A few days ago, I published a column in The Provincial Times pushing back on Conservative MP Jamil Jivani’s latest broadside against what he calls “Liberal degeneracy.” The piece came from a place of genuine frustration; here was a guy who’s always been cordial in person, suddenly painting huge chunks of the electorate with the same ugly brush.

Jamil’s comments were sparked by Prime Minister Mark Carney’s glad-handing at Pride, including some participants in revealing kink gear. Fair enough to criticize the optics. Public events meant for families shouldn’t double as adult playgrounds, and plenty of people across the spectrum, including within the LGBTQ community, quietly agree.

But the leap from “this specific display is inappropriate” to labeling it Liberal degeneracy—implying a moral rot infecting anyone who votes Liberal, supports certain policies, or simply isn’t Conservative—is classic rhetorical overreach. In a country where Liberals and their allies took the majority of the vote, that’s a lot of your own constituents you’re writing off as societal cancer.

Since the column dropped, the bad-faith replies have poured in. “He only meant the naked people at Pride!” Sure. Except Jamil’s track record on LGBTQ issues, and the way the phrase landed, made it read like a bigger cultural indictment.

Defending it by narrowing it retroactively feels like special pleading—especially from folks who’ve long had beef with LGBTQ visibility in general, but Jamil’s handling of this situation reminded me of a situation I was in and how I handled it by refusing to let one person define millions of people.

Back in January, I was at a Nate Erskine–Smith event when Edward Nixon, then president of the Scarborough Southwest Federal Liberal Association, got sloppy drunk and crossed every line. Unwanted touching, crude sexual remarks, physically shoving me aside—it was textbook misconduct. I wrote about it, reported it to the party, and watched much of the response evaporate into silence or defensiveness. Subscribers bailed. “Shut up so Poilievre doesn’t win,” some Liberals lectured.

But the very first person who asked if I was okay afterward was Bridget Girard, a Liberal candidate. The folks who stood up for me against shielding Nixon? Team Nate—Liberals. Decent people doing the right thing inside their own camp.

Would it have been acceptable for me to scream “Liberal degeneracy” over Nixon’s behaviour and the party establishment’s sluggish response? Of course not. It would’ve been lazy, unfair, and dehumanizing. One official’s sleazy conduct, even if enabled by others, doesn’t indict every teacher, nurse, or small-business owner who voted Liberal because they liked the platform on health care or immigration or whatever. Blaming millions for the worst actors in their coalition is the kind of cheap shot that makes politics feel pointless.

That’s why Jamil’s framing bothers me. It’s the mirror image. We can debate Pride boundaries and. cultural guardrails without turning neighbours into degenerates. I If we want better, elected officials need to call out real problems without excommunicating half the electorate. The alternative is endless retaliation and declining trust. Neither side has a monopoly on virtue, or vice. Time to raise the standard.

To whom it may concern,

I am requesting the immediate cancellation of my Ontario Liberal Party membership and wish to be removed from all party mailing lists, and fundraising databases. It is a step I take with the clarity that comes when an organization you once trusted reveals that its principles are, in practice, optional.

My decision flows directly from the party’s conduct—and its studied silence—surrounding the Scarborough Southwest nomination, the subsequent appeal, and the culture those events have laid bare.

I was present at a political event where the president of the local federal Liberal riding association, who maintains deep and well-known ties to the Scarborough Southwest Ontario Liberal EDA, was intoxicated and, for more than fifteen minutes, physically pushed me from my chair and touched both a female friend and myself inappropriately. That incident was reported, and the response from the party—whose provincial and federal cousins routinely shield one another—was not a review, not a statement, not even the courtesy of a follow-up question. It was silence. Total institutional silence.

I have since been told, by people who privately came forward with similar experiences, that the cultures of the federal and provincial Liberal organizations in this province are effectively interchangeable—that one hand washes the other, and that grievances are passed between them like a hot stone until they cool and disappear. The candidate the Ontario Liberal Party has now installed in Scarborough Southwest is himself a former senior figure in the federal Liberal apparatus. He moves in the same circles and is protected by the same reflexes.

The SSW nomination meeting—a race decided by nineteen votes, with thirty-four more ballots cast than voters signed in. The arbitration panel, chaired by a pre-selected establishment figure, dismissed this gap as a record-keeping error.

It retroactively accounted for some votes after the fact, declared the remainder harmless, and effectively ruled that in a nineteen-vote election, fourteen unexplained ballots are an acceptable margin of error.

The voter ID rules that campaigns had been told to prepare for were rewritten in real time by a returning officer whose neutrality was an open question. None of this, the panel assured us, compromised the integrity of the process.

Interim Leader John Fraser, whom I have long regarded as a sensible man, appended his name to a statement that said nothing about any of this. He called for unity and spoke of earning trust. But trust is not earned by telling people who witnessed serious irregularities that their concerns have been adjudicated and can now be set aside, or a leader who remains resolutely silent on the behaviour of party officials, on the public record of a nominated candidate, or on a code of conduct that now reads as a work of fiction.

Mr. Fraser has chosen the OLP establishment over the province, the establishment over the grassroots, and a culture of protection over the basic standards Ontarians have every right to expect from those who seek to govern them.

Whether it be the federal or provincial, the Liberal Party’s code of conduct exists on paper and nowhere else. It was not enforced when a federal Liberal president, intimately connected to a provincial riding association, sexually assaulted me at a public event. It was not enforced when a nomination candidate’s decade-old social media posts—linking to videos described as depicting incestuous sexual assault—surfaced hours before the vote, and the party simply proceeded as though nothing had happened.

This party’s overriding message is that certain people are beyond accountability and that the rules are for everyone else.

I can no longer associate myself with an organization that has made itself morally illegible in this way. To remain a member would be to offer a silent endorsement I am not prepared to give. I cannot lend my name or my credibility to a party that has decided, repeatedly, that winning a seat is more important than keeping its word.

Please confirm in writing that my membership has been cancelled and that my information has been removed from all party records. I do not wish to receive any further communications, save for that confirmation.

My very best,
— Will Adams
Editor, The Provincial Times

I saw a Facebook comment this week that made me want to flip the table over, but since we’re adults and we’re here to write, I’ll settle for explaining the arithmetic and the architecture of this particular grift.

The comment was a response to a repost I made about Russia’s ongoing cultural genocide in Ukraine—specifically the kidnapping of children and their forced adoption into Russian families. The commenter, a former friend with a terminal case of online brain rot, said the usual thing: “We shouldn’t spend a dime on foreign aid while Canadians are homeless/unemployed/starving.”

On paper, this sounds like fiscal prudence. It’s the political equivalent of saying you’re going to pay off your credit card by canceling your Spotify subscription. It makes you feel like you’re making a hard choice when, in reality, you’re just ignoring the mortgage payment on the second house you don’t think you should be paying for.

The linguistic trick here is to make you think Canada’s international assistance is a bottomless slush fund, when that couldn’t be further from the truth. In 2024, total federal expenses were $534.5 billion. Canada’s entire envelope for international assistance—every grant, every humanitarian dollar, every cent spent on attempting to stabilize regions so they don’t devolve into the kind of chaos that creates more refugees at our border—was $11.1 billion.

That is only 2.1% of total spending.

You know what’s even more frivolous than 2% of the federal budget? The taxpayer-funded 9,500-square-foot mansion in Rockcliffe Park known as Stornoway.

We are told to get outraged about foreign aid—which, by the way, is a post-WWII insurance policy against Fascism 2.0—but we are supposed to remain silent about the fact that the Leader of the Opposition (the losing party) lives in a gated estate that costs the public a minimum of $170,000 a year just to maintain. Not to live in. To maintain. The heating bill for the garage alone is probably more than some families’ annual grocery spend.

You cannot, with a straight face, tell me that the $28.92 per Canadian we spend to ensure Ukraine doesn’t fall to a revanchist empire is the reason you can’t afford gas, while simultaneously sleeping soundly knowing the guy who wants to be Prime Minister is getting his floors waxed on your dime.

This is what I like to call the “MANSIONGATE Fallacy.” It’s the selective amnesia that grips the political right whenever a Conservative leader is involved. They’ll screenshot Jagmeet Singh’s pension accrual (which is, to be fair, a legitimate conversation about MP benefits), but they will never, ever demand that Pierre Poilievre give up Stornoway and rent a two-bedroom condo near Panchvati Supermarket like a normal MP.

