half of a dichotomy: the pro-nomian/anti-nomian distinction. Anti-nomians, as you may have guessed, are opposed to rules, strictures, orders, and laws. They look at Chesterton’s Fence and sees an obstacle that stands in the way of immanentizing the eschaton. That fence is not something to be appreciated, but rather an oppressive and anachronistic barrier.

With this in mind, it is easy to see how the pro-nomian/anti-nomian distinction could serve, during most times, as a useful stand-in for the right/left divide. The right desires order, continuity of tradition, and an upholding of existing mores; the left, meanwhile, desires the dissolution and disintegration of these things in the hopes that utopia can be achieved.

Canada in the year of our Lord 2026, however, bucks the usual assignment of these categories. The left, or at minimum the center-left Carney represents, is pro-nomian—or at least pro-nomian in regards to the paradigm created by Pearson and PET. While Carney may introduce reforms to the system of varying degrees of consequence, he doesn’t desire to upend or replace the system. His actions merely represent a continuation of the existing order.

In this sense, you could say that Leonid Brezhnev was both pro-nomian and tempermentally conservative. Yes, Brezhnev presided over a doctrinaire marxist government. Yet this government, though at one time revolutionary, had, by the 1960s and 1970s, become schlerotic and essentially conservative in nature. The Politburo and the gulags were Chesterton’s Fence. To be in favour of them was to be pro-nomian, as Brezhnev was.

Reagan, meanwhile, could be classified as anti-nomian as it relates to the political structures of the late Soviet Union—even though he, of course, would be placed well to the right of Brezhnev on any political spectrum worth its salt.

All of this may, to you, seem very strange. What is it, you may ask, that flips the pro-nomian/anti-nomian distinction and makes a man like Carney—someone who has, implicitly or explicitly, been on board with every ideological crusade the left attempted in the past decade—into a pro-nomian conservative? What variable resolves this paradox?

Entropy.

Entropy, broadly speaking, is the slow accumulation of disorder and chaos within a system which results from a gradual degenerative process. As a system ages, intractable problems and internal contradictions that, in the past, were either much smaller in scope or else more easily papered over grow to a point where it is harder and harder for them to be ignored.

Yet, since this is a process that occurs gradually, it is entirely possible to completely acclimate oneself to a new and degenerated state of affairs. Therefore, like a frog in a pot of boiling water, one can be oblivious to the surrounding decay until it is too late.

Now all systems, to a certain extent, produce entropy over time; elements a structure inevitably decrease in quality, become anachronistic or irrelevant, or even come to serve as active impediments to the functioning of the structure itself.

However, since entropy is an end product of deconstruction and degeneration, it is ineluctably the child of any ideological matrix that is anti-nomian in nature. So, in a typical political environment, we can say that since entropy is produced by anti-nomianism, and leftism is inherently anti-nomian, entropy is the natural result of leftism.

Now, since the 1960s, Canada has been in thrall to a leftist project that has succeeded in capturing all of our major institutions, has remolded our constitutional and political structures and our collective sense of identity in its image, and has been allowed to run wild with few—or no—strictures or limitations on the size and scope of its mandate. It is because of this institutional capture, and the need to protect said institutional capture, that the Canadian left can be considered partially pro-nomian, since the prevailing nomos is left-wing.

The result of this leftist project is the inexorable decay that pervades the Canada of our current year. There are many ways in which this decay can be quantified or otherwise accounted for, but it can be sensed simply on a visceral and intuitive level. One can deny its existence, or blame its existence on outside factors, but, time and time again, the entropy will reassert itself.

Here is where Carney comes in (again). Carney is pro-nomian. He preserves our existing institutions. Those institutions, however, are consumed with sclerosis and entropy, since they are controlled by leftists who, despite their attempts to converse what they have created, are still anti-nomian in regards to anything they haven’t created. From this, the logical (albeit somewhat paradoxical) conclusion is that Carney is a conserver of entropy and creators of entropy. His job is to conserve both a force that bends towards slowly eating and destroying the environment it finds itself in and the moldering waste products left behind by that force.

Where, though, does this place the CPC—our ostensibly conservative party? The CPC likes to think of itself as a party that is both ideologically and tempermentally conservative—yet by thinking this way, it is deluding itself.

In our present moment, there is no way anyone can be both of these things at the same time.

The political and cultural paradigm we live within—the one that consumes virtually all actors in our political sphere—is one that was constructed by PET, making it innately left-leaning.

Because of this, anyone who identifies as a tempermental conservative under this system is someone who is conserving a previous version of the paradigm’s leftist ideology. A version that perhaps contains less entropy than the current ideological software, but a version that rests upon axioms created by PET nonetheless.

This is the trap that the CPC falls into—they desire an ideological conservatism, but are so blinkered by their tempermental conservatism that they end up incorporating many things into their ideology that are left-leaning but considered axiomatic by our political status quo.

What results from this is a slow yet seemingly unstoppable and continuous leftward drift in our politics. The Liberals, as they naturally do, steer the ship ideologically and push us further to the left. As this process wears on and Overton Window moves away from anything genuinely right-wing, the only artifacts from the past that the CPC is able to latch onto are liberal ones—albeit outdated artifacts (like classical liberalism) that have long ago been discarded by actual liberals. Over time, our discursive and political landscape ratchets to the left, the catamite “right” ratchets left, the degree of entropy present increases, and a sense of demoralization among those unprotected from the rotten fruits of this process grows.

As many noticed and observed, this is obviously unsustainable. Terminal decline of this sort can only continue for so long before all our cultural and economic inheritance is burned. Once that point is reached, rebuilding could very well be nigh-impossible. But what can arrest this vicious cycle? How can the ship be turned around?

Such a state of affairs forces anyone who is ideologically conservative, and actually serious about their ideological conservatism, to be anti-nomian. Not wholly anti-nomian—a pro-nomian disposition should still be retained when it comes to our inheritance, our posterity, and the transcendent. Rather, anti-nomian in regards to the Laurentian leviathan that has unleashed malign entropic forces across our society.

Going forward, the challenge for the Canadian right will be to embrace this unique combination of pro-nomian and anti-nomian attitudes. Anyone who can succeed in doing so will have a massive advantage insofar as it relates challenging our existing late Soviet-esque order and replacing it with a new order dedicated to ethnocultural renewal.

The crown is lying in the gutter. Can someone pick it up?

2025 has finally come to a close. There is much that could be said about the past year and what has transpired, but—since this newsletter is primarily focused on Canadian politics—I’d like to provide a brief overview of how I currently see our political landscape. This post will be fairly brief, and I plan on releasing a much longer, more substantial piece in the next week or two, so stay tuned for that.

The most obvious and consequential change that has occurred in the past year would be, without a doubt, the re-election of the ruling Liberal government—albeit under the new leadership of Mark Carney. This is something that was very unexpected at the start of the year, as Pierre Poilievre and the CPC were cruising with a 20-point lead in the polls—a lead that many, including myself, thought would be more durable than it actually was.

Of course, the evaporation of this lead was in large part due to the “Elbows Up” panic that the Liberal Party successfully capitalized on, something that was also relatively unexpected.

Much of the support that the Liberals rapidly regained during the height of this panic—February, March, and April—came from the NDP, who had something of a near-death experience in this year’s election; they have since been cast into the political hinterlands, perhaps permanently.

Indeed, a more narrow and concentrated two-party system in Canada has seemed to emerge—such predictions, however, must not be overstated, as federal elections can sometimes be aberrations (like 2011).

All of this, however, has served as somewhat of a blackpill—a reminder that there exist many people in this country who are incredibly obtuse, and will continue voting for managed decline as long as it gives them a false sense of moral superiority. These people constitute a powerful voting block that will not be easily dislodged, and any attempts at engaging in Canadian electoral politics must take this into account.

Such events also sent a strong signal—one that traditional center-right strategies which rely solely on mass democracy as the means to effect political change are no longer viable in the current political climate.

Even more broadly, I have personally come to the conclusion that entire paradigm that has underpinned Canadian politics for six decades, and was molded by the likes of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, should be—like a dilapidated building—condemned and summarily demolished. We are now living in a moment that moves in paradigms, not increments, and we need to act accordingly. A change of this magnitude will no doubt take considerable time to set in motion, and there will indubitably be a fair share of false starts and frustrations that accompany this process. Viable alternatives to the axioms that currently exist will need to be created lest we risk descending into anarchy—something that could be even worse than our current managed decline.

Even just thinking about the possibility of this happening, however, makes me dramatically more optimistic and energized than I otherwise would be.

And there are signs that others on the Canadian right are recognizing this as well.

The Dominion Society, created only a few short months ago, are the vanguard of this shift in approach. I personally have some quibbles with the finer details of their worldview, but they—more than anyone else—grasp the fundamentals of what is needed.

On the more establishment-friendly end of the spectrum, you have the Without Diminishment substack. They are more polished and refined than the Dominion Society, and are at least somewhat positioned within existing paradigms—yet they too seem to understand What Time It Is. Importantly, Without Diminishment has received a boost from some inside the CPC establishment, such as MP Michelle Rempel Garner and Pierre Poilievre’s ex-communications director, Ben Woodfinden.

These developments, despite their relative smallness, can be considered whitepills. Yes, much more infrastructure is needed to deliver the ultimate jump from one paradigm to another. Other considerations regarding this matter will be included in the future post I mentioned earlier. But considering where we were following defeat on April 28th, to end the year with this sort of progression occurring is reason to celebrate, even if the larger situation at hand remains lamentable.

So there you have it. Although 2026 probably won’t bring a definitive paradigm shift, what has been set in motion during the latter parts of 2025 will surely continue to grow. Happy New Year!

For a while now, in certain circles on the right, the term POSWID—an acronym that means ‘the Purpose of a System is What it Does’—has been steadily gaining popularity as an explanatory tool for certain phenomena that cannot otherwise be explained using the conventional abstract principles the right usually uses when making political judgments.

Here is Dave Greene explaining the concept using an analogy:

Suppose you are in charge of an ice cream distribution system, making the frozen confection in large refrigerated containers and then shipping it to customers who want to eat it cold. The purpose of your system is to deliver high-quality ice cream. Fair enough. But then you notice a problem. While the ice cream sent to most locations arrives fine, the shipments sent to Hawaii arrive melted and spoiled, certainly NOT the purpose of your system. Subsequently, when doing a follow-up investigation, you discover that the spoilage was due to a design flaw in the packaging that comes apart in humid climates and that fixing this design flaw is beyond your technical capabilities with the resources available. It looks as if, like it or not, this problem will be a persistent, unfixable feature of your system. Yet orders from Honolulu for ice cream keep coming in and you keep sending it out.

At this point, the purpose of the system is what it does. Knowing what the reality is, you can no longer retreat into ignorance and excuses.

Now, one of the core criticisms made of POSWID by its opponents is that it leans heavily on a consequentialist interpretation of events, completely discarding the roles human intention, error, and agency play in how things transpire.

However, these critiques only hold validity if you take POSWID and make it your singular mode of analysis—something that I don’t encourage, nor intend on doing myself. Rather, POSWID should be understood and used as a specific tool with a specific purpose—that is, to peel back the noxious platitudes, gaslighting, and wishful thinking that envelop our politics, and hinder our ability to view our present situation with clarity and honesty.

And, unfortunately for the citizenry of Canada, Canadian politics is—and has been for some time—a domain chock full of the misguided idealism and obfuscation that POSWID seeks to erase.

It is why many Canadians—despite their country having experienced a precipitous decline in both general prosperity and the integrity of the common social fabric—remain willfully blind to such an absurd degree.

POSWID, as I will be applying it, can tackle many of the polite pleasantries and mindless incantations that have become embedded in Canada’s ‘consensus’ of acceptable political discourse, exposing them as misaligned with reality. This will take one of two forms: the first is to demonstrate that a common belief in the trope in question has led to results contrary to the intentions of those who originally pushed the trope; the second is that the trope was always purely abstract and aspirational, never described reality, and any attempts to align reality with said trope have failed miserably.

Many of these tropes are sacred cows of Canada’s political establishment—ideas that they would insist define “what it means to be Canadian” or are things that “we all believe”. Going against them, or merely questioning their validity or suitability, would be considered “UnCanadian”. These tropes have, in many cases, dictated the direction of Canadian society since the 1960s and created the foundations for the paradigms that currently define Canadian politics. Therefore, the deconstruction of these tropes constitutes the deconstruction of these paradigms—something that would have cascading ramifications for our country.

It is worth noting, however, that my intention in writing this piece is not to make granular policy prescriptions. My job is merely to provide a clear-eyed account of how three of the values and policy programmes of Canada’s chattering class (you could substitute “chattering class” with “professional-managerial class” or “Laurentian Elite”) are out of step with how this country actually exists—a reality felt and experienced at an intuitive level by many, but rarely articulated in public.

Trope #1: Canada is a Bilingual Country

Since the Official Languages Act of 1969, the notion that Canada is an “officially bilingual country” has been deeply embedded in the practices of our federal government to the point where most bureaucratic positions within the Canadian government require both French and English fluency. But is the term “bilingual” an accurate description of the reality of Canada, both now and in 1969?

Let’s start by breaking down the word “bilingual”. The prefix “bi” means “two” or “double”, seemingly indicating that the two objects being referenced carry equal value. Bicycles have two wheels of the same size; binoculars feature two equally shaped refracting telescopes.

From this, it is reasonable to conclude that an implementation of “bilingualism” would be appropriate in a country where there are two dominant languages, and those two languages are spoken by roughly similarly sized groups of the population. Half of the population would learn the language spoken by the other half of the population, and vice versa. There would also be a sizable pre-existing chunk of the population that is already bilingual. However, you may ask, does this describe Canada? Did the Canada of 1969 meet these two preconditions? How about Canada presently?

As you can see from the two charts above, the answer is a definitive “no”. In 1900, anglophones outnumbered francophones by a roughly 2-to-1 ratio; that ratio has only expanded since then to reach 3-to-1, as the number of immigrants who speak neither English nor French has increased. And based on the latter chart, Canada was never more than 15% bilingual before the passage of the Official Languages Act.

The conception of Canada as a “perfectly bilingual country” was always nothing more than pure abstraction, unaligned with on-the-ground realities when the entire country is taken into account.

This, naturally, brings us to our next question: the Official Languages Act mandated the use of French in many government positions; did it also result in Canada containing a significantly larger cohort of people fluent in both languages?

Again, the answer is “no”. The number of fluently bilingual people has barely crept upwards since 1969, reaching a paltry 18.0% as of the 2021 Census. But why is this? Why has over five decades of official policy failed to produce much of anything?

First, it is worth noting that since Canada is a majority English-speaking country, more people would have to learn French than learn English by a considerable margin for some semblance of actual bilingualism to be achieved. This means that the French fluency numbers are critical when answering this question.