The commenter in question had a meltdown on my page previously when I posted about enforcing the Canada Health Act. His response was, verbatim, “nobody cares about that,” followed by a rant about the price of gas.

This is the modern political right in a nutshell: I don’t care about the structural integrity of the system unless the price at the pump changes by a nickel. He’s worried about $1.60 a litre while turning a blind eye to a residence that costs more to operate annually than the median Canadian household earns in two years.

Here’s the truth Pension Poilievre doesn’t want you to hear: You can help Ukrainians defend their sovereignty and build houses for homeless Canadians. The government is not a household with a fixed cookie jar. It’s a sovereign entity with the capacity to do both if the political will exists. But the political will doesn’t exist because it’s easier to scream about “foreigners” than it is to tax the massive, record-shattering profits of the oil and gas sector that are actually causing the high price of gas my former friend is so worried about.

And since we’re doing either/or fallacies, let me play the game: I would rather have $20 per-person on foreign aid yearly than strap on a suit of body armour and go to war. See? It’s easy. It’s also stupid.

If we are serious about cutting “frivolous spending,” the first sacrifice must come from the political class. Sell Stornoway. Cap MP pensions before they hit six figures. Cut the travel budgets for the people who fly business class to tell us we can’t afford to buy groceries.

You don’t get to play the fiscal hawk while living in a gilded nest. And you don’t get to lecture me about the cost of helping a child escape a war zone while you’re sitting in a taxpayer-funded living room the size of a basketball court.

Start with the mansion. Then we can talk about the pocket change.

There’s a photograph I keep coming back to. It’s a dreary, rain-slicked shot of the old Oshawa House. The signage is still up, but the lights are out. And there, taped to the glass with the kind of hopeless optimism only a commercial realtor can muster, is a For Lease sign. I took it the week after the doors were locked for good.

I’d poured a lot of coffee in that building. From the fall of 2023 until summer 2024, I was one of the baristas listening to Oshawa’s daily symphony: the clatter of laptops, the gripes about the 401, and the quiet, sacred gossip that animates a downtown counter. When it closed, I felt that particular ache familiar to anyone who’s ever had a local haunt turn into a ghost.

It’s a sentimental loyalty that fuels a hundred Facebook comment sections, but mostly, it’s a sadness for the silence. But I’ve learned something about that building. It doesn’t care about my nostalgia, and frankly, it’s earned the right not to.

Because the funny thing is, the café is the least interesting chapter in the biography of that address. The real Oshawa House was built sometime around 1838, a handsome Italianate stack of bricks that was, for a time, the undisputed best tavern between Toronto and Kingston. In the 1840s, that was a marker of civilization.

Before politicians had council chambers to argue in, they had the meeting hall upstairs off Centre Street. Before Canada had a formal identity, we had a dollar-a-night room and a corner entrance (now filled in, a scar of changing traffic patterns) where stagecoach drivers and merchants walked off the mud of King Street.

This place was Canada before Canada finished becoming itself. It was part inn, part public square, part electrical marvel—fully lit while most of the province was still squinting by candlelight. The names on the deed changed like the seasons: Woon, McElroy, Lockhart, Hobbs.

The only constant was the building’s stubborn refusal to fall. It survived the shift from horse to horsepower. It survived the post-war decline when the hotel rooms became walk-up apartments. And it survived the 21st-century pivot to oat milk and WiFi. For a brief, beautiful moment, it was my place of work. Then it wasn’t.

When I walked past with my camera that afternoon, the For Lease sign felt like a period at the end of a long sentence. But here’s the thing about this country of ours: we don’t end with periods. We just start new paragraphs.

That photograph is already out of date.

I’m happy to report that the lights are back on. The space is now home to Fusion Kitchen. And full disclosure: Chef Jaylen is a good friend. He’s the kind of guy who puts his head down and works, the kind of guy who deals with the bureaucratic headaches and infrastructure limbo that would make a lesser entrepreneur throw his tongs in the air and walk away. The food? It’s delicious—the kind of bold, no-nonsense cooking that a building erected during the beginning of confederation deserves. It’s the next act.

And that’s the hopeful, stubborn truth of the Oshawa House: it’s the story of this entire nation, compressed into one corner lot.

We are not static monuments. We mutate. We host phases. Everyone who walks through that door imagines their chapter is the definitive one. The tavern keeper thought it was his. I thought it was mine. Chef Jaylen might think it’s his. We’re all wrong.

The building communicates something deeper than any of our business plans. It says: I’ve heard your complaints about downtown, about the economy, about the kids these days. I was here before the complaints started, and I’ll be standing long after they’ve faded into the hum of the 401.

It matters that Fusion Kitchen succeeds. Not just for Jaylen’s sake, but for the sake of the bricks themselves. We can’t just celebrate historical façades while making it impossible for living people to build a life inside them.

So yes, I’ll pour one out for the old café. But I’ll raise a glass to what’s cooking now. The Oshawa House is still doing what it has always done: giving the town a place to gather and figure out what it wants to be when it grows up. It’s the story of Canada. And the story isn’t over. It’s just getting good again.

I didn’t cry all that much when my first romantic relationship ended. I cried for maybe 15 minutes, but mostly spent the next several months sulking before moving on. But four years after my cat Boomer disappeared, I saw a tortoiseshell cat on Instagram and completely lost it. I’m not exaggerating when I say I’d give anything—anything—to hear her distinct, annoying, middle-of-the-night meow one last time.

We got Boomer when I was two years old. I named her after a dog toy. I was a dumb kid. For most of my childhood, she was just there—a furry roommate who occasionally broke my electronics (RIP, my original DSi) and knocked over glasses.

I liked cats, but Boomer wasn’t the centre of my world. That changed in 2020.

Like many people during the pandemic, I had a day where I just broke down. Everything felt impossible. Boomer, who had never been particularly sentimental, sensed something was wrong. She sat next to me, did that little sniffing thing cats do when they want your attention, and looked at me with what I can only describe as concern. From that day on, I became attached to her in a way I hadn’t been before.

Boomer was always a funny little asshole. She’d tear open window screens, meow all night long, and escape into our backyard at every opportunity. And when my insomnia acted up, her nocturnal yowling—which should have driven me crazy—somehow helped me fall back asleep.

In August 2022, I left the bathroom window open one late summer afternoon. It was hot. I needed cool air while I shat. My parents had warned me a hundred times: “Don’t leave it open or Boomer will escape.” She’d gotten out before. She always came back. Once, she even made it to a neighbour’s house and came home pregnant.

This time, she didn’t come back.

I hadn’t meant to leave the window open. I wasn’t being malicious. I was just a person who made a mistake in a hot bathroom. Four years later, I still don’t know what happened to her. A car. A coyote. An alien. Something else. I only know she’s gone, and I’ll never see her again.

For a long time, it didn’t hurt this much. Grief is strange that way. Sometimes your mind protects you, numbs you, lets you function. Then, years later, a trigger arrives—a cat that looks like her, a quiet moment alone, a trip away from home—and the feeling you’d been holding back comes rushing in like a flood.

I’ve learned something painful but important: we often don’t realize how much a pet means to us until they’re gone. Not because we didn’t love them, but because their presence is so constant, so woven into the fabric of daily life, that we forget to notice it.

Boomer was there for 14 years. She was there when I was a toddler, a teenager, a young adult navigating a pandemic. She was there for the mundane mornings and the sleepless nights. And I didn’t fully appreciate her until she sat next to me in 2020 and showed me that a cat can care.

If you have a pet that you take for granted today—one that knocks things over, meows at 3 a.m., or tests your patience in a hundred small ways—don’t wait. Go find them. Sit with them. Let them be annoying. Because one day, you might leave a window open by accident. And you might never forgive yourself.

I loved Boomer. I also made a mistake. Those two things are both true. And if she were here, I think she’d knock a glass off the table and meow at me until I understood.

Six months ago, Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while speaking at a student event in Utah.

And the internet turned him into Shaquille O’Neal.

That’s the legacy he left behind. Not a martyr. Not a movement. Not a single thing that’ll make it into a history book beyond a footnote about how weird AI image generators got in the mid-2020s. No, six months later, the most enduring image of Kirk is his face awkwardly stapled onto Shaq’s body, doing the timeout gesture, because some guy in his basement thought it’d be funny.

Let me be clear about something upfront, because these things require the usual disclaimers: shootings are awful. They leave families shattered and rooms haunted. No one should die that way, and no one should celebrate it. I didn’t celebrate it then, and I’m not celebrating it now. But I’m also not going to pretend Charlie Kirk was some great loss to political discourse. Because he wasn’t. He was a poison pill the radical right swallowed willingly, and his death didn’t stop the damage; it just metastasized it.

I’m not American. I’m writing from Canada, where we have our own problems, our own bad faith actors, our own people who learned the Kirk playbook by heart. And I saw the clips where he’d smirk at a college kid, cut them off mid-sentence, sneer at the audience, and declare victory without ever engaging in an actual argument. For Kirk, debate was a contact sport. Humiliation was the point.

He spent years downplaying school shootings. Not explicitly, not always, but through the math of implication: distracting, deflecting, blaming everything from parents to so-called “gender ideology” while the bodies of children piled up. And then he died in a shooting that looked an awful lot like the ones he dismissed. That’s not justice. Violence is never justice. But it is, in the bleakest sense, poetic.

His views on women? We all remember. If your daughter is raped, she should be forced to carry her rapist’s child. And Kirk didn’t just hold that position quietly; he reveled in it. He was smug about it. Proud. That’s the kind of man we’re talking about.

But here’s what gets me, six months out. He built nothing that lasted. His followers didn’t rally around his memory; they splintered into a thousand little fragments, each one more unhinged than the last. We went from one Charlie Kirk to twenty Charlie Kirks, and the new ones are worse. More bigoted. More openly cruel. They learned the style without the (minimal) restraint.

But the original? The internet has turned him into a complete joke. AI-generated memes of him doing things he never did. George Floyd comparisons that make zero sense but exist anyway because the internet is a chaos dimension, and Kirk is just another data point. Shaq's face, Kirk's face, doesn't matter; hit generate, see what happens!

And honestly? That makes sense, too.

If you don’t want people to mock you in death, be a good person in life. It’s not complicated. Kirk chose cruelty as a brand. He chose sneering over sincerity, performance over persuasion. He turned political discourse into a mud fight and then acted surprised when people treated him like mud.

There’s a lesson to be learned from Charlie Kirk. Some people earn grief, others earn a photoshopped picture of Shaq with their face on it, shared 50,000 times, captioned with something dumb, living forever as a meme instead of a memory.

In December 2025, Europe once again witnessed a spectacle that would be unthinkable if carried out by almost any other group in society: tractors charging police lines, manure dumped in public spaces, city centres effectively held hostage—all in service of one demand. Not higher wages. Not safer working conditions. But higher food prices, enforced by political pressure.

And Europeans are supposed to pretend this is normal?

If there is one class in modern Europe that genuinely believes it sits above the law and above the public interest, it is the politically protected farming lobby. No other industry gets away with this behaviour. No other sector could ram a six-figure vehicle into a police cordon and be treated as a folk hero rather than a criminal.

If a trucker, dockworker, or retail worker tried this, the response would be swift and brutal. But a farmer? That’s “democracy in action,” apparently.

Let’s start with the part that rarely gets said plainly: European agriculture is not a free market. It hasn’t been for decades.

Roughly one-third of the EU budget is consumed by the Common Agricultural Policy. Tens of billions of euros are funnelled into subsidies, price supports, and market protections for farmers yearly. This is not a struggling, neglected sector. It is one of the most heavily subsidized industries on the planet.

And yet, every time trade liberalization is proposed—every time cheaper beef, coffee, chocolate, or tropical produce might reach European consumers—the tractors come out.

What is being defended here is not “food security.” It is entitlement.

The irony is almost too rich. Farmers who claim to be victims of globalization are often the same ones whose overproduction—enabled by subsidies—has devastated small farmers in the Global South. European surplus crops are dumped abroad at artificially low prices, undercutting local agriculture in developing countries.

At home, those same farmers demand protection from competition and guaranteed prices, even as fertilizer runoff poisons waterways and industrial-scale farming degrades soil and ecosystems.

This is state-backed cartel behaviour.

The Brussels protests are about refusing to compete. About blocking trade deals because cheaper imports might force efficiency, innovation, or—god forbid—lower margins. The message to European consumers could not be clearer: you will pay more, or we will shut your city down.

And it exposes a deeper rot in European politics: the myth that some interest groups are inherently virtuous, no matter what they do. Farmers are wrapped in a sentimental narrative of tradition and national identity, which grants them moral immunity. When they riot, it’s framed as passion. When others do it, it’s framed as disorder.

We’re also told—often by the same people—that Europe lacks free speech. That it is a bureaucratic dystopia where dissent is crushed. Really? Then explain why a man in a tractor can charge a police line in the heart of Brussels without being neutralized on sight. If that’s not freedom of expression in practice, it’s hard to imagine what is.

What these protests actually reveal is selective tolerance. Speech is free if you belong to the right class, wield the right symbolism, and threaten the right people.

The defenders of these riots want you to believe this is about protecting “local food.” But if that were true, they would welcome competition that rewards quality and sustainability rather than volume. They would accept reforms that shift subsidies toward small, environmentally responsible producers. Instead, they fight tooth and nail to preserve a system that favours large landholders, capital-intensive operations, and political leverage.

European farmers are not friends of competition. They have had too much government support for too long, and now they’re afraid of a world where that support is questioned. And here’s the uncomfortable truth: if the only way your business survives is by threatening public order and demanding permanent protection from competition, then your business model is broken and deserves to fail.

Trade deals that lower food prices are not an attack on ordinary people. They are a lifeline for consumers already crushed by inflation. Every blocked agreement keeps groceries artificially expensive, disproportionately hurting working families while shielding a privileged sector from market reality.

So let’s stop pretending this is noble.

If you like affordable beef, coffee, chocolate, and fruit, these protests are aimed directly at you. The tractors are not blocking Brussels for justice; they’re blocking it to keep prices high.

At some point, governments need the courage to say no.

No more blank-cheque subsidies. No more romantic exemptions from the rule of law. No more treating one industry as untouchable while everyone else is told to “adapt.”

If farmers want to be respected as businesses, they should be prepared to act like them. And if they want to riot like petulant children, perhaps it’s time to see how long they last without the taxpayer propping them up.

The sacred cow of European politics needs to be slaughtered—not by force, but by reality.

Look, I’ve read some stupid takes in my time. I’ve seen people argue that water isn’t wet, that the sun rises in the west, and that pineapple belongs on pizza. But Yves Engler’s recent hit piece on Jack Layton? That’s a special kind of stupid, the kind that makes you want to tear your hair out, set it on fire, and then blame the nearest passing stranger for the arson.

According to Engler, the late NDP leader was apparently a “warmonger” whose veneration “highlights the party’s militarist ethos.” Jack Layton, the guy who inspired a generation of young people to give a damn about politics, that guy was a militarist? Sure, and I’m the Queen of England. Thomas Mulcair’s probably spinning in his grave, and he’s not even dead.

Let’s break down this garbage, shall we?

Engler Drags Out The Tired Old Libya Critique

Layton supported the 2011 NATO bombing campaign, you see. And now, with the benefit of fifteen years of hindsight, we know it didn’t turn out great. No kidding, Yves. That’s what hindsight is. It’s the world’s most perfect vision, unclouded by the fog of the moment.

Back in 2011, there was a guy named Muammar Gaddafi, who was threatening to massacre his own citizens in Benghazi. He said he would show “no mercy.” The international community, including human rights organizations, was screaming for someone to do something. Layton, like the overwhelming majority of people, thought stopping a potential massacre was appropriate.

Wow, what a monster, right? How dare he respond to a rapidly unfolding humanitarian crisis instead of consulting a crystal ball and Yves’s 2026 editorial calendar. What a bloodthirsty ghoul he was!

This is the intellectual equivalent of criticizing someone in 1940 for supporting the war against Nazi Germany because, decades later, we’d learn about some unpleasantness with post-war reconstruction. It’s lazy, it’s dishonest, and it’s the kind of argument someone makes when they’ve already decided on the conclusion and are just shopping for evidence.

Then We Get To Haiti

Engler actually has the nerve to say Layton “wasted an opportunity” because he didn’t dominate an election debate question about Canada’s role there.