And, when the French fluency numbers are broken down on a province-by-province basis, vast disparities between the provinces are revealed—disparities that likely make substantial increases in bilingualism nigh-impossible. The overwhelming majority of Quebeckers (84.1%) and a sizable chunk of New Brunswickers (34.0%) can speak French. Outside of those provinces, though, the numbers are microscopic—no other province (or territory) has a francophone population exceeding 15%; Saskatchewan and Nunavut even dip below 5%. Remember that these numbers are purely self-reported; I’m sure many people claim to be French speakers on the Census but are simply bluffing.

For people outside of Quebec, northern and eastern New Brunswick, and select parts of Ontario, there is little incentive to actually speak, read, write, or learn French, as it is absolutely irrelevant to the functioning of their daily lives. A handful of upper-middle-class households may send their children to French immersion schools; however, the French language skills of these children often evaporate once they leave school and enter into new contexts in which those skills are superfluous.

“Canada is a bilingual country” is a phrase that has never reflected reality, and over half a century of policy on the books has not manifested a country dramatically more bilingual than the one that existed in 1969. Instead, what official bilingualism has done is restrict employment in much of the federal bureaucracy to a narrow sliver of the population that disproportionately comes from a select geographic region—which, in turn, means that large swathes of the country are essentially barred from participation in the federal government beyond a certain point. That is the Purpose of Bilingualism because that is What It Does.

Trope #2: Canada is a Multicultural Country

Somewhat more nebulous in character—yet just as beloved by Canadian officialdom—is the concept of multiculturalism.

For decades, multiculturalism has been pushed using near-mythological and utopian terms; in theory, it is a framework under which people from all cultures and backgrounds can live harmoniously with each other, something that magically dissipates all ethnic and tribal tensions that once defined interactions between groups.

Yet multiculturalism—despite the never-ending repetition of sanguine bromides in its favour—has always been a rather thin concept that is defined by the era it finds itself in rather than the other way around.

And when it was introduced, multiculturalism was never even an accurate descriptor of the country it was foisted upon. Canada in 1971—the year that multiculturalism was implemented—was a country composed overwhelmingly of Europeans and Christians and had a strong shared culture. Multiculturalism, like many other Canadian policies, was always more of a normative policy, describing the way things should be rather than the way things are in actuality. In that sense, it was always misaligned with reality.

In the published report of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, which is seen as having paved the way for the Multiculturalism Act of 1971, the concept of multiculturalism translates to meaning “unity in diversity”.

However, “unity in diversity” is itself somewhat of an oxymoron, lacking in clarity and specificity. This nebulousness created a lack of guardrails that could potentially prevent a reinterpretation of the phrase or an overemphasis on certain parts over others, which is what happened.

In particular, the “diversity” aspect of multiculturalism was pushed to the extent that the “unity” aspect became essentially non-existent—a development that can largely be chalked up to the internationalist and postmodernist “end of history” ethos of the late 20th century, which de-emphasized sweeping narratives and distinctions between places and peoples.

Pierre Trudeau himself—the architect of the policy—provided an articulate summation of this issue over a decade after his exit from federal politics, as explained in this quote from a MacDonald—Laurier Institute article:

And so, what the commission’s report said, “unity in diversity,” appears to be what Pierre Trudeau meant by multiculturalism. At some point in the mid-1990s, Trudeau lamented before a private audience that contemporary multiculturalism had not turned out as he had intended. Former Liberal MP John Bryden, who was present, later reported Trudeau’s criticism: multiculturalism, he said, had been “twisted to celebrate a newcomer’s country of origin and not a celebration of the newcomer becoming part of the Canadian fabric.”

Since the mid-1990s, things have only gotten worse, and Canada’s previously high levels of social cohesion and social trust have rapidly disintegrated. One only needs to look at the extreme degree of ethnic balkanization present in the suburbs of Canada’s major cities to illustrate this point. Markham is 49% East Asian, while Richmond is 57%; Brampton is 52%1 South Asian, and parts of Surrey are close to 70%. Many of these communities operate as self-enclosed ghettos that rarely interact with each other, or the broader Canadian society writ large.

These ghettos, in turn, have become breeding grounds for ideological movements that are at best indifferent to the country they operate within—if not actively hostile. The fact that the Khalistani movement—which is wholly focused on establishing a homeland for fundamentalist Sikhs in the Punjab province of India—plays such an outsized role in Canada’s political sphere is a testament to this.

Meanwhile, Canadians’ faith in the ability of migrants to integrate into our society has waned, and Canada’s immigration intake—high for decades, yet truly astronomical in the last few years—has come under intense scrutiny, even in elite circles that were once fastidiously pro-immigration (although I think that much of this elite reversal on immigration can be attributed more to self-preservation than a genuine change of heart.

Multiculturalism, for its part, has shifted from being understood within the previous “end of history” framework and now finds itself situated within a post-colonial, grievance-based matrix that denigrates Western civilization and posits that it is an ontological evil needing to be fully dismantled. This narrative, besides being far more militant and aggressive than what came before, is completely far-removed from the “unity in diversity” mantra championed by Pierre Trudeau—yet, strangely enough, doesn’t seem to find fault with the concept of multiculturalism.

Like bilingualism, multiculturalism has always been an abstraction that has never accurately described how Canada operates in effect. Unlike with bilingualism, though, multiculturalism as official government policy didn’t come with a clear set of intentions on what should be achieved. Instead, its inherent vagueness allowed it to act as an empty skinsuit to be filled by the various ideological trends that arose in the decades after its passage. Because of this, it is difficult to say if the way multiculturalism has been implemented has strayed from the stated objectives of multiculturalism as a concept. However, the goals of the anti-white, anti-western movements that have laundered their ideas into the mainstream by using multiculturalism as their vessel would seem completely alien to those who first conceived of the original “unity in diversity” mantra. Therefore, the Purpose of Multiculturalism is to disintegrate the Canadian social fabric, ethnically balkanize the country, and delegitimize the civilization that Canada was built by because that is What It Does.

Trope #3: Canada is a Westminster Parliamentary Democracy

There is perhaps no platitude that center-left politicians adore more than “democracy”, especially when “democracy” is referred to in a possessive sense (“our democracy”). To them, “democracy” is an unassailable, unambiguous good that both completely describes the workings of our political system and needs constant, vigilant protection against “existential threats”.

In Canada, democracy platitudes take on a distinctive form, emphasizing that our democracy is not just any old democracy but a Westminster Parliamentary Democracy2. Technically, this term refers to Canada having the same constitutional monarchy (which separates head of state and head of government into two different positions) plus a blending of the executive and legislative branches of government found in the Yookay and other commonwealth countries.

One gets the sense, though, that the constant need to drone on about Westminster Parliamentary Democracy goes beyond merely a neutral description of our system of governance and instead symbolizes something else—but what?

One clue as to how the phrase Westminster Parliamentary Democracy is commonly understood could perhaps come from Elizabeth May’s cringefest at the 2015 Parliamentary Press Gallery Dinner, where she says the following:

I don’t believe in running for Prime Minister because our Parliamentary system of Westminster Parliamentary Democracy means that all MPs are equals, and none of us are elected to be dictator. Sorry Stephen.

Elizabeth May, in her drunken exuberance, succinctly summarized the essence of what “Westminster Parliamentary Democracy” ostensibly is: all MPs are equal and none of them are elected to be dictator.

But, looking at how the Canadian political system operates in effect, is any of this true?

Let’s start with the plight of the humble Canadian MP, and the supposed equalness and significance of all 343 of them.

The vague notion that backbench MPs are, to some degree, powerless and impotent is a well-known fact of the Canadian political system—yet this fact is still worth bringing up every time “our democracy” incantations are uttered. Tragedy in the Commons—a book published in 2014, yet completely relevant today—provides a compelling account of this, with many of the Canadian political system’s myriad dysfunctions explained in detail through the accounts of former MPs. These dysfunctions stem from both political parties (opaque rules surrounding nomination races, the scripted nature of what MPs say in the House of Commons) and larger systems (the futility of using Question Period as a mechanism to hold the government to account, the centralization of political power in the PMO, the difficulty in passing a Private Members’ Bill). If one of these problems is taken and isolated from the rest, it may not seem significant. Yet when all these issues are compounded on top of each other, they add up to a system where unelected bureaucrats and a handful of elected politicians control virtually all political power, while the vast majority of people sent directly to Ottawa by voters play a vanishingly small role in the decision-making process.

That is What Our Parliament Does, That is its Purpose.

With “all MPs are equal” dismantled, let’s move on to the “none of us are elected to be dictator”

The role of the Canadian Prime Minister, in theory, is supposed to be the “first among equals”—someone who steers the ship, but is ultimately held to account by his party caucus, the House of Commons as a whole, the Senate, the news media, and ‘neutral’ third-party agents such as the auditor general.

But—I have used this line (albeit worded differently) many times in this piece, and it is starting to get somewhat formulaic—is this the case in actuality?

As Jeffrey Simpson explains in his book about the powers of the Canadian Prime Minister, The Friendly Dictatorship, the PM enjoys levels of control over governmental affairs unparalleled in other WEIRD countries:

The Canadian prime minister is more powerful within this system than any democratically elected leader in other advanced industrial countries. The U.S. president governs within a checks-and-balances in which his proposals must be chewed over by two legislative bodies with much weaker party discipline than there is in the Canadian House of Commons. The Senate must approve major presidential nominations, including his cabinet choices and Supreme Court appointments. The French prime minister serves at the behest of the president, who can replace prime ministers at will, but the French president’s power do not extend to day-to-do management of the government. The Australian prime minister can be deposed at any time by his own caucus and must sometimes deal with an elected Senate controlled by parties other than his own. The German chancellor invariably presides over a coalition - in recent years Christian Democrat, Christian Social Union, and Liberal Democrat or Social Democrat/Green - and must find ways of getting legislation approved by an upper house composed of representatives of the German Länder, or states.

Few of the checks and balances described in the quotation above apply to the Canadian system.

Backbench MPs in the Prime Minister’s caucus—who can, in theory, hold the PM to account—rarely do. Part of this is structural—the Liberal caucus has repeatedly rejected to adopt the Reform Act, which lets caucus fire the party leader through a simple majority vote (as was done with Erin O’Toole). Yet, to me at least, there is a great deal of cowardice involved in the reticence MPs have when it comes to challenging the party leader.

The House of Commons can challenge the PM—but only under a minority government, considering the aforementioned pliancy of the government caucus. And even then, parties that are ideologically aligned with the government (cough cough, the NDP, cough cough) can prostrate themselves before the government and turn a minority into a de facto majority.

The Senate is technically a check on the PM’s power—but, as is common knowledge, acts as nothing more than a rubber stamp on the HoC and a repository of patronage appointments.

And, finally, we arrive at the news media. They receive billions in subsidies from the government, which naturally makes them reluctant to offer anything beyond the mildest of pushback.

So really, the checks against the PM’s power are either weak or non-existent.

Considering this, it is no surprise that U.S. President Woodrow Wilson—a noted fan of top-down executive control—preferred the parliamentary system over the American republican model.

Now, you may ask, if the “all MPs are equal, none can be dictator” mantra is blatantly false, then what is meant when the “our democracy” or “our system of Westminster Parliamentary Democracy” bromides are uttered?

To answer this question, one only needs to look at the tail end of Elizabeth May’s quotation: “Sorry Stephen”.

For those on the center-left who invoke “democracy” ad nauseam, “democracy” is nothing more than code for the values, mores, and policy preferences of the white-collar upper-middle-class liberals who staff the NGOs, professional organizations, and sprawling bureaucracies that the government both funds and relies on. To them, “democracy” is synonymous with intangible values such as “equality” and “human rights”, and expresses itself in policies such as tolerance of transgenderism or abortion. It is not a cut-and-dry political system where the general populace voices its views through means of voting (such a system, if it produces the “wrong” election results, is denigrated as “populism”) but rather a way of life that relies on a bloated managerial state to survive. Therefore, threats to the size and scope of that managerial state are “threats against democracy”.

To Elizabeth May, Stephen Harper—a man who was democratically elected three times, and relied on the executive branch to govern no more than most PMs—was an affront to Westminster Parliamentary Democracy because he strayed from the center-left PMC values held by her and the Canadian political establishment. He threatened both their actual political power and their sense of absolute moral authority. For that reason, he was a “threat to democracy”.

Therefore, the Purpose of Invoking the Term “Westminster Parliamentary Democracy” is to sublimate “democracy” into meaning “our interests” while ignoring or justifying the undemocratic nature of much of Canada’s political system.

Abstract Principles vs. System-level analysis

The POSWID concept is one that I could apply to vast swaths of the Canadian political system. There are so many examples of situations in Canada where stated intentions and actual results are so divergent that you have to assume that those repeating the misaligned bromides are either willfully blind or malicious liars. Of the additional examples I can think of, healthcare, criminal justice, and immigration seem particularly juicy.

These, however, would be more policy-based analyses, whereas the three I’ve done so far concentrate on aspects of Canada’s identity that were molded in the 1960s and collectively form a paradigm that we’ve lived under ever since.

What I will end with, though, is a reflection on the failings of the right as it relates to using a system-level analysis when discussing policy failures.

In particular, I want to lay out a quote from the late paleoconservative writer Sam Francis in his essay collection Beautiful Losers, which is an extended reflection on the failings of modern conservatism:

The presuppositions of these pieces are perhaps somewhat different from those of most of the writing produced by conservative intellectuals since World War II. Those writers tended to approach political theory in a way that might be called formalistic and normative—that is, they sought to offer morally right and philosophically true prescriptions for public affairs—and they did so in terms of philosophy, theology, and ethics, with a good deal of attention to imaginative literature. Eric Voegelin, Leo Strauss, Richard Weaver, and most of their disciples are examples of this approach to conservative thought at the highest levels of academic theory; Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek are similar examples in economic theory, and, among many others, National Review’s Frank S. Meyer was representative of it in conservative journalism.

My conclusion that conservatism has transformed itself into virtual extinction will surprise and perhaps even anger those who favor the formalistic and normative approach, which does not easily stoop to considerations of social change and historical fluctuation and is reluctant to admit that some things, even ideas, fail. Regarding political events as the earthly manifestations of timeless abstractions, the intellectual mainstream of the “Old Right’’ from the end of World War II developed a highly sophisticated body of ideas and a highly articulate body of spokesmen to express them. Perhaps because they were too uxoriously wedded to Weaver’s principle that “Ideas Have Consequences,” most of the conservative intellectuals who subscribed to this body of thought always seemed to assume that it was only a matter of time before their own beliefs would creep up on the ideas of the Left, slit their throats in the dark, and stage an intellectual and cultural coup d'état, after which truth would reign. I have never thought so, in part because I have less faith in the power of intellectual abstractions than most of my conservative colleagues. The historian Lewis Namier remarked that “new ideas are not nearly as potent as broken habits,” and Burnham, describing Vilfredo Pareto’s view of human rationality; wrote that “rational, deliberate, conscious belief does not, then, in general at any rate, determine what is going to happen to society; social man is not, as he has been defined for so many centuries, a primarily ‘rational animal.”’ 1 In the tradition of Namier (who briefly studied under Pareto) and Burnham, I place more emphasis on the concrete forces of elites, organization, and psychic and social forces such as class and regional and ethnic identity than on formal intellectual abstractions and their “logical” extrapolations as the determining forces of history. Ideas do have consequences, but some ideas have more consequences than others, and which consequences ensue from which ideas is settled not simply because the ideas serve human reason through their logical implications but also because some ideas serve human interests and emotions through their attachment to drives for political, economic, and social power, while other ideas do not.