Let me tell you something about politics, which Yves seems to know about the way a fish knows about bicycle maintenance; Jack Layton raised the issue. His foreign affairs critic demanded an investigation right in the House of Commons. They pushed. But in a federal election debate, when you’re trying to actually win votes and, you know, form a government that can do something about Haiti, you sometimes have to pick your battles.

You can’t spend the entire ninety minutes screaming about every single injustice abroad while the other leaders talk about issues the majority of voters care about, like healthcare and the economy. But to Yves, this is a moral failure. The guy’s modus operandi is simple: find a moment, strip it of all context, ignore the constraints of reality, and then scream “HYPOCRITE!” at the top of his lungs. He even goes as far as to cite a National Post columnist to make his point about the NDP’s supposed militarism.

When you’re quoting the right-wing establishment media to prove a left-wing party is too hawkish, you’re either lost or you’re building a very weird coalition.

And What’s The Point Of All This?

This blog-post is why this pantomime villain was never a serious leadership candidate.

Yves never wanted to lead the NDP; he wanted to burn it down so he could dance in the ashes and declare himself the mayor of nothing. He struts around like he’s owed the party, like the NDP is just a fancy hat he gets to wear because his ideology is the “purest.” But look at his supporters; they’re not New Democrats. They’re radical leftist tourists with torches who view the party as a puppet that wouldn’t dare speak unless Yves pulled the strings.

He thinks he’s a gift to the movement, but he’s really just a guy holding a blueprint for a building he’s never had to lay a brick on. You want to know why he lost? Because real leadership isn’t standing on the sideline screaming “I told you so!” fifteen years after the fact.

This is the politics of the perpetual purist; the person who has never been in a position of responsibility, never had to choose between a bad option and a worse one, never had to respond to a crisis with incomplete information. From the cheap seats, it’s easy to boo. From the peanut gallery, every decision looks simple.

But Jack was trying to actually do something, to move the goddamn ball forward. Sometimes you fumble. Sometimes you make the wrong call. But you don’t get to sit in the stands sixteen years later with a stat sheet and yell about how you would have done it better.

Jack wasn’t a warmonger. He was a human being, a politician operating in a messy, complicated world. He made compromises. He made calls that, in hindsight, might look bad. That’s called being alive. That’s called being in the arena.

The spirit Jack Layton left behind—the one of hope, of building something better, of getting people to the table—that’s still worth something. And all the cherry-picked, context-free, hindsight-soaked hit pieces in the world from radical leftist morons aren’t going to change that.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need a drink. Reading that thing dehydrated me.

A recurring theme in our public discourse is the translation of complex legal text into simplistic, fear-based narratives. It is a politically profitable alchemy, turning the lead of nuanced statute into the gold of viral outrage. The latest example is the concerted effort to misrepresent Bill C-16, the legislation creating a criminal offence for coercive control in intimate relationships, as a state intrusion into the marital squabble.

In this Facebook post, we are presented with a chilling, if entirely fictional, parade of horribles: a husband charged for asking his wife’s whereabouts; a mother arrested for protesting a child’s junk food; a family destroyed over a disagreement on household finances.

The purveyor of this fiction, in this instance, is Dr. Leslyn Lewis.

The “Doctor” honorific confers authority, and maybe rightly so, in her field. But Dr. Lewis does not have a degree in statutory interpretation or domestic criminal law. And in this matter, precision is everything. Because the argument presented is not a matter of political disagreement on a shade of meaning, it is a fundamental misrepresentation of the law’s operative standard.

The offence, under the proposed Section 264.01 of the Criminal Code, does not criminalize “asking,” “disagreeing,” or “expressing concern.” It criminalizes a “pattern of coercive or controlling conduct.” The drafters did not choose these words carelessly. They are terms of art, with a growing body of legal understanding from jurisdictions like the United Kingdom that have already walked this path.

Let’s perform a thought experiment requested by the reader who requested my thoughts on the matter: Could the examples listed by Dr. Lewis form the basis of a charge? Only if we engage in a radical, dishonest rewrite of the law.

An “Information” laying a charge must allege the actus reus (the guilty act) and mens rea (the guilty mind). It would need to state, under oath, not that “John asked where Mary was,” but something approximating:

“That JOHN DOE, between the 1st day of January 2023 and the 1st day of June 2024, did repeatedly engage in a pattern of coercive and controlling conduct towards his intimate partner, MARY DOE, including but not limited to: the systematic monitoring of her movements and communications, coupled with threats and intimidation upon any deviation from demanded schedules; the intentional isolation from her family and friends by consistently demeaning them and controlling all means of transportation and independent finances; and the degradation of her personal autonomy and mental health through constant criticism, humiliation, and the imposition of unreasonable rules governing her appearance, diet, and associations, which conduct, in all the circumstances, could reasonably be expected to cause Mary Doe to fear for her safety or to have a significant impact on her mental health, contrary to Section 264.01 of the Criminal Code.”

Do you see the chasm between the political example and the legal reality?

The isolated act of “asking” is invisible here. What is visible is the pattern, the intent to dominate, and the objectively reasonable expectation of causing fear or significant psychological harm. This is the critical, omitted context. The “concern about finances” in a healthy relationship is a conversation. Within a pattern of coercive control, it is one thread in a web of domination, where all bank accounts are controlled, all receipts demanded, and any spending met with explosive anger and psychological punishment.

The objection that our laws already address “clear abuse and violence” misses the point entirely. Coercive control is clear abuse. It is the architecture of imprisonment without a physical cage. It is what happens before the escalation to physical violence, or in its absence. It is why a victim may appear “non-compliant” with a peace bond, because the abuser’s control is psychological, economic, and social, not reducible to a single threat on a single day.

To suggest this law targets loving, if occasionally quarrelsome, families is to profoundly insult both the intelligence of our judiciary and the lived experience of victims. It presupposes a justice system that would treat a marital debate over saving for a vacation as legally equivalent to a sustained campaign of isolation, surveillance, and psychological torment. Our courts are usually not so foolish.

The goal of Bill C-16 is to name and punish a specific, devastating form of psychological tyranny that has long festered in the shadows of the law, not to police disagreements. Detractors warn of a slippery slope. But there is a slope far more perilous: the one where we dismiss the terror of controlled lives as mere “family business,” and where we allow the comforting fiction of the overreaching state to blind us to the very real, and very present, reality of the predatory partner.

The law, in its precise and careful language, draws a bright line. The political rhetoric, in its deliberate vagueness, seeks to blur it beyond recognition. We must choose which we trust: the statute, or the scare quote.

To all my American followers and readers, I need you to be very aware of something, especially my fellow Zoomers.

You are coming of age in a world where, increasingly, everyone hates you.

That’s a brutal sentence for me to write, and a brutal reality for you to face, but it’s the truth. I’ve noticed a deep, structural, and moral contempt that is hardening into the new global consensus. You are quickly becoming public enemy number one to the international community, and you should find the velocity of this shift terrifying.

The evidence is in actions so stark they feel ripped from a darker century.

Your government now kidnaps citizens of other countries for tourism. Over 150 Canadians—my neighbours, people who popped over the border for a wedding, a concert, a weekend trip—have been snatched and stuck into what can only be described as immigration concentration camps, without due process. One Canadian is now dead. His crime? Being born in a country that your regime dislikes.

Your fascist president and his regime have ruined countless lives, from the deserts at the southern border to the streets of my own community, where your policies spill over. But Canada, polite and conflict-averse Canada, has finally taken notice. 2025 is over, and the anger here isn’t a performative “elbows-up” anymore; it’s a cold, simmering fury that is changing how an entire nation sees yours.

A few weeks ago, I saw an image on X that I cannot unsee. It was a shocking and grotesque photograph taken from the inside of the vehicle of a woman named Renee Good, who was shot in the face by an ICE agent.

This image is what I now think of when I think of America.

Not astronauts. Not apple pie. Not rock n’ roll or Hollywood. Not the lofty ideals on parchment that the world was taught to admire. I see this. I see the logical endpoint of a system that has decided human-beings are disposable, that allies are prey, and that might makes right.

The inside of the blood-soaked car of a mother and wife is your legacy in this moment. That is the brand you are burning into the global consciousness.

You need to get this through your skulls: you are a pariah.

And I know, I know, the gut-punch of that. Maybe you didn’t do anything wrong. Maybe you voted against this. Maybe you protest. I am not blaming you, personally. But your nation’s government, as a system, has earned this hatred. It has accrued this debt of rage. The blanket of its actions covers you, and the world is now judging you by it. This is the weight of citizenship in an empire in decay.

The clock is ticking. Our generation, the Zoomers, will eventually take the reins of power here in Canada, in Europe, and across the globe. Unlike the Boomers, who built a framework of alliances to uphold the status quo, we have no such sentimental loyalty to dead relationships. We are watching this. We aren’t forgetting this.

We will rebuild the relationship on our terms.

And those terms will be harsh. Many of my peers, even if I myself do not advocate for outright vengeance, will be driven by a profound desire for justice, for recompense, for ensuring this can never happen again. They will put you through economic, diplomatic, and cultural hell. The soft power you once bled dry will be gone. You will be isolated, sanctioned, and cut off in ways you can’t yet imagine.

This is not a threat from me. It is a forecast. It is the trajectory.

So my advice, as someone who still believes some of you can be something else: stand up while you still have a chance. The window for you to change this from within, to repudiate this grotesque legacy, to prove you are more than the monsters your government employs, is closing fast. The world’s patience is gone. Our memory is being formed right now, in these moments of cruelty.

What you do next defines what we will do later. Choose.

I’m writing this as a preface to an op-ed detailing my further thoughts on Mark Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Not because I’m suddenly starstruck by foreign policy speeches or suspended my criticisms of Carney’s government, and certainly not because I think one speech absolves anyone of scrutiny.

I’m writing because the Davos address is evidence of something, and pretending otherwise would require an impressive level of self-deception.

So let me pose a simple question to voters. Not a gotcha. Not an insult. An honest question:

Could you say, with a straight face, that you could have seen Pierre Poilievre or Jagmeet Singh delivering that speech, in that room, at that moment in history?

No. You can’t.

And anyone who says otherwise is either ignorant of context or lying to you.

Let’s dispense with distractions first.

Yes, Pierre Poilievre once said he would ban a hypothetical Canadian government from attending the World Economic Forum. That was nonsense then, and it’s nonsense now. Canada has participated in Davos for decades without incident. Even Maxime Bernier, hardly an internationalist caricature, attended without confederation collapsing.

Yes, Jagmeet Singh has a WEF profile page, as do countless politicians, activists, and labour leaders.

Let’s set all of that aside. None of it matters.

The question is not attendance.
The question is credibility.

Davos is not a campaign rally. It is not a partisan audience. It is not a room where slogans are rewarded. It is a room where people who control capital, trade flows, defence procurement, and state capacity assess whether you understand the world as it actually exists.

That is why the Carney speech mattered—because it demonstrated competence in context.

Carney did not pretend the post-WWII order was coming back. He did not perform nostalgia. He did not speak in absolutes or fantasies. He acknowledged rupture. He acknowledged power. He acknowledged limits.

That is what leadership sounds like when the audience cannot be bluffed.

Now ask yourself—honestly—what would have happened had Poilievre taken that stage.

He would not have gone to begin with, and that’s assuming he had even been elected, which itself requires a suspension of disbelief. But even if you indulge the hypothetical, it collapses immediately. The antagonistic, far-right populism that plays on social media does not translate into a room of sovereign nations, central banks, and security alliances.

In this scenario, “Prime Minister Poilievre” would be laughed off the stage within seconds.

And Singh? Singh would not have even been laughed at; he would have just been ignored. The WEF does not reward moral posturing detached from reality. It does not respect ambiguity disguised as legitimate policy.

Keep in mind, I did not vote for Carney because of foreign policy.

I voted for Carney because housing supply is a material crisis, and slogans do not pour concrete. On that end, Build Canada Homes is a good solution to this problem on paper. That was my priority, and I voted accordingly. Others had different ones. That does not make them stupid, immoral, or unserious. But I am not a fool.

Anyone who solely cared about an increasingly authoritarian Washington, about trade weaponization, about the collapse of multilateral guardrails—anyone who understood that foreign policy had become domestic policy by other means—voted for Carney on that file.

And many did so reluctantly.

Long-time Conservatives who could not stomach Pension Poilievre’s unseriousness and New Democrats who understood that hollow Jagmeet Singh’s protest politics do not function in a fractured world delivered Carney the popular vote in April 2025.

Does this mean you were wrong if you didn’t vote on that basis? No.

Does it mean you must now agree with everything Carney does? Absolutely not.

But it does mean this: no voter honestly believed Poilievre or Singh could do this specific job, in this moment, on this stage.

Entertaining that idea was never a serious analysis. And the Davos speech removed any remaining ambiguity. This is evidence that leadership is not interchangeable.

You don’t have to like Carney.

But if you’re honest—with yourself, if not with others—you already know the answer to my question.

And that is why this moment mattered.

Jagmeet Singh, emotional, stands at podium beside his wife, announcing resignation after losing Burnaby Central on election night. Image credit: The Canadian Press/CTV News

After the most disappointing electoral result in the NDP’s history and a devastating third-place finish in his own riding, it came as little surprise that Jagmeet Singh chose to step down as leader. Though the timing, coming immediately after the election, was abrupt, the decision itself felt inevitable. With Parliament having resumed before the summer recess, veteran MP Don Davies is serving as interim leader as the party prepares for a full leadership contest and the next chapter in its history.

Unfortunately for the Davies-led NDP, their appeal for official party status has been denied. After losing 18 of the 25 seats won in 2021—and falling five short of the 12-seat threshold—the government House Leader confirmed there will be no special treatment. That means no daily questions in question period, no guaranteed seats on committees, and no access to the financial resources granted to recognized parties. In the eyes of Parliament, the NDP is now just a collection of independents with matching logos.

Davies was crowned NDP leader on May 7th, kicking things off with a statement where he admitted—shockingly—a few things may not have gone perfectly. He promised to ‘course correct’ and win back Canadians’ trust, in his words:

“We need to take a hard look at how we got to where we are, and we need a clear view of where we’re going,” Davies said. "We need to reconnect with working people and show them that the NDP is their party, the one that fights and delivers for them.”

Before concluding his statement, Davies outlined key priorities that the NDP will focus on under his watch. These include the housing crisis, pushing to strengthen public healthcare, and fighting for better wages.

“The strength of the NDP has always come from our members, activists, labour and supporters. I look forward to working with our caucus, our party, progressive allies and everyone ready to build a stronger, better, fairer Canada for everyone.”

The NDP is trying to project hope—and I don’t doubt the sincerity behind it. But we have to be honest with ourselves: the party is in a tough place right now, and it has been for a long time. The question a lot of New Democrats are starting to ask—and one we need to answer—is this: where did things start to go wrong, what’s stalled the parties momentum, and what’s it going to take to truly rebuild?

The Post-Layton Crossroads

Jack Layton and Tom Mulcair warmly clasp hands at an NDP event, surrounded by smiling supporters and campaign signs. Image credit: The Canadian Press/CBC News

It’s no secret the NDP hasn’t been the same since Jack Layton passed. Under his leadership, the party surged from socialist protest vote to Official Opposition status during a Harper majority. That was a big deal. Layton had vision, compassion, and political instincts the party hasn’t really seen since. His death left a hole the party’s been trying to fill ever since—and if we’re being honest, it still hasn’t.

After Layton, Thomas Mulcair stepped up. And say what you want, but Mulcair—at least in Parliament—was a beast. He knew his files, took no crap, and held Harper to account like no one else. “Angry Tom” wasn’t just a nickname—it was earned. And honestly? He brought up more of the issues I care about than Jagmeet Singh ever did. Electoral reform. Senate abolition. Media and government accountability. Things that actually mattered to people watching our democracy begin eroding under Harper.

Tom Mulcair calls out Andrew Scheer’s bias as house speaker. Video credit: Maclean’s

Also—and I say this respectfully—Mulcair had strong DILF energy. Just had to put that out there.