In short, Francis says that too many rightist intellectuals have become overly attached to abstractions, to normative forms of analysis. In this, they have ignored alternative approaches, such as analyzing power dynamics and looking at how systems operate in effect. Utilizing these approaches would give the right a better idea of how to actually use political power effectively in the event of forming government, as they would have a clear-eyed view of how the system actually operates as opposed to the fruitless wish-casting they often engage in.

Francis uses the term Beautiful Losers as the title for his book. Such a title may seem harsh, but ultimately seems deserved once you read through a substantial portion of the book’s essays. And considering the success of Canada’s “conservative” (I put “conservative” in quotation marks because they’ve failed to conserve anything) movement over the past decade, I think the Beautiful Losers moniker could be applied to them as well.

Even after losing four consecutive elections to the Liberals (including one held after ten years of painful managed decline), they’ve failed to produce any ideas that go beyond mediocre half-measures and warmed-over Harper incrementalism—despite getting lampooned by the left for their supposed “extremism”.

At a base level, they still agree with the Liberals on the foundations of Canada’s post-1960s paradigm—things like multiculturalism, bilingualism, and relatively high levels of immigration.

They don’t realize What Time It Is, and yearn for a return to the supposed halcyon days of 2015—even though many of their abstract goals went unrealized during the Harper years.

To put it bluntly, they are unambitious and uninspiring.

Yet to completely write them off as milquetoast disappointments would be a mistake.

At a fundamental level, it is not in the nature of people who think of themselves as “conservatives” to go on the offensive or imagine what large-scale reforms they could enact. Conservatives, by definition, are focused on preserving what already exists within their immediate sphere. They have a strong moral dimension to their politics, and a shift in focus towards systems of power could seem somewhat amoral.

However, if many of those people who currently call themselves “conservatives” are unable or unwilling to accept that a change in approach is needed, I don’t think Canada will be able to reorient itself and escape the current malaise and managed decline it finds itself in. The pot will continue to boil, the frog will lose consciousness, and the harshest critique of Canada’s immigration system conservatives will be able to muster is that it was “broken by Trudeau”.

What Canada needs now is to transition to an entirely new paradigm in terms of both political structure and national identity. The CPC—despite being more forceful in its current iteration than at just about any time in its history—doesn’t seem to realize this. A mere reversion to the policies of 2015, or 2006— or any other point in our post-1960s trajectory—is insufficient. Something new is needed. How soon this newness arrives—and who ends up delivering it—remains to be seen.

But, in the meantime, the POSWID concept can help those who have yet to realize What Time It Is come to grips with the pervasive rot baked into so much of Canada’s political system.

A few days ago, King Charles kicked off Canada’s 45th Parliament by reading the throne speech in the Senate, the first time that the U.K. monarch had read a throne speech in decades (this duty is usually performed by the governor general).

Many in the Canadian media, including many right-leaning commentators, have greeted this event with great enthusiasm. They have also heaped much praise on Carney for inviting King Charles to speak in the first place. But what is the purpose of this pomp and circumstance? What does this symbolism symbolize?

In discussing Canada’s monarchy, I would be remiss if I failed to mention that Canada’s monarchy is, of course, a constitutional monarchy. The monarch is our official head of state, yet he wields no actual power. Therefore, King Charles only has a role in Canadian politics in a technical sense, as opposed to a meaningful one. Never in recent history has the monarch objected to laws passed by Parliament, instead performing a performative rubber-stamp and blindly approving whatever bills make their way through the House of Commons and the Senate.

The monarch doesn’t even control the contents of the throne speech. King Charles simply read a laundry list of Liberal talking points off of a sheet of paper.

Even more poignantly, King Charles started his speech with a land acknowledgment, essentially abdicating his sovereignty over Canada.

It is worth noting that not all monarchists are constitutional monarchists, with ascendant right-wing intellectuals like Curtis Yarvin advocating for the absolute monarchy of a “National CEO” that reigns supreme and wields complete power over the nation. Yet in the Canadian context, these sorts of monarchists are nowhere to be found. Instead, our monarchists follow a brand of monarchism that places heavy value on a sentimental attachment to the historic British Empire, and see the King as a symbol of that empire’s former prowess—the operative word here being “former”.

Yet it is worth considering why Canada venerated the British Empire in the first place.

Before the 1950s, veneration of the British Empire formed the core of Canada’s identity, stemming from our refusal to join the American rebellion against the crown in the 18th century. But, during this time period, the British Empire was vast and powerful, spanning large chunks of Africa as well as the Indian subcontinent. There were valid reasons for this veneration that went beyond the acknowledgement of our history or loyalty to our forefathers.

But, like most European nations, Britain abandoned its colonial Empire in the 1950s, removing itself by choice from the list of world superpowers. More than anything, this is why our veneration of Britain vanished. Britain, lacking an empire, was no longer a country worth venerating. This caused Canada’s core identity to be thrown into doubt and shaken, and the 1960s brought the dawn of a new identity based on leftist policies such as multiculturalism, single-payer healthcare, and gun control. The Red Ensign was scrapped in favour of a flag that features vague and inoffensive symbolism, Dominion Day was renamed Canada Day, and our repatriated constitution explicitly allows for affirmative action policies and contains a section on indigenous rights.

The post-1960s Canadian identity is one that I have always strongly disliked. Like the pre-1960s identity, it was always based on a core of reactionary anti-Americanism that exaggerates the differences between us and our southern neighbours.

But this identity has turned out to be far more fragile, insecure, and—perhaps worst of all—sanctimonious than the identity it replaced.

The British conception of Canadian identity was always political, with Canada being cast as a righteous, law-and-order alternative to the chaotic United States. Yet there was always a strongly non-political cultural element to it, which balanced out its political edge.

The post-1960s identity, by contrast, is purely political. Leftist policies, instead of being viewed dispassionately and analytically—as policies generally should be—have become sacred articles of faith upon which no compromise is possible. To question them is to question a core tenet of the nation’s identity—hence the “un-Canadian” accusation that is so frequently thrown at Conservatives.

And because this ideology is rooted in anti-Americanism, the United States becomes the singular point of comparison for all policies enacted, which is why our decidedly mediocre healthcare system is praised so enthusiastically.

On top of that is the self-righteousness, which breeds a sense of smug complacency, in turn making Canadians blasé about their country’s decline.

In short, it is a truly horrible identity.

Because of this, I have a degree of sympathy for traditionalists who venerate Canada’s monarchy. In a country where leftists have been dominant for decades, symbols of the Canada that existed before the events of the 1960s—things that small-c conservatives would recognize as being worth conserving—are few and far between. The monarchy, as an institution that has withstood the transformations that have happened elsewhere, is a notable exception. It has the same appeal to Conservatives as the Catholic church—that is, something that stretches back to antiquity and is based on a pre-enlightenment moral order.

Institutions, though, are more than just pure and unchanging symbols of heritage and history. They are run by people, with the people who run them shaping the way those institutions are perceived by the general public.

And if an institution is connected to the identity of a country, the ways that said country changes will be reflected in the perceptions and sense of authority afforded to that institution.

King Charles, far from representing the glories of the British Empire, holds political views similar to those embedded in the throne speech he read. He’s long been a climate change activist and has compared the present-day United States to 1930s Germany.

The British Empire, meanwhile, is now long dissolved, with the United Kingdom—a country whose decline has arguably been more shocking and precipitous than that of Canada’s—being a paltry shell of its former self. Now, if Britain’s monarch had raised objections to the abdication of the British Empire and the myriad of policies and politicians that landed the U.K. where it is now, I could see more justification for giving respect to the monarch. But there exists scant evidence that the fastidiously politically-neutral Queen Elizabeth or the leftist King Charles ever so much as raised a finger to stop this process from playing out.

Now, contrary to socialist or right-wing populist critics of the monarchy, I don’t take issue with the monarchy for being hereditary, hierarchical, anti-democratic, or elitist. In my view, there is nothing inherently wrong with having a caste of elites; a functional society needs elites to provide leadership and moral direction.

Rather, my complaint is with the quality of the current elites, and what those elites represent.

The monarchy’s aesthetics make it a compelling symbol of the world as it existed before the modern liberal era, or even the Enlightenment. However, aesthetics are essentially useless if they are not backed up by concrete actions and principles.

And the British monarchy has sat idly by while the principles that the people who venerate it champion have been laid to waste. Despite being a Conservative institution in theory, it has not bothered to conserve the things that Conservatives care about, making it a cargo cult that exists purely for sentimental value.

A man who sits next to Mark Carney and dutifully reads a campaign speech written by the political party that has run Canada into the ground for the past decade is hardly a brave protector of ancient Anglo-Saxon wisdom and hierarchy.

Over the past few years, I have come to believe that Canada is in the midst of an identity crisis. Our post-1960s identity crumbled under the weight of post-national self-flagellation and declining living standards, only to be hastily revived via the “Team Canada” cargo cult—a movement that stands for nothing except spiteful anti-Americanism.

To me, adulation of the monarchy has a similar appeal to some Conservatives as “Elbows Up” has to those on the left. It promises the revival of an identity that has been in decline or altogether abandoned—in this case, the pre-1960s Canadian identity that placed heavy emphasis on loyalty to the British Empire and pride in our Anglo-Saxon heritage. Once the aesthetics and sentimentalism are removed, though, there isn’t much of an underlying structure.

Just as the idealized Canada of the 1990s—the time in which the “Elbows Up” crowd wishes to return to, and often thinks we still live in—can’t easily be revived, neither can the early 1900s world of a dominant British Empire with Canada as its loyal subject.

Rebuilding Canada’s identity will be a long and arduous process, one that will take much thought and deliberation. One thing, however, is for certain: monarchism will not be the basis of that new identity.

There are many different explanations swirling around online about why Liberals were able to pull off a win despite driving our country into the ground for the past decade. Of them, pathological anti-Americanism and fear of Trump, the dependence of public sector employees on a bloated government, voters believing Carney represents a dramatic shift away from Trudeau, and (to put it bluntly) boomer myopia seem like the most convincing explanations.

However, on some corner of the right, sweeping conclusions are drawn about the effects that the post-COVID immigration surge has had on Canada’s voter rolls. These new immigrants, this narrative goes, were brought in for the sole purpose of boosting the Liberal Party, as they are naive and ignorant about our political climate and can be easily propagandized by Liberal politicians looking for votes.

Many of these people are correct that Canada’s recent immigration influx has fueled economic stagnation and the erosion of our social fabric. It should be clear that I am not making an argument in favour of mass immigration. With that being said, the people brought in through this influx did not tip the scales in favour of the Liberals on Monday night.

Let’s start by examining the election results in Brampton, a Toronto suburb that has become well known for its massive population of Indian immigrants. Of the 6 ridings in Brampton, 5 of them voted Liberal. This, on the face of it, seems to confirm the narrative that I have set out to disprove. Things get more complicated, though, when you look at the percentages coming out of individual ridings.

Nationwide, the Conservatives received 41.3% of the popular vote. In Brampton North—Caledon, the Conservatives got 47.5%; in Brampton East, they took home 44.7% of the vote; in Brampton—Chinguacousy Park, 44.5%; Brampton Centre, 47.2% Brampton South, 47.5%; and in Brampton West (the one Brampton riding they won), 49.8%. All of these percentages are higher than the national average.

The reason why the Liberals captured all but one of these ridings is due to the anemic NDP showing; the best NDP result in Brampton was a pathetic 2.7% in Brampton—Chinguacousy Park.

The story is very similar in Surrey, the other major haven for Indian immigrants in Canada. The three ridings in Surrey that contain the bulk of the city’s immigrant population (Surrey Centre, Surrey Newton, and Fleetwood—Port Kells) all gave higher-than-the-national-average percentages to the Conservatives (43.3%, 44%, and 44.2% respectively). Meanwhile, the older and affluent South Surrey—White Rock flipped from Conservative to Liberal.

Other ridings with large immigrant and visible minority populations also shifted towards the Conservatives.

Humber River-Black Creek—a riding that is almost 80% non-white and contains Toronto’s Jane and Finch neighborhood—gave the Conservatives over double the percentage they received in 2021 (35.9% vs. 17.4%).

Etobicoke North—also close to 80% non-white—was very much the same, with Conservatives going from 24.9% in 2021 to 41% in 2025.

Liberals, by contrast, made gains in wealthier, highly credentialed, upper-middle-class areas. such as the aforementioned South Surrey—White Rock.

Poilievre’s own riding of Carleton—a riding that is 73% white and contains many Ottawa bureaucrats—may be the perfect example of this phenomenon. The Liberals were able to increase their vote share by a whopping 19 points, while Poilievre’s fell by six. Of course, the dramatic and unprecedented result in Carleton probably also had something to do with personal animosity towards the Conservative leader. Yet this trend is seen elsewhere.

Kelowna—which is over 80% white and home to many wealthy retirees—gave the Liberals 48.5%, 22.3% more than in 2021.

Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke—a 78% white Victoria-area suburban riding where almost 30% of the population is over the age of 60—also experienced a Liberal surge, with the party going from 21.9% in 2021 to 49.4% in 2025.

And West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country—72% white and home to some of the country’s most expensive real estate—went from 33% Liberal in the last election to 59.8% this time around.

The demographic story of the election is not immigrants vs. non-immigrants. Rather, it is those insulted from the effects of Liberals policies vs. those who have been left out in the cold. Those who are insulted tend to already own multi-million dollar houses and have their pensions secured; they have nothing to lose from a continuation of the status quo. They tend to skew older, wealthier, and more credentialed (I’m using the term “credentialed” in place of the term “educated”, since the credentialed class is often quite poorly educated).

Those who have been left out in the cold, meanwhile, do not enjoy such luxuries and have suffered an order of magnitude more than the insulated classes. They tend to skew younger, more working-class, and less credentialed. Among their ranks are many recent arrivals who have become disillusioned with Canada, and feel they were sold a false bill of goods.

And, with the election results being what they are, the alienation of those already left behind will only be accentuated. By the time the next election comes around—which, if the NDP continues its pathetic routine of kowtowing to the Liberals, could be in four years—the jaded and angry will demand more dramatic changes to the Canadian system. The question is, will anyone offer those changes to them?

In the post I released a few days ago discussing whether Michael Anton’s “Flight 93 Election” analogy applied to the election Canada currently finds itself in, I differentiated Pierre Poilievre from Donald Trump mostly by discussing the ideological differences that separate the two. However, upon some reflection, I have come to the conclusion that the most significant distinction between the two men is temperamental in nature, not ideological.

Let me explain.

Over four years ago, the clever-yet-underappreciated (at least in my view) YouTuber BostWiki released a video titled “Builders vs. Operators”. In it, he describes two separate avenues that individuals can use to climb to the top of a hierarchy. These hierarchies can be political or corporate, yet the strategies for reaching the top are similar for both.

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Pierre Poilievre is an operator. He is someone who has methodically climbed his way through the Canadian political system to become the Leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, and has his sights set on the position that would give him the designation Right Honourable.

In fact, he has had his sights set on the Prime Ministership for over two decades.

As a 20-year-old undergraduate at the University of Calgary, Pierre submitted a 2,500-word essay called “Building Canada through Freedom” to Magna International’s “As Prime Minister, I Would…” essay contest. The contents of the essay are eerily similar to his current rhetoric. Consider, for example, this passage:

“Therefore, as Prime Minister, what I would do to improve living standards is not nearly as important as what I would not do. As Prime Minister, I would relinquish to citizens as much of my social, political, and economic control as possible, leaving people to cultivate their own personal prosperity and govern their own affairs as directly as possible.”

The libertarianism and the importance of negative freedom that are so central to his current political career are the driving themes of this essay from 1999.

From this, it is reasonable to conclude that he formed a vision of what he sought to achieve very early in life, and then set out to fulfill that vision in an incrementalist and meticulous fashion.

He was first elected to the House of Commons in June 2004 as a 25-year-old, and spent the next year and a half as an opposition backbencher. After the 39th Canadian election in 2006, he received a promotion and became the Parliamentary Secretary to the then-President of the Treasury Board, John Baird. In 2008, he rose further and was made Stephen Harper’s personal Parliamentary Secretary. Come 2013, he was appointed to cabinet, albeit as a junior minister (Minister of State for Democratic Reform). Finally, in 2015, he was given a more substantial cabinet job, replacing Jason Kenney as the Employment and Social Development minister.

This promotion proved to be short-lived, however, as he was relegated to the opposition benches following the 2015 election. But that political exile would also be short-lived, as he was named Finance critic after Andrew Scheer became leader in 2017—a position he would use to lambast the Liberal government, increasing his political clout in the process.

By the time he launched his bid to lead the Conservatives in 2022, he had been in Parliament for almost 18 years and had held a myriad of jobs in the place. He had completed a long march through the institution, if you will.

An operator, like Poilievre, is someone who plays by the rules and follows a conventional and structured path to the top of the hierarchy. To do this, they study how the hierarchy operates and then play by its rules to slowly rise through it in a linear progression, much like how one advances in a video game.

Mark Carney, it is worth noting, is also an operator. He has just operated in the separate hierarchies of government bureaucracy and finance, as opposed to partisan politics.

Trump is a builder. Not just in the sense of him creating brick-and-mortar buildings, but also in the sense that he operates outside of pre-existing hierarchies and creates his own infrastructure that allows him to circumvent the paths followed by operators.

Initially starting his career as a New York real estate developer, Trump was able to make his surname into a brand synonymous with luxury, material success, and business acumen by licensing his name to a number of products (Trump Steaks and Trump Vodka being two of the weirder examples) and commissioning the ghostwriting of the book The Art of the Deal.

He then leveraged this reputation into a career hosting The Apprentice, where he plays a hard-nosed business executive tasked with eliminating contestants on the show (“you’re fired”).

Compared to the slow and steady political rise of Poilievre, Trump’s ascent in politics can best be described as a long, dry spell, followed by a sudden explosion.

In line with his status as a builder, Trump’s first foray into politics was not with either of the two legacy parties in American politics, but rather with the Reform Party—itself the creation of another builder, Ross Perot. He launched what was described as a “brief and flamboyant run for President”, and his candidacy was, predictably, not taken seriously by the mainstream media—or even others in the party at the time.

During the period before his run in 2016, Trump lacked fidelity to any particular party. After his Reform Party candidacy in 2000, Trump was a registered Democrat during the Bush presidency, before shifting his affiliation to the Republicans in 2009. In short, he was choosing to always identify as the opposite of those in power, which is how he could position himself as an outsider who could stick it to the political establishment and “drain the swamp”.

Finally, in 2016, Trump was able to use the personal brand he had been building for decades to his advantage, and triumphed over both the legions of operators running in the Republican Presidential Primary and arch-operator Hillary Clinton to win the Presidency—despite famously lacking any experience in elected office.

Up to this point, what I have described seems like something that is fairly neutral. There are benefits to being a builder instead of an operator, and vice versa. However, due to the nature of the place Canada finds itself in at this moment, I would like to imbue what I have previously said with some analysis, and perhaps a hair of judgment.

Because operators are people who work within the pre-existing system as opposed to creating structures outside of it, they naturally adopt the values and mores that are deemed acceptable within that system.

In politics, operators will, almost without exception, adhere to an ideology that falls within the Overton Window of the jurisdiction they are running in. This is because they need to network and build connections with people further up the hierarchy than they are in order to advance, and having ideas that differ significantly from those above them in the pecking order will cause conflict and friction, stymying their chances of progression.

Pierre Poilievre, while being more ideologically strident than his predecessors (cough cough, Erin O’Toole), is still a creature of Canada’s political establishment and the narrow range of discourse that establishment operates within. He will only adopt positions that are within Canada’s Overton Window, and will only change his position on an issue if the Overton Window shifts on said issue. This explains why he shifted his position on gay marriage to the left as gay marriage started gaining bipartisan support; it also explains why he’s moved, although only slightly, to the right on immigration as the previous elite consensus on immigration has crumbled. If the Overton Window on immigration happened to shift to the left, I have no doubt that Pierre would change his position accordingly.

Herein lies the problem. Canada is at a point in its trajectory where it desperately needs a leader who is willing to pursue bold, innovative, and imaginative policies, even if such a pursuit makes this leader despised by the elites and a substantial chunk of the Canadian electorate. Pierre, by virtue of his past and status as an operator, looks unlikely to be that leader. This is not a personal slight against him; he is, by far, the best leader the Conservative Party has ever had. I still strongly encourage readers to cast their ballots for the Conservatives. But, despite this, it is important not to be under any illusions about him and recognize that Canada’s decline cannot, and will not, be fully reversed should the CPC win on Monday.

Builders are not without their faults. They often pursue risky policies that have catastrophic results. But personally, I would prefer a higher level of risk over managed decline as far as the eye can see.

It is also worth noting that I am not calling for a Canadian replica of Donald Trump. I don’t think that sort of brazen and gauche persona would ever be appealing to the Canadian populace. But, with Canada where it is, merely having a builder would be nice.

2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.

Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.

While this analogy may seem—and seemed to many commentators at the time—hyperbolic and histrionic, I think that the essay's analogy can be applied, to a certain extent, to the election Canada is facing at the present moment.

As Pierre Poilievre has bluntly put it, “Canada is broken”.

Ten years ago, our GDP per capita and average income were roughly on par with the United States. Now, the average income in Canada is similar to the average in impoverished U.S. states such as Kentucky and Mississippi, while GDP per capita has stayed stagnant over the past decade.

Canada’s national debt has doubled since 2015, and we now spend almost as much on interest payments servicing that debt ($46.5 billion) as we do on healthcare transfers to the provinces ($49.4 billion).

Our per capita violent and property crime rates are higher than those of the United States, a fact that feels wild and inconceivable considering the United States’ reputation for violence and Canada’s reputation as a bastion of safety and law and order.

Virulent pro-terror mobs have become a common feature in Canadian cities, and serve as a blunt reminder of the consequences of decaying social trust and the loss of a social fabric previously taken for granted.

We have the world’s most permissive euthanasia system, MAiD, that has killed 60,000 people since its introduction and is the 5th leading cause of death in the country.

China interfered in our last federal election, interfered in nomination races, and has set up “police stations” on Canadian soil.

To anyone remotely familiar with Canada’s current predicament, the recitation of these facts may seem redundant or even asinine, for they have been repeated ad nauseam by countless others in recent months and years—yet a continuation of Liberal governance could add fresh horrors to the mix.

Despite Mark Carney’s status as a supposedly centrist central banker, he is promising to add an additional $130 billion to the national debt over the next four years.

The revival of the Online Harms Act, which surely follows the re-election of this government, will lead to the implementation of a draconian censorship regime surrounding content uploaded to the internet. Arrests for wrongthink are likely.

And, based on Brookfield Asset Management taking out a $176 million loan from the CCP and Carney’s reluctance to fire Paul Chiang, China—in all likelihood—will become more aggressive and brazen in the ways that it interferes with our political system.

If Canadians can’t be roused from their stupor to vote against a government as disastrous as the current one, I see a bleak future ahead for Canada.

The word “existential” may be grossly overused nowadays, but I think it fully applies to the stakes of the election we find ourselves in the midst of. If the status quo continues, the damage that will continue to pile up may be irreparable.

Yet there are limitations to this analogy.

Michael Anton spends the bulk of the “Flight 93 Election” essay excoriating the conservative establishment for being an ineffectual counter to an increasingly militant left.

Indeed, the essay’s central thesis is that mainline, establishment conservatives should throw aside their reservations about Donald Trump and embrace him, as he is a paradigm-shifting figure who can reverse American politics’ slow leftward drift.

As far as this analogy goes, Mark Carney may well be our Hillary Clinton—but, despite what the Liberals and the CBC want you to believe, Pierre Poilievre is not analogous to Donald Trump. In fact, he is the exact sort of mainline, establishment conservative that Michael Anton castigates.

“But but but he’s a mean and angry populist who uses simplistic slogans.”

Yes, Poilievre uses one-liners and catchy slogans. He appeals to disaffected working-class people. But the similarities with Trump end there.

At heart, Poilievre is the campus conservative nerd. He’s Alex P. Keaton from Family Ties. His intellectual foundations are Ayn Rand, George Will, William F. Buckley Jr., and Milton Friedman. In university, he was the kid who would show up to your political science tutorial wearing a bow tie and carrying a briefcase.

When it comes to Trump, it is unclear whether he has any clear and consistent intellectual foundations, despite the efforts of some to create post-hoc intellectual rationalizations for his policies.

Poilievre’s political project is formed off of a core set of principles that he has stayed remarkably consistent in following throughout the entirety of his political career—limited government, balanced budgets, low taxes, and personal liberties.

This stands in stark contrast to Donald Trump, whose political positions are almost entirely incoherent and fluid, save for a handful of core issues—immigration, foreign policy, and trade—on which he bucks the neoconservative orthodoxy that Poilievre champions.

Poilievre has been in politics for almost the entirety of his adult life, while Trump was over the age of 70 when he first assumed political office.

And while Poilievre may be a fiscal libertarian, he is far from an ideologue when it comes to social issues.

Poilievre supports gay marriage, abortion, and relatively high levels of immigration. He has stated that he wouldn’t re-criminalize euthanasia and marijuana. When it comes to his personal life, his adoptive father is gay and his wife is the daughter of a Venezuelan immigrant.

He embraces a form of blank slate civic nationalism that only asks of immigrants that they refrain from importing foreign conflicts:

“Bring your culture, bring your traditions, bring your family, but do not bring foreign conflicts onto our streets.”

“Ours is a nationalism not based on birthplace, bloodlines, or background. Whether your name is Martin or Muhammad, Poilievre or Patel, anyone from anywhere can come here to do anything. We will treat all of our people, regardless of race, as Canadians and Canadians first, with no hyphens.”

Doesn’t sound very Trumpian to me.

If Poilievre loses this election, I suspect he will be remembered as the last gasp of a certain sort of reformist neoconservatism that has long dominated Canada’s right-of-center political scene. The last bowtie-wearing neocon, if you will.

This type of politics is generally cautious and moderate, happy to pursue incrementalist economic reforms while maintaining a stiff indifference towards social issues—or indeed anything that reeks of controversy. Politicians who profess to follow this ideology may be slightly right-of-center, but they are still well within Canada’s narrow Overton Window of acceptable political discourse.

Poilievre may be considered hard-right by some, but all of his ideas are still within the Canadian Overton Window. He is fundamentally not—and I don’t think he is capable of being—a paradigm-shifting and transformational character like Trump.

However, in the event of the Liberals being re-elected—an event that, it is important to remind readers, is likely but far from inevitable—it would not surprise me if a Canadian politician who is actually analogous to Trump rises to prominence.

Who that person will be, and what political vehicle they will use for their ascent, though, remains to be determined.

Will Maxime Bernier and the PPC finally gain ground after years in the political wilderness in a situation similar to the rise of the Reform Party in the UK? Knowing what I know about Bernier, it seems implausible. But who knows.

Or will our hypothetical Maple Syrup Trump win the Conservative leadership in the event of a Poilievre resignation? And who would that person be?

All of this is still—and will remain for a while—completely up in the air. One thing, however, is for certain: if Carney’s Liberals are re-elected, the “Flight 93 Election” analogy will much more straightforwardly apply to the following election than the one we are currently in.

Recently, I found myself reading Jordan Peterson’s piece in the National Post about why boomers (and older Canadians in general) seem to be disproportionately attracted to Mark Carney. And although there are many important insights to be found in that piece, one particular passage stood out to me:

Consider the persona of our prime minister, rather than his actual continually stated and written views. He is grey-haired, calm, sensible, a bit peevish in a manner of a wise father who’s simply been asked too many stupid questions — the very image of 1990s (or even 1950s) reliable patriarchy. He is Mark J. Carney, after all, banker, economist, former governor of the Banks of Canada and England — a man vetted by our betters; a man of international cachet and renown. Could there possibly be a better symbol of the essentially conservative desire of mature old age and judgement? Who better to stand forth against the imprecations of Donald J. Who better to put forward the eternal vision of Peace, Order and Good Government still so dear to central and Atlantic Canada’s establishment heart?

Mark Carney—at least superficially—presents as a calm, collected, and fundamentally boring man who will be a steady hand at the wheel during tough times. This persona, hollow as it may be, has a “small-c conservative” appeal to it, and is incredibly attractive to boomers who simply want to escape the chaos of the current moment and return to the “end of history” comfort and stability of the 1990s.

And in an era of vibes-based politics, this persona may be enough to win them over.

Compare this to the persona of U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, a man with whom Carney recently met and has much in common with:

Members of Sir Keir Starmer's shadow cabinet have warned the Labour leader that he is 'boring voters to death' as a separate poll revealed voters feel he is 'bland but honest'.

A wordcloud reveals the term people most associated with Keir is “boring” - racking up 5.3 per cent of all responses.