But Mulcair’s real failure came during the 2015 campaign, when he tried to out-centrist Trudeau. Not centrist in the practical, “I’ll work with anyone to get things done” way—more like fence-sitting on the stuff that mattered. He wouldn’t take a clear position on legalizing marijuana or running a deficit for social programs, even as Trudeau leaned into both. Remember: Trudeau was literally outflanking the NDP from the left. The Liberals. That’s how the NDP went from 103 seats to 44 seats in one cycle. Let’s not forget either—marijuana legalization wasn’t a fringe issue. There was an entire registered party dedicated to it. They never won a seat, but they had enough of a base to move the needle when paired with Liberal support.

The Marijuana Party of Canada joins Vancouver Pride 2010, waving cannabis-themed Canadian flags and promoting legalization with bold banners. Image credit: The Guardian

And in the Harper years, when programs were being gutted in the name of “balanced budgets,” the NDP had a real opportunity to speak up for working people and offer something bold. Instead, Mulcair played it safe. Worse, he made it seem like he was more ideologically aligned with Harper than with the progressives looking for an actual alternative. If he’d focused his fire on Harper instead of Trudeau? Who knows. We might’ve had our first NDP government.

Post-Mulcair

Thomas Mulcair speaks at the 2016 NDP convention in Edmonton, where party members later voted to remove him as leader. Image credit: Canada’s National Observer

After the 2015 loss, Mulcair’s leadership was immediately called into question. In 2016, at the Edmonton convention, delegates voted to oust him as leader. To this day, he’s the only federal NDP leader to ever get the boot by the party. Say what you will about Mulcair’s campaign decisions, but that moment said more about the NDP’s internal identity crisis than it did about him. The base was angry, confused, and desperate to change course—but the direction they picked? That’s still up for debate.

The leadership race that followed in 2017 brought us Jagmeet Singh.

Charismatic, sharply dressed, a great public speaker—he looked like the future. Singh had served as an MPP at Queen’s Park, where he made a name for himself on issues like police reform and drug decriminalization. Important stuff, no question. But here’s the thing: unlike Layton, who built real policy wins on city council, or Mulcair, who served as a cabinet minister in Quebec, Singh didn’t come into federal leadership with any serious legislative accomplishments. Not a single bill passed under his name while he was at Queen’s Park. That’s not necessarily a dealbreaker—but it mattered. Especially when you're up against leaders with track records of actually changing things. Singh was historic in his own right—the first visible minority and first practicing Sikh to lead a major federal party in Canada. As the son of Indian immigrants, his presence at the top of a national ticket was powerful and overdue. Representation does matter. But representation without results? That’s where people start asking tough questions. And over time, those questions would only get louder.

Singh as NDP Leader

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh arrives for campaign event at the Peel Basin in Montreal. Image Credit: Pierre Obendrauf/Montreal Gazette

Under Singh’s leadership, the NDP correctly recognized there was a problem with Mulcair’s tenure, but they completely misdiagnosed what that problem actually was. Instead of learning from 2015 and doubling down on core progressive principles like electoral reform, Singh’s NDP quietly shelved them. He mentioned electoral reform once in 2017—and then radio silence until 2025, when he finally brought it up again… only after it was clear he was about to lose third place in his own riding. By that point, it wasn’t policy—it was panic. But it wasn’t just electoral reform advocates who were left behind. Disability rights advocates turned on Singh’s NDP over their support for the expansion of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD). And then there was the Canada Disability Benefit—touted as a “historic step” by the Liberals and NDP, but widely panned by disabled Canadians as woefully inadequate. In many eyes, it didn’t lift people out of poverty—it locked them into it, just with a different name on the cheque.

There’s been serious debate among New Democrats about whether Singh’s legacy is a net positive or a net negative. Personally? He’s the reason I left the party—but he’s also the reason I joined in the first place. That’s the duality of Jagmeet Singh. He inspired a new generation of Canadians—racialized youth, progressives, people who hadn’t felt seen before in federal politics. And yet, for many of us, that inspiration eventually gave way to disappointment. Singh’s most defining political move would likely be the 2022 Supply and Confidence Agreement (SCA) with the Trudeau Liberals. Signed in the aftermath of the Ottawa occupation, the SCA offered stability to a government reeling from crisis, in exchange for delivering on long-standing NDP policy goals. And to be fair, the agreement did produce results.

Former NDP leader Jagmeet Singh meets with former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. Image Credit: CBC

The Canadian Dental Care Plan gave coverage to thousands of children, seniors, and people with disabilities. Workers in federally regulated sectors finally gained access to 10 paid sick days. There were new investments in housing, clean energy, and reconciliation. On paper, the crown jewel of the agreement was the Universal Pharmacare pilot program, which now covers diabetes medication and contraceptives—and, in British Columbia, hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for those going through menopause. Transgender Canadians were excluded from that HRT coverage, even in a province where the NDP holds a majority government. It was a devastating oversight. And for many LGBTQ Canadians, it confirmed that even in 2025, our fight is still an afterthought, even to the NDP.

By the time the 2025 election rolled around, Singh ran an even worse campaign than Mulcair. And that’s saying something. Mulcair may have tried to rebrand himself as a centrist in 2015, but at least he wasn’t actively misleading voters about the government’s record. Singh, on the other hand, spent most of his campaign deflecting criticism of the Liberals, trying to sell voters on what the NDP almost did through the SCA, rather than what he planned to do as prime minister.

It didn’t work. And honestly? The loss was deserved. Singh’s time as leader will be remembered for bold optics, weak follow-through, and a party that forgot how to fight for the very people who built it.

So, what’s the problem???

People romanticize 2011 as if it were some kind of turning point, and in a way, it was. But it wasn’t because the NDP suddenly became this unstoppable force. It was the result of a political vacuum—Harper was faltering, and the Liberals were running back-to-back flops as leaders. Layton stepped into the void. He had charisma, a track record, and good timing. Did he have skeletons? Absolutely. Living in subsidized housing well above his income bracket, “rub and tug” stories—take your pick. But he made people believe the NDP could be more than a pressure tactic.

Then he died—and that belief turned into legend.

And that’s where the first big problem begins: New Democrats have turned Jack Layton into a myth. Some folks genuinely think winning 100 seats under a Harper majority somehow meant more than founding public healthcare. It’s wild. It’s not even revisionist—it’s delusional. The bigger issue, though, has been building for decades. Since the ’80s, the NDP has slowly drifted rightward. It came to a head under Mulcair, when they literally deleted the word socialism from the party constitution. And for what? To chase moderate Conservatives. To try and be “respectable.” Spoiler: it didn’t work then, and it didn’t work now—just like it didn’t work for the U.S. Democrats in 2024 when they tried the exact same thing.

By 2025, the NDP had truly stopped fighting for the working class and started speaking like consultants. They treated major issues—such as Gaza—not with moral clarity, but like they were campaign talking points. No wonder people tuned out. And then the strategic voting crowd appears again, guilting people into voting Liberal in ridings where the Liberals never had a shot. The end result? NDP seats lost to people like Aaron Gunn. That’s not strategy. That’s how you lose movements.

The NDP Was Never Meant to Win—And That’s Not a Bad Thing

Say what you want about Jagmeet Singh—and believe me, there’s plenty to say—but even with all the baggage, and even after the disaster that was the 2025 election, I honestly think the NDP is better off now than it was before.

Here’s the part a lot of people—especially New Democrats—tend to forget: the NDP wasn’t built to win power. When it was the CCF, it was founded as a protest party. It was supposed to push the Liberals to make policy concessions. That’s it. That’s the whole blueprint. Tommy Douglas, the so-called "father of universal healthcare," didn’t create the party to lead the government—he created it to make the government lead better. And by that measure? Singh actually did pretty well.

Protest parties don’t have to win to make a difference. They just have to hold the line. When they stop doing that—when they start chasing power for power’s sake—that’s when they lose everything. Look to the Marijuana Party if you want to see what winning actually looks like. No seats, no money, no clout, but they held the damn line. Built a movement. Changed the country. That’s victory.

The truth is, the NDP was always strongest when it stood for something, even if it meant losing. If the NDP wants a future, it has to stop being afraid of its past. Go back to its roots. Be bold. Stand for something. Because if you don’t, no one else will.

Stornoway, the official residence of Canada’s Opposition Leader, is a stately, tree-shaded mansion with classic architecture and lush gardens. Image credit: National Capital Commission

Let’s talk about Stornoway. Not the Scottish town. The $20-million taxpayer-funded mansion in Ottawa. The one meant to house the Leader of the Official Opposition. And no, that’s not Pierre Poilievre anymore. That job belongs to Andrew Scheer. Yet somehow—miraculously, entitledly, disgracefully—Poilievre is still living there.