When one polling firm, JL Partners, recently quizzed members of the public on the adjectives they’d use to describe Starmer, the most common answer was “boring”, although “dull”, “uninspiring” and “bland” also featured.

Purely based on vibes alone, Starmer seems remarkably similar to Carney. And if you judged him solely off of vibes, you would expect him to be running a competent—yet uninspiring—technocratic centrist government.

However, anyone who has been following UK politics as of late knows that is anything but the case.

Here is a quote from a article about how Starmer’s popularity—and the popularity of his Labour party—have sharply declined in the months following his landslide election win:

Imperious decisions from the Chancellor Rachel Reeves about the winter fuel allowance and a bumper tax-raising budget have been accompanied by Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson implementing unabashed woke leftism in the education sector, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband going full Greta Thunberg on energy policy and Foreign Secretary David Lammy masterminding an apologies-and-reparations regime at the Foreign Office.

Thousands of convicted felons have been released from jail early, and Prisons Minister Lord Timpson is seeking to tilt the criminal justice system towards non-custodial sentences. After scrapping the Rwanda deterrent plan, Labour has presided over a further increase in small-boat crossings.

Doesn’t sound very centrist to me. But alas, there is more.

Thanks to the UK’s censorship laws, the police there arrest an average of 33 people per day for “hate speech” offences. This number, while shocking to many, is apparently too low for Keir Starmer, who has mused about extending speech restrictions even further to outlaw “Islamophobia”.

And, after the infamous grooming gang scandal was brought to international attention in recent months, Starmer refused to launch a national inquiry into the issue—instead accusing those who brought the issue to light of “spreading misinformation” and “jumping on the far-right bandwagon”.

Carney’s True Colours

A good start in terms of exposing Carney would be to examine what he thought about the Freedom Convoy. In an op-ed in the Globe and Mail on February 7, 2022, Carney says that those involved in the Convoy were committing “sedition” and expresses support for the invocation of the Emergencies Act:

But now in its second week, no one should have any doubt. This is sedition. That’s a word I never thought I’d use in Canada. It means “incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority.”

On Sunday, authorities began to draw the line. Declaring a state of emergency was the right thing to do.

He then goes on to endorse the freezing of bank accounts for those who donated to the Convoy:

Those who are still helping to extend this occupation must be identified and punished to the full force of the law.

Drawing the line means choking off the money that financed this occupation. Again, many Canadians who were amongst the initial donors were likely well meaning. Perhaps they were unaware of the convoy’s stated objectives, or – like many in positions of authority in Ottawa – they didn’t take them seriously. Perhaps all they wanted was a new COVID-19 policy with fewer restrictions.

But by now anyone sending money to the convoy should be in no doubt: You are funding sedition. Foreign funders of an insurrection interfered in our domestic affairs from the start. Canadian authorities should take every step within the law to identify and thoroughly punish them. The involvement of foreign governments and any officials connected to them should be identified, exposed and addressed.

Yikes.

Other evidence of Carney’s authoritarian inclinations can be found in comments he made recently on the question of internet censorship:

“There are many serious issues that we’re dealing with,” he said. “One of them is the sea of misogyny, antisemitism, hatred, and conspiracy theories — this sort of pollution online that washes over our virtual borders from the United States.”

“The more serious thing is when it affects how people behave — when Canadians are threatened going to their community centres or their places of worship or their school or, God forbid, when it affects our children,” he said.

“My government, if we are elected, will be taking action.”

On the face of it, some of what he says here —such as the part concerning threats to places of worship—seems reasonable. However, the line about “taking action” likely means that his government, if re-elected, would revive and pass Bill C-63.

If you don’t remember, Bill C-63 is the draconian censorship bill that could lead to life sentences for “hate speech”:

Offence motivated by hatred

320.‍1001 (1) Everyone who commits an offence under this Act or any other Act of Parliament, if the commission of the offence is motivated by hatred based on race, national or ethnic origin, language, colour, religion, sex, age, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity or expression, is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for life.

The bill also prescribed placing people under house arrest and making them wear an “electronic monitoring device” if there is a reason to suspect that they will commit a “hate speech” offence in the future:

Fear of hate propaganda offence or hate crime

810.‍012 (1) A person may, with the Attorney General’s consent, lay an information before a provincial court judge if the person fears on reasonable grounds that another person will commit

• (a) an offence under section 318 or any of subsections 319(1) to (2.‍1); or

• (b) an offence under section 320.‍1001.

Appearances

(2) The provincial court judge who receives the information may cause the parties to appear before a provincial court judge.

Adjudication

(3) If the provincial court judge before whom the parties appear is satisfied by the evidence adduced that the informant has reasonable grounds for the fear, the judge may order that the defendant enter into a recognizance to keep the peace and be of good behaviour for a period of not more than 12 months.

Duration extended

(4) However, if the provincial court judge is also satisfied that the defendant was convicted previously of any offence referred to in subsection (1), the judge may order that the defendant enter into the recognizance for a period of not more than two years.

Refusal to enter into recognizance

(5) The provincial court judge may commit the defendant to prison for a term of not more than 12 months if the defendant fails or refuses to enter into the recognizance.

Conditions in recognizance

(6) The provincial court judge may add any reasonable conditions to the recognizance that the judge considers desirable to secure the good conduct of the defendant, including conditions that require the defendant to

• (a) wear an electronic monitoring device, if the Attorney General makes that request;

• (b) return to and remain at their place of residence at specified times;

• (c) abstain from the consumption of drugs, except in accordance with a medical prescription, of alcohol or of any other intoxicating substance;

• (d) provide, for the purpose of analysis, a sample of a bodily substance prescribed by regulation on the demand of a peace officer, a probation officer or someone designated under paragraph 810.‍3(2)‍(a) to make a demand, at the place and time and on the day specified by the person making the demand, if that person has reasonable grounds to believe that the defendant has breached a condition of the recognizance that requires them to abstain from the consumption of drugs, alcohol or any other intoxicating substance;

• (e) provide, for the purpose of analysis, a sample of a bodily substance prescribed by regulation at regular intervals that are specified, in a notice in Form 51 served on the defendant, by a probation officer or a person designated under paragraph 810.‍3(2)‍(b) to specify them, if a condition of the recognizance requires the defendant to abstain from the consumption of drugs, alcohol or any other intoxicating substance; or

• (f) abstain from communicating, directly or indirectly, with any person identified in the recognizance, or refrain from going to any place specified in the recognizance, except in accordance with the conditions specified in the recognizance that the judge considers necessary.

In terms of finding evidence of Carney’s radicalism, his book Value(s) is a treasure trove. Here is an excerpt from a National Post review of his book in 2021:

Carney draws inspiration from, among others, Marx, Engels and Lenin, but the agenda he promotes differs from Marxism in two key respects. First, the private sector is not to be expropriated but made a “partner” in reshaping the economy and society. Second, it does not make a promise to make the lives of ordinary people better, but worse. Carney’s Brave New World will be one of severely constrained choice, less flying, less meat, more inconvenience and more poverty: “Assets will be stranded, used gasoline powered cars will be unsaleable, inefficient properties will be unrentable,” he promises.

Marx, Engels, and Lenin, eh?

Naturally, Carney also heaps praise on Greta Thunberg in the book:

Carney also commends the knowledge and wisdom of Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg: “The power of Greta Thunberg’s message lies in the way she drives home both the cold logic of climate physics and the fundamental unfairness of the climate crisis.”

Anybody who cites an anxious 17-year-old as an authority on climate science and moral philosophy should be an object of deep suspicion, but then, according to Carney, climate science is easy. Greta’s “basic calculations” are ones that she could “easily master and powerfully project.” (Carney says he once gave Greta a tour of the Bank of England’s gold vaults. One wonders if she also offered up tips on monetary policy.) But then, in early 2020, Greta demonstrated her complete disconnect from reality when, at the WEF in Davos, she called for an immediate cessation of emissions, which would tank the world economy and potentially kill millions.

It is a rather curious choice to heap praise on someone who calls for an “immediate cessation of emissions”. But, after all, a “net zero” agenda is a key element of Carney’s political project.

In addition, Carney made headlines a few weeks ago for adding Mark Wiseman, co-founder of the Century Initiative, to his Canada-U.S. relations advisory council1. The Century, for those who are unaware, is an organization that seeks to increase Canada’s population to 100 million by 2100 (the beginning of the 22nd century, hence the name). Since Canada’s native population has a low birthrate, achieving this goal would necessitate sustained mass immigration for the next 75 years—a process that would likely lead to tanking GDP per capita numbers and further cultural balkanization in urban and suburban areas.

By now, I think the point is clear.

Keir Starmer and Mark Carney both give off a bland-yet-competent vibe. Based on this vibe, one would expect them to govern cautiously and moderately. Yet that vibe is, indeed, just a vibe; it carefully conceals a penchant for a sort of technocratic soft authoritarianism that seeks to punish anyone who deviates from boilerplate left-liberal groupthink and orthodoxy.

The worldview that both of these men share view dissent, skepticism of officialdom and institutions, and divergent opinions as things that, at best, are nuisances to be barely tolerated—at worst, they are, like the Freedom Convoy, to be “identified and punished to the full force of the law”.

To them, democracy works best when the power of the unwashed masses is weakened and replaced by “experts” in the managerial state, such as unelected judges, bureaucrats, and workers at NGOs. Giving the plebians too much power, after all, could result in those simpletons falling for “harmful disinformation”—or even worse—”far-right populism”.

They have a deeply condescending attitude towards common people, seeing them as being “uneducated” and “ignorant”—people in need of a large, paternalistic government that controls every aspect of their lives and guides them towards the “correct” choices, even if those choices lead to a lower quality of life.

One of the most famous quotations from George Orwell’s 1984 is “if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever”. The boot in this analogy clearly symbolizes an extreme and uncompromising form of totalitarianism, one that resembles Stalin’s USSR or Mao’s China.

When it comes to the possibility of Mark Carney being elected, I would simply change Orwell’s quote to say “if you want a picture of the future, imagine the dress shoe of a central banker walking on the faces of Canadians for the next four years”.

Being walked on by a dress shoe may not hurt nearly as much as being stomped on by a boot. It is a softer tyranny, after all. But it still hurts. It is still an experience you probably want to avoid.

And, in the coming days, Canadians should think carefully about whether they are masochists who desire that experience—or if they sensibly want to avoid it.

If you are a sentient being that resides within Canada (or so-called Canada, as some call it), you are probably aware of Donald Trump’s tariff threats and the supposedly fierce backlash these provocations have caused amongst your fellow citizens.

Seemingly overnight, otherwise timid and feeble citizens of the Great White North were transformed into chest-beating and chauvinistic nationalists, eager to defend the sovereignty of the Dominion of Canada.

Yet this performance inevitably invites questions. Namely, what about Canada do they see as worth defending? And what were these “patriots” advocating for in the years leading up to these recent events?

Cargo Cults

Before World War II, many Melanesians in places such as the Solomon Islands or Vanuatu had never encountered things that we would consider to be hallmarks of modernity—airplanes, motorized vehicles, radios, etc.

However, Japanese imperialism in the Pacific theater of the war and the American response exposed many of these isolated peoples to such devices for the first time. This proved to be deeply traumatic for many of them, and shook their worldviews in such dramatic ways that they developed bizarre rituals and spiritual belief systems based around their interactions with this new technology

In particular, many of them resorted to making recreations of the devices they had seen for the first time out of commonly used materials on these islands, such as wood and straw.

Now let us return to Canada’s current predicament.

For decades, Canada has enjoyed unprecedented levels of peace, prosperity, and security. However, despite the claims of many rabid anti-Americans in this country, much of this was due to our close proximity to the United States.

With the strongest military power the world had ever seen as our closest ally and only direct neighbour, our national security was assumed to be taken care of—meaning that investments in our own military seemed gratuitous and unnecessary.

We also enjoyed the luxury of living next door to a massive economic powerhouse, which made selling our goods to a foreign market incredibly easy.

In other words, we became decadent and complacent, as we weren’t facing any imminent threats.

It was in this environment of luxury and stability that Justin Trudeau rose to power in 2015 and promptly proclaimed Canada to be the first “post-national state”.

Over the following decade, a series of drastic and sweeping cultural changes occurred, leading to a sharp decline in Canadian patriotism.

Statues were torn down, streets renamed, churches were burned, the flag was flown at half mast for six months, and Canada was deemed to be an irredeemable and genocidal settler colonialist abomination that was built on blood and exploitation.

One of the most extreme manifestations of this self-flagellation—which I alluded to earlier—went as far as to deny Canada’s right to be a sovereign nation (hence the term “so-called Canada”).

And although this zeitgeist may have reached its peak during the mass graves hoax of 2021, it was still very much alive and well when then-President-elect Donald Trump started threatening to slap Canada with tariffs and make our country the 51st State.

Suddenly, the Laurentian Elite—who had previously taken Canada’s security for granted and had spent the past decade indulging in radical social engineering experiments—found itself in a position akin to the Melanesians in the South Pacific who had encountered outsiders and modern technology for the first time.

They were completely shocked and blindsided.

Donald Trump—a man who many of them earnestly believe is the Orange Reincarnation of Hitler—had, perplexingly to them, won the Electoral College, completed his political comeback arc, and was now shitposting about annexing Canada.

When any country is threatened, a renewed sense of jingoistic nationalism and a “rally around the flag effect” is inevitable (the U.S. after 9/11 is a good example).

Yet the very people now tasked with protecting our sovereignty were the exact same ones who had encouraged the intellectual and cultural forces that led to terms such as “so-called Canada” becoming widely used in academia.

So, despite their best efforts at projecting a sense of fierce loyalty and commitment to Canada, their attempts at nationalism boil down to nothing more than a feeble and reactionary anti-American hatred; with our history trashed and living standards degraded, they have no substance to defend and nothing left to stand on.

What they have created in the last few months resembles the wooden planes constructed by the Melanesian peoples—it includes the outer trappings of something, but fundamentally isn’t that thing in a very obvious way.

In other words, what they have created is a cargo cult.

The chart show a string of issues of concern to voters, with the percentage that consider a particular issue to be among the most important broken down by age group.

And of these results, the results from the “Dealing with Donald Trump” column are especially significant.

For voters over the age of 60, 50% of them consider the Orange Man Question to be of utmost importance.

However, this drops to just 16% among the 18-29 age bracket.

But why is this?

Other results on the chart may give us a clue.

28% of the under-30s consider “Making housing more affordable” to be a top issue, while just 9% of the over-60s say the same.

“Growing the economy” is a key priority for 23% of young people, but only 13% of older folks.

Perhaps most revealingly, 23% of the 18-29 bracket place “Making Canada a better place to live” in their top echelon— just 6% of seniors do the same.

On a similar note, here is a chart showing voting preferences broken down by age:

As you can see, Liberals lag behind with just 23.4% of the vote among the 18-29 demographic. Their support, however, increases to a whopping 49.8% with the 60+ crowd.

Next, let’s take a look at the 2024 World Happiness Report. Canada comes in with an impressive 8th place finish among those over the age of 60:

Yet Canada’s ranking falls to a measly 58th place with young people, joining the company of third-world countries such as Guatemala, Honduras, and Ecuador:

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Luxury Beliefs

The concept of “luxury beliefs” was coined by the psychologist and author Rob Henderson, and is generally defined as “ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes”.

They are beliefs that make those who hold them feel sophisticated and high-class, and give them a non-material way of signaling that they are morally superior to the unwashed masses and plebians.

However, the implementation of these ideas into practice often causes great harm to those lower down in the status hierarchy.

In his book Troubled, Henderson explores how leftist ideas surrounding drug legalization, defunding the police, and family formation inflict a disproportionate degree of damage on working-class families. Meanwhile, the white upper-middle-class “progressives” largely responsible for the promulgation of these ideas remain unscathed.

Similarly, Trump’s tariffs—while confounding and unjustified—have given rise to the Orange Man Question being the defining feature of Canadian politics. The tariff threats from the U.S. are, undoubtedly, of great concern to us. Yet the inflated importance of this issue in the Canadian political imagination—and the Trump Derangement Syndrome and jingoistic nationalism that accompany that inflated importance—can be seen as the product of a very secure and privileged class of people.

These are people who retired at the age of 53, own a cottage in the Muskoka region, live for three months of the year in timeshares in Boca Raton or Palm Springs, and spend their mornings playing golf or pickleball. They are also perpetually glued to watching CBC, MSNBC, and CNN, whose talking points they mindlessly regurgitate without a hint of skepticism or self-awareness.

In 1988, they purchased a 3,000 square-foot house in an upper-middle-class suburb of Toronto for $250,000; today, that house is worth over $2 million.

They have enjoyed some of the best material conditions that anyone in all of human history has ever experienced, and expected to enjoy their sunset years living in the “end of history”—a unipolar world where capitalist democracy and the managerial state reign supreme.

For them, Donald Trump and the paradigm shift that came with his rise represent a fundamental threat to the established order they have lavishly benefited from, and are so keen on preserving. Their fervent opposition to Trump, and other populist-lite politicians like Pierre Poilievre, is borne out of a self-interested preservation of a system that helps them.

Yet, for them, publicly declaring their self-interest would be gauche and uncouth—something only uneducated plebians would do. This necessitates that they dress up their selfish and myopic position in a veil of moral outrage and indignation.

Pierre Poilievre doesn’t just threaten to lower the price of their $2 million home by increasing housing supply and lowering immigration—no, he is a “far-right populist”, a “fascist”, a “radical extremist”, an “existential threat to our democracy”.

Therefore, their support for Mark Carney is an expression of their moral superiority that they can lord over their opponents. For, you see, they are on the “right side of history”, which means their political preferences must always be correct.

Yet for all of their righteous grandstanding, these people remain hopelessly oblivious to the myriad of ways in which Canada has gone to hell in a handbasket over the past decade.

They haven’t driven past the sprawling homeless encampments surrounding highway exits and overpasses.

They haven’t noticed the twitching, mentally disturbed drug addicts lying on the sidewalk.

They barely glance at their grocery bill, as their government pensions can easily cover the cost of basic necessities.

And they never stopped to consider why there had been a marked increase in the number of stabbings done by criminals out on bail—in fact, they probably haven’t even heard about the stabbings.

After all, if something isn’t reported on by the CBC, it may as well not exist.

So they sit in their leather recliner and listen to Rosemary Barton and Chantal Hebert, continuing to swim in a soup of delusion and narcissism.

Meanwhile, their grandchildren live lives defined by misery and hardship.

One of their grandchildren lives in his parents’ basement, and is unemployed due to the influx of Temporary Foreign Workers.

Another is looking to start a family, yet has to continuously delay family formation due to only being able to afford a 400 square foot apartment.

A third struggles with opioid addiction, is homeless, and is barely sentient most of the time. He spends his days (they might be numbered) slumped over next to a restaurant that shuttered during Covid and never reopened.

This is where the second part of the luxury beliefs concept comes in: the damage that these high-status beliefs can inflict on lower classes of people.

The boomers, by voting Liberal, will ensure the continuation of the disastrous social and economic policies of the last 10 years—policies that have immiserated their children and grandchildren.

Yet their material comfort and sense of smug self-satisfaction will blind them to this reality—and, by consequence, make the rest of us suffer.

Elbows up, hosers! Fight against the DOGE! Spray-paint swastikas on a swasticar! And above all, remember: Evil Orange Man drumpf!

However, like the election results maps, ridingbuilder also lets you access precinct data from recent elections at both the federal and provincial levels. This data can be used to create election maps that show precinct results, with a gradient revealing where parties have stronger and weaker support. Over the last year, I have created a plethora of these maps, and I intend on sharing a few of them with you today:

Election results in Vancouver from the 2021 Federal Election:

Election results in Vancouver from the 2019 Federal Election:

*Grey represents Jody Wilson-Raybould, as she was running as an independent in Vancouver-Granville.

Results in Vancouver from the 2020 B.C. Provincial Election:

Results in Vancouver from the 2017 B.C. Provincial Election:

Results in Montreal from the 2014 Quebec Provincial Election:

*Quebec political party colours:

CAQ: teal

PQ: dark blue

Liberal: red

Quebec Solidaire: orange

Results in Montreal from the 2018 Quebec Provincial Election:

Montreal results of the 2021 Federal Election:

*Precincts that voted Bloc Québécois are coloured teal

How Edmonton voted in the 2021 Federal Election:

How Edmonton (and St. Albert) voted in the 2019 Federal Election:

How Winnipeg voted in the 2021 Federal Election:

How Calgary voted in the 2015 Alberta Provincial Election:

*Teal is for the Alberta Party, Dark Blue is Progressive Conservative, and Green is Wildrose.

Results from Toronto in the 2021 Federal Election:

How Toronto voted in the 2018 Ontario Provincial Election:

I have more maps that I might include in a future post. But for now, I hope you enjoyed these maps and found them interesting!

As I have mentioned in previous posts, this Liberal leadership race has, and will probably remain, completely devoid of any inkling of substance or ideas.

Especially when it comes to the frontrunners, empty credentialism and the “narcissism of small differences” seem to be the defining themes of this contest.

However, analyzing the endorsements from members of the Liberal caucus is one of the few ways we can gain any deeper insights into who the candidates are appealing to.

After all, internal party politics mostly happens behind closed doors, with endorsements often being the only public result of those private machinations.

For the sake of simplicity and relevance, I will focus only on endorsements from current members of the Liberal caucus, excluding former MPs/Cabinet Ministers.

And before I begin naming the trends present in the endorsements, it is worth sharing the number of endorsements in total. As of January 24th, 40 MPs have backed Carney, 28 have backed Freeland, and just two have thrown their support behind Gould.

Swing vs. Safe Ridings

There doesn’t seem to be much of a difference in terms of the margin MPs backing either candidate won in the last election. The average margin for a Carneyite MP is 17.15%, while Freelanders netted a slightly higher 17.93%1.

However, there is a noticeable divergence when one examines endorsements from MPs in ridings with thinner margins. 17.86% of Freeland’s caucus endorsements came from MPs whose margin of victory in the last election was less than 5%; just 7.50% of Carneyites fall into the same category.

This divergence narrows, though, when those who won with less than a 10% margin are included—28.57% of Freeland’s caucus support comes from this tier, with Carney close behind at 27.50%.

There are multiple ways this data can be examined. On one hand, having more MPs from swing ridings endorsing you should, in theory, be a good sign—it could be seen as a sign that they have more confidence that you can win, as their chances of winning again are precarious at best. On the other hand, given the absolute dominance that the Conservatives have shown in the polls over the past year, any Liberal MP in a riding that was remotely close last time will face almost certain defeat. This knowledge of inevitable political annihilation might make them cavalier in regards to throwing their support behind the stronger candidate, which means they could be indifferent to the potential strength of who they endorse and simply be supporting their preferred candidate only because they personally prefer that candidate.

Things get even more interesting when the chances of winning re-election are thrown in. On average, Freelanders have a 29.44% chance of returning to the House of Commons, while that number stands at just 22.63% for Carneyites.

The first thing that pops out about both of these percentages is that they are extraordinarily low—indeed, the Liberal caucus would shrink to just 27% of its current size if an election were held today. The second noteworthy feature of this statistic is the 6.81% gap between Freelanders and Carneyites. This gap—though not huge—is large enough to suggest that some Freelanders are slightly more secure in their positions than Carneyites are—at least when it comes to winning again.

Regional Differences

Using YAPms.com (Yet Another Political Map Simulator), I created a map of all of the Liberal caucus endorsements in this leadership race. This makes it easier to assess which regions candidates are picking up support from.

Western Canada (British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and the Territories) is evenly split; 9 Carneyites and 7 Freelanders hail from the vast region.

Quebec is a similar story, with Carney receiving 7 endorsements and Freeland 5.

Atlantic Canada and Ontario, however, are dominated by Carney; he leads 6-to-2 and 22-to-14 in each region respectively.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about these numbers is the lack of endorsements from Quebec—only 12 of the province’s 33 Liberal MPs have jumped in to support a candidate.

A large part of the reason for this is that neither candidate is from Quebec—a province that is famously parochial when it comes to political preferences.

Despite this, Quebec will still play a critical role in determining who becomes the next Liberal leader, as it has 23% of Canada’s ridings, and every riding is worth 100 points according to the rules of the race.

Cabinet Ministers and MPs jumping ship

When it comes to endorsements from Cabinet Ministers, Mark Carney has the clear advantage. So far, 11 cabinet ministers have thrown their support behind him, compared to just 5 for Freeland.

This is a rather damning indictment of Freeland’s lack of ability to capitalize on her former position as a senior minister in Trudeau’s government. If there was to be any natural constituency for her among the Liberal caucus, it would be with the other members of the King’s Privy Council.

For her to be trailing in cabinet endorsements to a man who has never held any cabinet position signals that either a) her colleagues lost faith in her due to her poor performance as Finance Minister or b) her abrupt resignation from cabinet and scolding of Trudeau for entertaining “costly political gimmicks” rubbed other ministers the wrong way.

Considering the general lack of emphasis on basic competence that has characterized the Trudeau government, I suspect that the latter of these options is more plausible.

Either way, this is not a good sign for her if she wants to even think about winning the leadership, as other cabinet ministers can bring organizational strength and regional clout to a campaign.

More ominous signs appear for Freeland when one looks at the percentage of caucus Freelanders who aren’t running for re-election—21.42%. Only 15% of Carneyites aren’t re-offering.

Having such a large chunk of your endorsers not want to run—even under their preferred choice of Prime Minister—signals a lack of confidence in Freeland and her ability to perform at the ballot box.

Diaspora Groups

This, by far, is the most striking difference between the Freelanders and the Carneyites—it is, frankly, my primary motivation for writing this article.

40% of the Carneyites are visible minorities, while the “visible minority” label applies to just 14.29% of Freelanders.

This, on its face, may seem slightly odd, yet ultimately insignificant.

Things become more clear, however, once these MPs are singled out in their individuality.

The MPs backing Carney include radical anti-Israel activists (Salma Zahid, Sameer Zuberi), Khalistani sympathizers (Harjit Sajjan, Randeep Sarai, Iqwinder Gaheer), and an MP who has been influenced by the CCP (Parm Bains).

Taken together, it becomes clear that Mark Carney—out of the public eye—has pandered to fringe diaspora groups in order to establish a base of support within the Liberal caucus.

Pandering to such groups has always been an easy road for cynical politicians looking to gain quick votes—those within diaspora communities are often naive about the state of Canadian politics and can easily be persuaded into supporting a certain candidate provided the narrow interests of their identity group are fulfilled.

Yet this support comes at a cost—one that may not be felt by the exploitative politician in question but one that is harbored by the rest of Canadian society.

Radical anti-Israel activists, for instance, don’t exclusively question the sovereignty of and delegitimize the Jewish State—they apply the exact same language to Canada and its institutions.

Khalistanis see Canada as merely a safe haven from which they can agitate in favour of creating an ethnocultural Sikh homeland in the Punjab province of India.

The Chinese government is only interested in Canada as long as it can sense weakness in Canada—a weakness that it seeks to exploit in order to flex its muscles as a world superpower.

None of these groups deem our cultural values, our liberties, or our way of life to be of any importance to them—except if they can exploit those things to further their own ends.

And if politicians continue to wink and nod at those who see Canada as nothing but a vessel to take advantage of, our already-frayed social cohesion and trust in each other is at risk.

In the 2024 Republican presidential primaries in the U.S., over 22.2 million people voted in a nation of 340 million—approximately 6.5% of the population.

By contrast, 104, 552 people voted in the 2013 Liberal leadership race—as Canada had a population of just over 35 million at the time, those 104, 552 people made up just 0.3% of Canada’s population.

More specifically, 81, 389 out of those 104, 552 people were single-handedly responsible for putting Justin Trudeau in charge of the most successful political machine in Canadian history - one that has been in power for almost 60% of the time Canada has been a country.

Despite the historical prowess of the Liberal Party, the 2013 Liberal leadership election was, nevertheless, a race to control the reigns of a third-place party that had received just 19% of the vote in the last election. When Trudeau first rose in the House of Commons as Liberal leader for the first time, he rose from a seat far along the opposition benches towards the bar of the chamber.

The winner of the ongoing Liberal leadership, however, will (theoretically) occupy1 the 11th seat from the speaker on the front row of the government side of the house - in other words, the Prime Minister’s chair.

This means that a tiny fraction of the Canadian population, a fraction that holds views well to the left of the average person, will choose the most powerful person in the country.

If that isn’t undemocratic, then I don’t know what is.

Now, you may ask, isn’t it completely insignificant who replaces Trudeau as Prime Minister, as that person will almost certainly lose an election two months later? Is picking the next Charles Tupper really all that important?

But, you see, the person who wins this leadership race could be more similar to Joe Clark—or even Paul Martin—than Charles Tupper in terms of the time he/she will spend in the top job.

If Jagmeet Singh gets cold feet (as he frequently does) and refuses to support a no-confidence vote, the next Prime Minister would, most likely, last until the fixed election date in October. Right?

Not necessarily.

As Sean Spear wrote in The Hub:

But if we’re entertaining hypothetical scenarios, it’s possible for a Carney- or Freeland-led government to more controversially go beyond the fixed election date. The four-year fixed election date in October 2025 is set out in the Elections Canada Act. But as Carleton University professor Philippe Lagassé recently explained at The Hub, the Constitution only requires an election every five years. The government could therefore amend or repeal the legislated election date or possibly even ignore it altogether.