Welcome to Mansiongate.

Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre lost his seat in the last election. He didn’t retire. He didn’t step down. He wasn’t redistricted out of existence. He straight-up lost. By over 4,000 votes. To Bruce Fanjoy. In his own backyard.

So what does he do? Does he resign from party leadership? Nope. Does he take time to reflect? Not a chance. Instead, according to the National Post, Scheer will be letting Poilievre stay in the mansion—like it’s his birthright—while he starts shopping around for a new seat like it’s a goddamn real estate listing.

He’s forcing a Conservative MP in a province he hasn’t lived in for 25 years to give up their seat so he can play musical ridings and force a needless, costly by-election.

Imagine the audacity of losing your job, then demanding your former employer let you keep the corner office while you interview for jobs somewhere else. This isn't just unethical. It’s a joke. And it’s on our dime.

What Stornoway Is Supposed to Be

Let’s get one thing straight: The idea that the leader of the losing party gets to live in a mansion is already kind of stupid. It’s a weird colonial leftover that reeks of elitism. Most Canadians can’t afford rent, but we’re out here funding an opposition mansion? Come on. Still, if we’re going to have the thing—and clearly, we do—then it should at least serve a clear function.

Stornoway is meant to be the place where the official opposition can live while holding government accountable—from inside Parliament. It is not a retirement home for a failed leader. It is not a clubhouse for sore losers. And it damn sure isn’t a crash pad while you audition for a seat in a province you haven’t stepped foot in since 1999.

Pierre Poilievre is no longer the Leader of the Opposition. He is no longer a Member of Parliament. He’s just… some guy. Some guy, living rent-free in one of the most expensive government residences in this country. That’s not leadership.

If Carney Pulled This, You’d Lose Your Minds

If Mark Carney ever lost his seat and refused to leave 24 Sussex—saying he needed to “figure things out” while staying in taxpayer-funded luxury—Conservative social media would be on fire. Rebel News would have drones over the lawn. Ezra Levant would be live-streaming Carney’s recycling bins. Every MP from Red Deer to Renfrew would be calling for a criminal investigation. And you know what? They’d be right.

This is indefensible. It doesn’t matter what party you support. If you claim to care about “accountability” and “wasteful spending,” then you have to call this what it is:

A shameless, hypocritical, taxpayer-funded squatter stunt. Pierre Poilievre has turned the opposition residence into a partisan Airbnb—and you’re footing the bill for this obnoxious, Maxime Bernier style grifting.

To Conservative Voters: This Is Your Moment of Truth

You don’t have to like Mark Carney. You don’t have to agree with the Liberals. But if you care about basic ethics—if you meant any of what you’ve been saying for the last ten years about government waste—then you cannot sit this one out. This man is disrespecting the voters, the system, and you.

You voted for a fighter. You got a freeloader. Now is your chance to prove you’re better than the cult. Better than the double standards. Demand he leave Stornoway. Demand he stop this phony by-election circus. Demand integrity—from your own side.

Because if you won’t? Then everything you ever said about Trudeau’s scandals? About ArriveCAN? About entitlement and privilege? It was all performative.

Mansiongate is real. It’s embarrassing. And it’s your responsibility to end it.

Bronze statue of George Floyd seated on a bench in New Jersey, symbolizing reflection, remembrance, and the impact of racial injustice. Photo credit: Unknown

I was 14 when I watched a man die for the first time.

Not in a movie. Not in a war documentary. In real time. On my phone. In my room.

The world was already upside down—the pandemic had locked us all indoors, schools were closed, and my generation was left to rot inside our bedrooms. I was bouncing between Twitter, YouTube, and cable news, watching a sick world get sicker. It was late May. You know where this is going.

I opened Twitter and saw a video that stopped me cold.

George Floyd. Handcuffed. Face down. Begging for air. Derek Chauvin—knee on his neck—blank face, hands in pockets, like he was posing for a damn photo. Eight minutes. Forty-six seconds. That's how long it took for a man to be suffocated in broad daylight by a cop while people begged him to stop.

And that night, the country went up in flames.

I remember flipping between CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, even BBC, just trying to understand what was happening. Minneapolis was on fire. Cop cars torched. Stores smashed. Protesters chanting. Police in riot gear acting like they were in Fallujah. And I sat there—a kid, frozen in front of my screen—watching an American city burn itself to the ground. That moment didn’t just change the world. It changed me. It rewired something. That night, I realized the world isn’t run by good guys and bad guys—it’s run by people with power and people without it. And people with power, when left unchecked, will kill you in broad daylight and call it protocol.

But Floyd Was No Angel…

Let’s talk about George Floyd. And let’s tell the truth—the full truth.

No, he wasn’t a “good man.” He had a criminal past. He had done real harm to people in his life. But this urge to use that as some kind of retroactive justification for what happened to him? That’s coward talk.

What matters is what happened on May 25th, 2020: Floyd was arrested over a suspected counterfeit $20 bill. A crime that—let’s be honest—half of us wouldn’t even recognize if it happened to us. That’s not just a low-level offence, it’s one most people wouldn’t even think twice about. He didn’t rob a bank. He wasn’t brandishing a weapon. He was pinned to the ground, handcuffed, and unarmed.

And Derek Chauvin—a man with a history of excessive force complaints—chose to kneel on his neck. While Floyd pleaded. While bystanders begged him to stop. While paramedics were kept at bay.

He died. Right there. In front of everyone.

Don’t talk to me about fentanyl like it changes the outcome. The Hennepin County Medical Examiner ruled Floyd’s death a homicide—caused by “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression.” Not an overdose. Chauvin’s actions—not Floyd’s blood toxicity—killed him. You can try to spin it, but facts don’t give a damn about your politics.

Even if Floyd was a drug addict—that doesn’t change a thing. Being an addict shouldn’t be a death sentence. Hell, I’d wager half the people reading this know someone struggling with opioids. You gonna kneel on their neck too?

Chauvin Was No Lone Wolf—He Was the Symptom

Derek Chauvin isn’t some one-off “bad apple.” He is exactly what happens when a broken system keeps promoting guys who should’ve been kicked off the force years ago. This goon had 18 prior complaints against him before Floyd. Eighteen. Most of them went unpunished. Because the system protected him. Because the badge covered for him.

I followed Chauvin’s trial (State of Minnesota v. Chauvin, 2021) like a hawk. It was the first time I ever got invested in a real legal case. And even with the video evidence, I wasn’t sure he’d be convicted. That’s how little faith we had in justice by that point. But the verdict came back: guilty on all counts.

Cue the online backlash. The right-wing pundits started crying about “cancel culture” and “mob justice.” Over the last year, I’ve even seen people say Chauvin is a “political prisoner.” Are you kidding me? A political prisoner doesn’t ignore a man begging for his life. A political prisoner doesn’t kneel on a guy’s neck until he dies. Chauvin is not some rogue anti-hero. He’s a convicted murderer.

The Timing Was Everything—And Everyone Knew It

Minnehaha Liquors in Minneapolis at night during the 2020 BLM protests, with broken windows, graffiti, scattered debris, and people gathered outside. Image credit: Chris Juhn

The riots didn’t start just because of George Floyd. They started because George Floyd was the last straw. Because the pressure had been building for years—for decades. And 2020 was the year the powder keg finally blew.

The U.S. government’s response to COVID-19 was a disaster. Trump and his supporters were too busy whining about masks and blaming China to take the pandemic seriously. People were losing their jobs, their homes, their families. Kids my age were killing themselves because their lives had been turned inside out.

So when that video of Floyd’s murder hit the internet & went viral, it was like lighting a match next to a gas leak. The riots didn’t come from nowhere. They were the inevitable consequence of a broken society. And the police made it worse—taunting protesters, rolling in with armoured vehicles and gas and riot shields before anyone had even thrown a rock. If you’re looking to defuse a bomb, you don’t bring a flamethrower.

George Floyd Wasn’t a Martyr. He Was a Reminder.

I’m not here to romanticize Floyd. Let’s be real—he wasn’t a “good man.” He did terrible things. But what happened to him was worse. He didn’t get a trial. He didn’t get a second chance. Derek Chauvin played judge, jury, and executioner, and a little girl lost her dad.