It is worth saying that this scenario is highly unlikely. Amending the Canada Elections Act to eliminate the fixed election date would require the support of one opposition party and a majority of the Senate. Since this change would be made purely for cynical, partisan reasons, I have a hard time imagining that any other political party (or a majority of Senators) would agree to this. Ignoring the fixed election date, meanwhile, would cause a constitutional crisis.

There is also the question of what this would to the popularity of a government that already enjoys anemic levels of support. As Sean Spear explains:

Extending the government beyond the four-year term limit would no doubt be contentious. It would arguably be even more controversial if Carney was the prime minister given that he wouldn’t at least start with a seat in the House of Commons. As a matter of politics, it would therefore be a high-risk strategy—one that could even do greater damage to the government’s already poor political standing.

However, there are still potential incentives for a future Prime Minister to attempt this gambit:

But if the new prime minister faces mere days or weeks before an election campaign, it may be viewed as a worthwhile bet compared to the alternative. Presumably, the political gamble would be that the short-term opprobrium would eventually be offset by the potential gains. Maybe the government uses the extra time to provide some budget goodies or secure a deal with the Trump administration or even permit the Conservatives to succumb to their own unforced errors.

If, god forbid, this scenario unfolds, this new Prime Minister - chosen by less than 1% of Canada’s population—could remain in office for one year and seven months.

That’s one year and seven months of being governed by someone who has never won a federal election.

This is where taking out a Liberal membership comes in.

By taking out a Liberal membership, you are giving yourself a say in both who the next Prime Minister will be and who will lead the Liberal Party into the next election.

I would, personally, prefer that Canada adopt an American-style primary system for choosing both party leaders and candidates for the House of Commons.

This would give the wider Canadian public more of a say in choosing party leaders—leaders that are often quite powerful, given the top-down, hierarchical nature of our political parties. It would also prevent leadership elections from being hijacked by special interest groups whose goals are irrelevant—or actively hostile—to the interests of the common people.

In the absence of such a system, however, taking out party memberships whenever leadership elections are held is the best course of action.

Although becoming a member of the Liberal Party is relatively easy, there are still several requirements one must meet to be eligible to take out a membership:

To be eligible for Registration in the Party, a person must:

(a) be at least fourteen (14) years of age;

(b) support the purposes of the Party;

(c) be a Canadian citizen, have status under the Indian Act, or be a permanent resident of Canada;

(d) not be a member of any other federal political party in Canada; and

(e) while Registered as a Liberal, not have publicly declared an intention to be a candidate for election to the House of Commons other than as a candidate of the Party.

Now, if you’re reading this post, I assume you’re at least fourteen years of age and have Canadian citizenship (or permanent residency, for that matter).

And unless you’re part of the Longest Ballot Committee, I doubt you’ll be running in the next federal election.

However, if you’re a member of the CPC or PPC (I assume my audience is right-leaning, although NDPers could be reading) this article will sadly be irrelevant to you.

With all of that taken care of, we are left with the clause that states one must “support the purposes of the party” in order to be eligible to register.

What the “purposes of the party” exactly are, however, isn’t specified.

Due to the nebulous nature of this phrase, it is fair game to use the ambiguity present here to your own advantage.

For example, I would say that the “[purpose] of the party” is to be absolutely shellacked by the Conservatives in the next election, and then spend years (or even decades) moldering in opposition.

Now that you have (hopefully) decided to register as a “Liberal”, it is worth considering who you should vote for.

The Liberal Party uses a ranked ballot system, which will make your decision easier if you are undecided—or simply hate all of the candidates.

If you conclude that you are primarily choosing the next Prime Minister, then Mark Carney would be a better choice; his robust financial experience and relative lack of involvement in Trudeau’s government would make him decent at managing the day-to-day affairs of the nation—in comparison to Freeland, of course. Carney would also be a better choice for people who want Liberals to return to a more fiscally responsible form of governance—or at least want Trudeau’s drunken orgy of spending to be toned down a bit.

However, if your main motivation for voting in this contest is to select the weakest possible leader for the party, Chrystia Freeland is your candidate. Her condescending communication style and abysmal track record as Finance Minister could very well lead to her pulling off a Kim Campbell-esque performance in the next federal election.

Personally, as I am very far ideologically from the Liberal Party as it currently exists, want to see the party get clobbered in the next election, and am somewhat skeptical of Carney’s technocratic centrism, I plan to cast my ballot for Freeland (I might rank Chandra Arya 2nd, though, if he manages to raise the $350, 000 necessary to run).

Would the Liberal Party approve of me encouraging randos on Substack to take out party memberships so they can vote for the weakest candidate in this leadership race? Probably not. But, after all the Liberals have done over the last nine years to weaken and damage our country, do I really care about getting approval from them? You wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the answer is a firm and unequivocal “no”.

The deadline for buying a Liberal Party membership is January 27th, so don’t miss out!

At the outset of the Liberal leadership race, I was eager to start pushing out regular coverage of the happenings of the race; after all, this is the first federal leadership election since Pierre Poilievre’s coronation over two years ago.

With over half a dozen potential candidates, the march towards choosing Trudeau’s successor seemed, at least to me, an intriguing exercise that could potentially highlight the power of different factions within the Liberal Party and, more broadly, left-of-centre Canadian politics writ large.

Instead, what has happened is a coagulation of the race around two (one has yet to announce, although she is presumed to do so sometime soon) anglophone, globalist, technocratic elites.

The similarities between the two of them has been patently obvious to me for a long time, and I noted their striking resemblance in the post I published just hours after Trudeau’s resignation:

The other major flaw with Carney is the striking parallels between his life and Freeland’s. Both of them grew up in Edmonton, both of them attended Harvard and Oxford, both of them lived in London and New York at various times in their lives, both them are members of the World Economic Forum….the list goes on.

Indeed, it is difficult to find anything meaningful to voters that differentiates the two of them (besides genitalia).

During his appearance on the Daily Show, Carney tried to position himself as an “outsider” untouched by the slimy machinations of the Liberal Party machine - yet any sentient being who has read Carney’s résumé would know that to be complete and utter bullshit.

Carney, in fact, may as well be the poster child for the word “insider” - just take a look at his biography on the World Economic Forum’s website:

Mark is also Chair at Brookfield Asset Management.
1988, Bachelor's in Economics, Harvard University; 1993, Master's in Economics and 1995, Doctorate in Economics, Oxford University. Thirteen years with Goldman Sachs in London, Tokyo, New York, Toronto. 2003-04, Deputy Governor, Bank of Canada. 2004-08, Senior Associate Deputy Minister of Finance. 2008-13, Governor of the Bank of Canada. Since July 2013, Governor of the Bank of England. Chairman, Financial Stability Board (FSB); He is also an external member of the Board of Stripe, a member of the Global Advisory Board of PIMCO, Harvard University, Rideau Hall Foundation, Bilderberg, the boards of Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Peterson Institute for International Economics the Hoffman Institute for Global Business and Society at INSEAD, Cultivo, as well as Senior Counsellor of the MacroAdvisory Partners, Advisor of the Watershed, and Chair of Chatham House, the Group of Thirty and also Advisory Board Chair for Canada 2020.

Freeland’s WEF profile, meanwhile, is equally dense with degrees from elite universities, important-sounding positions, and complimentary adjectives:

An esteemed journalist and author, the Deputy Prime Minister was born in Peace River, Alberta. She was educated at Harvard University before continuing her studies on a Rhodes Scholarship at the University of Oxford.

After launching her career in journalism as a Ukraine-based freelance correspondent for the Financial Times, The Washington Post, and The Economist, Ms. Freeland went on to various roles at the Financial Times of London. She then served as deputy editor of the Toronto-based Globe and Mail between 1999 and 2001, before returning to the Financial Times as deputy editor and then as United States managing editor.

In 2010, she joined Canadian-owned Thomson Reuters. She was a managing director of the company and editor of consumer news when she decided to return home and enter politics in 2013.

Ms. Freeland has written two books: Sale of the Century: The Inside Story of the Second Russian Revolution (2000); and Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else (2012). Plutocrats has been an international best-seller and won the Lionel Gelber Prize and National Business Book Award.

In 2018, the Deputy Prime Minister was recognized as Foreign Policy's Diplomat of the Year. She was also awarded the Eric M. Warburg Award by Atlantik-Brücke, for her achievements in strengthening transatlantic ties. In 2020, she was awarded Freedom House’s Mark Palmer Prize, in recognition of her years of work in championing democracy and human rights.

She is a member of the Forum's Board of Trustees

Because of the abundance of credentials both Carney and Freeland possess, it could be presumed that both of them would also possess an abundance of original ideas on deep questions relating to how we live and govern ourselves. Right?

Wrong.

So far, the elitist duo have shied away from most matters of substance and depth.

A few years ago, Mark Carney published a book with the bland and unsuggestive title of Value(s). As you would suspect, it is, essentially, an application of liberal platitudes to economics. As National Review put it:

It is revealing to compare the values Carney claims are necessary to repurpose our economic and financial systems with those that the Nobel prize–winning economist Edmund Phelps shows are key to innovation and economic growth. Carney lists fairness, solidarity, resilience, responsibility, sustainability, humility, and dynamism. Phelps emphasizes independence, initiative, achievement, and acceptance of competition. Carney’s values are arbitrary and politically motivated, while Phelps’s are validated by both the historical evolution of innovation and statistical evidence. Carney’s shallow analysis hardly justifies his cover flap’s boast that he is “one of the great economic thinkers of our time.”

Nothing suggests that Carney has tried to come up with anything more novel as of recent; his campaign website, for example, functions as a glorified resume.

For Freeland, even if she does possess such ideas, it will be hard for her to differentiate herself from the Trudeau’s ideology considering she spent many long years as his most loyal acolyte and loudest cheerleader.

In Matthew 4:4, Jesus said that “man shall not live on bread alone”.

On a similar note, it is worth saying that politicians shall not live on credentials alone.

Both Freeland and Carney have more-than-sufficient qualifications to be Prime Minister - yet scratch below the surface and you will find an emptiness to their ambition.

Both have spent years climbing up corporate and professional-managerial ladders and padding their resumes - for them, being Prime Minister is akin to “putting a feather in one’s cap”, as the saying goes.

Throughout the coming campaign, one can expect each of them to highlight the supposed differences between each other - an exercise that can be summed up using the phrase “the narcissism of small differences”.

Yet, fundamentally, they are the same.

Both of them are technocratic liberals.

Both of them are ambitious strivers and credentialists.

Both of them suffer from a poverty of ideas all-too-common among the upper echelons of polite society.

And both of them, if either one ends up winning the leadership, will not stand a chance against Pierre Poilievre in the next election.

The single-payer Canadian healthcare system has come to be seen as one of the defining sources of our national identity, with a 2016 poll showing that more Canadians derived a sense of pride from our healthcare than the Canadian flag, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the Canadian passport. This pride is usually justified, however, by invoking comparisons to the American healthcare system. And although the U.S. does indeed have many problems with its healthcare, having this be the exclusive point of comparison used to justify our status quo can become problematic.

Despite the triumphant rhetoric of some, there are many aspects of our healthcare system that are far from ideal, or even acceptable. For example, 61% of Canadians say they are not or not at all confident that they could quickly access emergency care, with 41% of Canadians saying they've struggled to access any of the main health services provided. Additionally, our supply of hospital beds (2.5 per 1000 inhabitants) lags behind many other wealthy countries, such as Finland, Norway, Iceland, and rather ironically, the United States itself.

As for overall performance, a report by the Commonwealth Fund furtherly and rather poignantly illustrates this point. Here, Canada’s healthcare system ranks 10th of out 11 wealthy countries, with the only country ranking behind us being the United States.

These problems with our healthcare system can often be traced back to the complicated matter of overlapping jurisdictions. For example, the federal government has much more control over tax revenues than the individual provinces, which means they need to distribute those funds to the provincial healthcare systems of each province. However, the transfers the federal government has been making to the provinces have often been inadequate.

Besides a lack of funding, another obstacle to the amelioration of Canada’s healthcare system is the lack of flexibility in considering possible changes. As many have noted, the debate surrounding healthcare in Canada is usually limited to the amount of funding that the system receives. While this is in no way an insignificant point, options such as private delivery of healthcare and introducing small premiums as a way to increase funding are often shunned due to their supposed similarities with the private healthcare of the U.S. However, these innovations are in fact used in European countries with robust public healthcare systems.

Canada’s healthcare system is grappling with a variety of challenges caused by an even greater multitude of problems. Due to the complex nature of healthcare, the best course of action should not involve a simplistic comparison to a single country designed to engender sanctimonious feelings but rather a reasonable evaluation of the pros and cons. Healthcare is a complex and multifaceted policy issue, and it is time we started treating it as such.

Last week, I spewed out a post on potential Liberal leadership candidates less than 24 hours after Justin Trudeau resigned.

Like most material published on the Liberal leadership race in its extreme infancy, that post was full of conjecture and rank speculation; indeed, anything published about the race at that point was bound to be unmoored from any concrete events as it was too early for significant events to have transpired.

This week’s post, while still containing a healthy dose of speculation and conjecture, will partially serve to review the multitude of predictions I made last week. Some predictions were inaccurate; others were rendered moot by potential candidates declining to run. Other predictions, however, ended up being quite prescient in retrospect.

The rest of the post will be a grab bag of various events related to the leadership race that have occurred over the past week, independent of any previous predictions.

Hopefully, you’ll gain a clearer sense of the race as it stands, and provide a useful forecast of how the race will transpire going forward.

Rules of the Game

The Liberals have set up a $350 000 entrance fee that candidates are required to pay in order to enter the race, which is a significant jump from the $75 00 needed in 2013.

This is more than the entrance fee for the 2022 CPC leadership ($300 000) and has likely been put in place to weed out irrelevant also-rans, therefore narrowing down the race to just the top-tier contenders (or potentially contender, more on that in a bit).

The voting day, March 9th, has also been announced. This creates an incredibly short timeline in which a leadership election can be held, which also will help the crème de la crème candidates.

The initial rules for registering as a party member in order to vote apparently made the process free and didn’t bar non-citizens or children from signing up, leading some to making their dearly departed pets members of the LPC.

These fraudulent memberships have now been cracked down on, yet memberships are still free and non-citizens can still vote (despite the protestations of some Liberal MPs).

These lax rules regarding just who can vote in this race provide a wonderful opportunity for foreign influence of all kinds, which could potentially favour certain candidates over others.

All the Declined Candidates

So far, most of the major developments concerning the Liberal leadership race have revolved around who isn’t running.

As of January 12, Sean Fraser1, Anita Anand, Brian Gallant, Mélanie Joly (thank god), Dominic LeBlanc, Steve MacKinnon, and Marc Miller have all declined to run.

Fraser, Miller, Gallant, and MacKinnon didn’t even make my list of potential candidates last week. Anand, Joly, and LeBlanc all came from the middle tier, leaving François-Philippe Champagne as the only candidate left in that category.

These exits have changed the race from one of numerous mid-tier contenders into a one of two possibilities: one is a bifurcated contest split between irrelevant also-rans and the Carney/Freeland duo; the other features that same bifurcation, except in this case, the dichotomy is between the also-rans and the former Governor of the Bank of England.

Christy Clark’s Implosion

Out of all that I wrote on January 8th, my section on Christy Clark was, by far, the most prescient.

In particular, these specific passages ended up being of great relevance:

The last time I heard from Christy Clark, she was endorsing Jean Charest to head to federal Conservative Party.

And now, just two years later, she’s considering a run for the leadership of the federal….Liberal Party???

On Friday, Christy Clark went on CBC Radio’s Saturday morning show/podcast The House, which should have been a softball interview for her considering the CBC is usually sympathetic to Liberal politicians.

She was then asked a softball question related to why she joined the Conservatives in 2022 to vote for Jean Charest.

And she then proceeded to handle this question in the absolute worst way possible.

Clark claimed, despite all evidence, that she never bought a CPC membership, never received her ballot from the party, and never voted in the race that coronated Pierre Poilievre.

Since these claims were so specific in nature, the CBC was easily able to verify that all three of them were false.

This, unsurprisingly, generated a ton of negative press coverage for Clark, which is the last thing a potential candidate who hasn’t been in the political arena for over seven years needs.

Right from the beginning, I was skeptical that there was any feasible avenue of success for Christy Clark in this race:

Clark was a relatively centrist premier of BC. Her father was a delegate for noted Blue Liberal John Turner. Yet the centrist position in this leadership race will probably be filled by the likes of LeBlanc and Champagne, with Carney’s economic credentials likely making him appealing to these sorts of voters as well.

This leaves little room for Clark, who also lacks the long-standing connections to the federal Liberal Party and French fluency of LeBlanc and Champagne.

Not to mention that the centrist wing of the Liberals has drastically shrunk over the last decade.

I also called her a delusional opportunist, and suggested that she would finish on first ballot with around 3% of the vote:

Indeed, one is left to wonder why exactly Clark is even considering a run?

One must look to the Artist Formerly Known as Twitter for clues.

On X yesterday, Clark said that now is the “biggest opportunity in over a decade that we’ve had to grow our Party and welcome new Liberals”.

So maybe she’s delusional? Or an opportunist? or both?

When Christy Clark’s ex-husband Mark Marissen ran for mayor of Vancouver in 2022, he won a measly 3.47% of the vote. I expect that Christy Clark will finish this race with a percentage of the vote roughly approximating that of her ex.

Considering Friday’s events, I can confidently say that I stand by everything I previously wrote about Christy Clark.

Carney’s Coronation?

With all of the former potential candidates announcing in rapid succession this week that they are declining to run, many have started speculating that the Liberal higher-ups are designing this race to be a coronation for their golden boy Mark Carney.

This is further buoyed by Carney apparently having amassed a not-insignificant base of support within the Liberal caucus.

But, you ask, what about Chrystia Freeland! Isn’t she, as I wrote last week, supposed to be the heir to Trudeau?

You see, Freeland’s abrupt resignation in December and swipe at Trudeau in her resignation letter has left a sour taste in the mouths of many senior Liberals.

Her close involvement with Justin Trudeau since the very beginning of his leadership also means that she carries the baggage of every damaging and politically toxic decision he has made.

Mark Carney, on the other hand, has never been in Cabinet or even the House of Commons (he would hate to have to sit as a backbencher with those plebians, after all). This means it is much easier for him to distance himself from the current administration, although his short-lived role as Trudeau’s economic advisor complicates this strategy.

Although recent news still has Freeland “poised” to enter the race, I wouldn’t be surprised if she declines to run within the next several days. We shall see.

Chandra Arya: The comic relief

At the outset, I thought this leadership race would be a boring contest between a long lineup of beige Liberal cabinet ministers.

However, one candidate appears (somewhat by accident) to be bucking that initial prediction of mine.

Chandra Arya has been a backbench MP from the Ottawa-area riding of Nepean since 2015, and has languished in near-total obscurity until now.

He doesn’t speak French, and barely speaks English (despite his House of Commons profile claiming that he speaks both).

To date, his most significant moment in the public eye has been him opposing the creating of a foreign influence registry.

He has also called for Hindus to reclaim the term Swastika.

His platform chastises the government he has been apart of for the past nine years for creating terrible economic conditions, yet he has voted against all the no-confidence motions that came before the House of Commons in the fall session.

And as a Liberal, he opposes DEI, supports abolishing the monarchy, and wants Canada to recognize a Palestinian state.

From the picture I have painted thus far, it is painfully evident that Chandra Arya is both a vehicle for sectarian diaspora politics and a man with bizarre political instincts.

I absolutely love him.

I’ll be voting for him on March 9th2. Unfortunately, my dog who died ten years ago won’t be able to. Au revoir!

One of the most famous thought experiments ever devised, Schrödinger’s cat, envisioned a cat stuck in a box with a vial of poison. The vial of poison is connected to a radioactive particle and will be smashed if the particle decays. After a while, the radioactive particle will be suspended in a superposition where it is simultaneously both decayed and non-decayed. As the state of this particle controls whether the cat is dead or alive, the cat is also in a superposition between life and death.

But how, you may ask, does this hypothetical situation from quantum mechanics have to do with the main focus of this substack - politics? The answer is that, as of the moment I write this, the chance of an early federal election in Canada is currently suspended in a superposition similar to the one Schrödinger’s finds itself in. Let me explain.

How we got here

In March of 2022, just six months after the last Canadian election, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh announced that he was entering his party into a supply-and-confidence agreement with the Liberal government. This pact, intended to last until 2025, locked the NDP into voting with the Liberals on anything deemed to be a confidence vote. In exchange, the Liberals would agree to table legislation addressing core NDP policy priorities, namely Dentalcare and Pharmacare. The result was a de-facto Liberal majority government pursuing an agenda far to the left of most governments throughout Canadian history, and even to the left of the Trudeau government’s agenda during its first few years in office.

Despite previous NDP promises of creating sweeping single-payer systems in regard to dental care and Pharmacare, the actual legislation tabled by the Liberal government on both of these fronts was highly targeted in nature. Government-administered dental care will only be offered to lower income brackets and Pharmacare only covers certain medications. Despite this, the NDP continued its dogmatic support for the Liberal government, which included shielding the government from accountability regarding the myriad of scandals the Liberals have found themselves in over the last few years. Because of the watered-down nature of the benefits the NDP received from the agreement, many (including myself) surmised that the only purpose of the supply-and-confidence agreement was to secure Jagmeet Singh a pension. Singh entered the House of Commons in a February 2019 by-election and needs to remain there for a minimum of six years for a pension to be guaranteed to him. With his chances of being re-elected in his riding looking rather precarious, it seemed safe to assume that he was reluctant to face voters and risk losing his seat before the six-year pension threshold. However, the NDP’s abandonment of the agreement forced us to re-evaluate that premise…at least temporarily.

Why we won’t have an early election

On June 3, the Pharmacare bill that had been one of the core pillars of the supply-and-confidence agreement passed through third reading stage in the House of Commons and was sent to the Senate. The NDP had gotten everything it wanted out of its pact with the Liberals and just three weeks remained in the parliamentary session before the summer recess. Over the following summer, the agreement held, although there was nothing that would officially test it. The NDP only officially tore up the agreement less than two weeks before parliament’s return in the fall.

With the agreement gone, Pierre Poilievre sought to capitalize on the return of a true minority government and tabled a bare-bones no-confidence motion that was detached from anything that could be deemed to be ideological. And yet………the NDP still voted against the motion! This result cast a light on the naked self-interest that had often propelled the NDP when it has voted with the Liberals, and cast doubt on the notion that the NDP’s support for the government hinged on specific policy outcomes. Below I will list out the possible motivations the NDP has in propping up the government now that the supply-and-confidence agreement is gone:

1. I have already mentioned Jagmeet Singh’s pension as a reason for the NDP’s continued support for the Liberals, and I think the reasoning behind believing it to be a motivator is quite strong. Even with the supply-and-confidence agreement gone, Singh could theoretically vote with the government until February to ensure that he gets his pension. And despite his socialist pretensions, Singh has shown himself to have a strong materialist bent, and him voting in a certain way to secure material wealth doesn’t strike me as implausible.

2. There is also the matter of pensions for the other members of his caucus, which has sometimes been raised in the same breath as Singh’s pension. However, I think we can firmly separate the two factors, and the case for other MPs delaying an election to get their pension seems less plausible. This is because of the six NDP MPs first elected in 2019, only one of them stands a realistic chance of losing their seat if an election were held today. Additionally, the NDP pushed back against a Liberal proposal that would have pushed the fixed election date for October 2025 back by a week, which would have secured pensions for those “Class of 2019” MPs.

3. The NDP lacks the funds that would be necessary to properly contest a federal election. This could potentially be a secondary motivating factor, but I doubt it is the primary reason they continue to support the Liberals considering their long-running financial troubles.

4. If an election were held today, the NDP would win just 18 seats in a newly expanded 343-seat House of Commons. This would place them in a distant fourth place, and give them little influence in a Poilievre supermajority government. Although the NDP’s current count of 25 seats isn’t much better from a raw numbers perspective, the present minority government situation allows the NDP to hold the balance of power. The NDP caucus must, in theory, enjoy the feeling of importance that this situation gives them, even if the only thing they do in this position is prostrate themselves before the government and act as Liberal backbenchers.

5. A vast ideological gulf exists between the NDP and the Conservatives, and the NDP might genuinely fear the potential actions of a Conservative government. Thus, the NDP seeks to prop up the much more ideologically aligned Liberal government for as long as possible. This is the only one of these factors that involves actual principles as opposed to money or power.

Out of these five factors, only one (Singh’s pension) definitively points towards an election occurring any earlier than October 2025. On the other hand, just a single factor (pensions of other MPs) definitively points towards the fixed election date. The other three are more ambiguous in terms of the timing of an election, yet they would probably motivate the NDP to schedule an election later rather than sooner. Based on these factors, an early election looks plausible but not likely. If the chances of an early election were Schrödinger’s cat, that cat would appear to be more dead than alive. But there are other factors, which return the cat - and the chances of an early election - to the state of a superposition.

Why we will have an early election

The countervailing case, that an election will soon be upon us, starts with a man named Gerald Butts, who was Justin Trudeau’s Principal Secretary from 2015 to 2019. More specifically, it starts with comments Butts made on The Bridge podcast (hosted by former CBC journalist Peter Mansbridge):

The truth is [minority Parliaments] start like a tight molecule and then they decay depending on the particular configuration of, to torture the metaphor, the atoms. In this case, the arrangement of the political parties. And in this case, you had a pretty obvious alignment between the two centre-left parties that was formalized in an arrangement. Now, I think that the New Democrats have decided that it is no longer in their interest to be part of that arrangement. Or they were bullied by the Conservatives, depending on your partisan perspective. It’s a matter of time before this Parliament dissolves. I think that the history of minority Parliaments in Canada is that they almost always end in a way that people wouldn’t have predicted at the beginning. There’s some piece of legislation, there’s some conflict, there’s some change in the polling, there’s some change in the self-interest of the parties involved, and all of a sudden you’re in an election. It seems to hit people by surprise. My own view is that the NDP pulling out of this supply and confidence [agreement] means that we are going to have an election sooner than we would have otherwise. That just stands to reason. The base rate probability of an election goes up. If I were a betting man, which I am not, I would say I would circle maybe the last ten days on the calendar in October for the [House of Commons] to fall for a December election.

Butts is absolutely right here. Minority governments are unpredictable, and it’s worth taking a look at the courses of recent minority governments to demonstrate this point:

• During the 43rd Parliament, the Conservatives tried unsuccessfully to bring down the government in October 2020 for its handling of the WE Charity scandal. Less than a year later, Justin Trudeau called a snap election to try to capitalize on his promising poll numbers and win a majority government.

• The 38th Parliament almost ended in May 2005 when then-speaker Peter Milliken broke a tied confidence vote in favour of Paul Martin’s Liberal government. The House of Commons, however, ended up voting no-confidence in the government six months later.

• The 40th Parliament started with the attempted formation of an NDP-Liberal-Bloc coalition. This led to Stephen Harper proroguing Parliament for almost two months. Over two years later, this minority Conservative government was found to be in contempt of Parliament and was defeated by all the opposition parties in a confidence vote. However, two of those opposition parties, the Bloc Quebecois and the Liberals, were decimated in the following election, which saw Stephen Harper obtain a coveted majority government.

As you can see, there are always unforeseen factors that lead to the downfall of minority governments. This makes the business of guessing what those factors are rather fraught and unpredictable. However, I still think it is worth attempting to suss out what might possibly trigger a successful vote of no-confidence.

The OAS vote

On October 2, the House of Commons passed a Bloc Quebecois motion that requested a Royal Recommendation for Bill C-319, a Bloc Quebecois private members’ bill that seeks to raise the amount of pension (also known as OAS) those over the age of 65 are entitled to by 10%1.

This passage of the motion came despite 93% of Liberal MPs voting against it (5 Liberal MPs broke ranks and voted in favour, while 6 didn’t vote). What was more interesting, however, was that the entire Conservative caucus voted in favour. On the face of it, this seems odd. The pension increases proposed in Bill C-319 will cost $16 billion over the next five years, which seemingly contradicts Conservative support for reduced government spending and balanced budgets. Additionally, spending $16 billion more on pensions would likely require raising taxes on workers and young people, both groups that Pierre Poilievre has claimed to champion. But what makes this vote significant is that all opposition parties voted against the government on a matter related to public spending. As votes related to money are usually assumed to be tests of confidence in the government, the Conservatives might have been laying the groundwork for a future vote of non-confidence, even if this specific Bloc motion was non-binding.

What also makes this issue of pension increases noteworthy is that the NDP has previously championed proposals to increase OAS, meaning they deem this matter to be of at least some importance. If both the NDP and the Bloc deem this issue to be significant enough to impact their support for the government, we could be in the midst of a federal election very soon. While I doubt the likelihood of this happening, I nevertheless see it as the most likely way the government could fall in a no-confidence vote before October 2025.

Final Thoughts

The Schrödinger’s cat experiment is often understood only in terms of the superposition the cat exists in. However, a key element is often left out. This is that after the box in which the cat is located is opened, the cat is either dead or alive and all the ambiguity created by the superposition is erased. Similarly, once the 44th Canadian Parliament is dissolved, all speculation regarding early elections will be erased and Canada will be plunged into a federal election - either in a year from now or sooner. Once this happens, the events that led to the election will look obvious in hindsight. Yet until that day arrives, Parliament - much like Schrödinger’s cat - will exist in a truly ambiguous superposition.