I remember when Floyd’s daughter said the thing she’ll miss most is that he won’t be there. That crushed me. That girl doesn’t deserve that pain. Floyd didn’t deserve that death. You can hate the man, but you better respect the truth.

Evil doesn’t always look like a villain in a movie. Sometimes it wears a uniform, keeps its hands in its pockets, and smiles while the light drains from your eyes.

Final Thought

George Floyd wasn’t a saint, but he was a man. A human being. A father. He made mistakes—some serious ones—but none of them justified what happened on that pavement. He deserved due process. He deserved a trial. He deserved to go home that night. Derek Chauvin took that away.

Chauvin didn’t just make a mistake. He made a decision. A cold, deliberate decision to press his knee into a man’s neck for nearly nine minutes, in front of witnesses, with no urgency, no remorse, and no regard for human life. That’s not poor training. That’s not stress. That’s intent. He had the badge. He had the power. And he used it to kill someone who posed no threat. That’s not law enforcement—it’s murder.

So if you're one of those people still trying to spin Chauvin into a victim, ask yourself: what kind of system are you defending when a man can suffocate another in broad daylight and still get apologists? Chauvin is not a hero. He’s not misunderstood. He’s not a scapegoat.

He’s a killer who wore a badge and thought it made him untouchable.

Prime Minister Mark Carney stands at a podium outside Rideau Hall, with his newly appointed cabinet posed proudly behind him. Photo credit: Mark Carney, X

Yesterday morning, Mark Carney stood in front of the cameras at Rideau Hall, shook a few hands, smiled just enough, and officially became an elected prime minister. Then came the cabinet reveal—a shuffle the Liberals pitched as bold, ambitious, generational. But what I saw was a warm glass of milk and a nod to the usual suspects.

Let’s give credit where it’s due. A standalone Ministry for Women and Gender Equality? That should’ve been standard a decade ago, so I’m glad it’s here now. Melanie Joly moving from Foreign Affairs to Economic Development? Fine. Not a demotion, not a promotion. Just a better lane for her strengths.

Anita Anand stepping in as Foreign Affairs Minister? I’m watching that closely. That’s a curveball. But a good one. But then I got to the housing file. And my stomach turned.

Gone is Nathaniel Erskine-Smith—a Housing Minister who actually showed up with a plan and a backbone. In his place? Gregor Robertson, the former Vancouver mayor who presided over one of the steepest climbs in urban homelessness in the country.

In 2008, when Robertson took office in Vancouver, there were 1,576 people officially counted as homeless. When he left in 2018, that number had ballooned to 2,181. A 38% spike. And that’s just what got counted. If you were in Vancouver during that time, you didn’t need a census report to know the city was spiralling.

So now he’s the guy tasked with running the Build Canada Homes initiative? The national housing push I—and so many others—voted for?

Let me be blunt: this is a bad appointment.

Nate Erskine-Smith expresses disappointment on X about being excluded from cabinet despite running to help solve the housing crisis. Photo credit:

I didn’t just vote Liberal this time. I did so because I believed, maybe for the first time in my life as a young person, that the housing file was finally in the right hands. Nate Erskine-Smith brought urgency. He brought lived experience as a man who himself grew up in community housing. He understood that housing isn’t just a market to stimulate. It’s a roof over your head. It’s safety. It’s stability. It’s dignity.

He posted on X the afternoon after the cabinet announcement, and if you read between the lines, you could see the disappointment bleeding through every sentence:

“I ran again because of the opportunity to make an even bigger difference around the cabinet table and to help fix the housing crisis. I’m not back in any role, unfortunately, so it may not surprise you to learn that it’s been a strange day on my end.”

“It’s impossible not to feel disrespected and the way it played out doesn't sit right. But I’m mostly disappointed that my team and I won’t have the chance to build on all we accomplished with only a short runway.”

“Our ambitious housing plan is bigger than one person, of course. I wish the new minister well and hope we’ll see fast action to unleash the market, double down on building community housing, address chronic homelessness, and treat housing as a home first (and investment 2nd).”

You’re not imagining that sting. It’s real.

And it doesn’t stop there. Karina Gould—another progressive force, snubbed from cabinet too. Meanwhile, folks like Sean Fraser and Chrystia Freeland keep floating on untouched, like driftwood in a tide that never really turns. But the loudest omission wasn’t who got shuffled—it’s who didn’t show up at all.

There is no Minister of Labour.

Not temporarily. Not pending. Just… nothing. And that should make every worker in this country furious. Postal workers might be headed for a strike in a few weeks. It’s going to be one of the first real tests for this new government. And we already know how this story plays out if nobody steps in with actual courage.

Here’s how it goes: management drags their feet, workers hold the line, the press characterizes it as “disruption,” and the government ducks behind back-to-work legislation like it’s a shield made of pure cowardice. We’ve seen it before. From Harper. From Trudeau. And now, if Carney doesn’t name a good Labour Minister fast, we’ll see it again from his government too.

No Minister of Labour sends a message. It says: “We’ll deal with you later.” It says: “Workers aren’t our priority.” And in 2025, with costs soaring, automation rising, and burnout becoming a baseline, that kind of silence isn’t just tone-deaf. It’s dangerous.

So where does that leave people like me? People who voted for vision. For action. For a government that doesn’t just rearrange the furniture and call it transformation.

It leaves us holding our breath.

I’m not here to write anyone off on day one. But this cabinet doesn’t scream change. It whispers continuity in the worst possible way. It says: don’t rock the boat. And if the Liberals think that’s good enough to hold their coalition together, they’re in for a rude awakening. Because if this is how they treat the people who actually moved the housing file forward—if this is how they treat workers, unions, the folks getting squeezed—then they’re not just risking their base. They’re losing it.

Sebastian Stan as young Donald Trump in The Apprentice (2024), lit dramatically in a tense, moody, retro-styled setting. Photo credit: ScreenRant

Last night, I watched The Apprentice on Blu-ray. Not some janky screener or a pixelated torrent, the real thing, legally bought, because I believe in supporting actual artists when they make art worth watching. And let me be completely honest with you: The Apprentice is one of the best films I’ve seen in years. Full stop.

It’s bold. It’s stylistically unique. It says something real and unflinching, and it says it with craft. The cinematography? Stunning. They made it look like it came out in the '70s, not just through filters or aspect ratios, but in how it moves, how it lingers, how it breathes. It’s cinema. This is easily the best performance of Sebastian Stan’s career. The range on display here is ridiculous. He doesn’t just “play” Trump—he embodies him without falling into caricature. It’s magnetic and unsettling. But what impressed me most wasn’t just the aesthetics or the performances, it was the audacity.

The film doesn’t try to find some cutesy, safe moral middle ground. It doesn’t soften the story to make it more palatable for cable news pundits or partisan filmgoers. It calls out a currently sitting U.S. President—by name—for his well-documented, heinously racist past, and it does so without flinching. There’s no “both sides.” There’s no sanitizing. It tells the truth and lets that truth sit with you like a weight on your chest. That’s rare these days. That’s what filmmaking is supposed to be.

Now contrast that with Sound of Freedom, a film I actually happened to go and see in theatres back when it was making headlines—for all the wrong reasons.

The Worst Movie I’ve Ever Sat Through

A poster for Sound of Freedom (2023) showing a man holding a child, another standing boldly, with bold title text. Photo credit: Clio Melody

Without bias, as a film lover, I need to say this clearly: Sound of Freedom is one of the most disrespectful, insulting, manipulative pieces of ‘cinema’ I think I have ever had the misfortune of having sat through. Two hours of my life I will never get back.

Setting aside the real-life politics of the man who inspired it (and honestly, the less said about that guy the better), this movie is just not well-made. It’s not well-written. It’s not emotionally honest. It’s not even technically competent in the way a movie should be. It feels rushed. Flat. Disconnected. The message sucks, and the people making it don’t seem to care whether they’re telling the truth—because they’re not.

A Message Built on Lies

They completely misrepresent the issue of human trafficking. In their world, it’s always some anonymous creep in a white van, some underground tunnel operation from a comic book. 1980 called and wants their trope back. The truth is much darker, much sadder, and far less cinematic: the overwhelming majority of kids trafficked into these horrific situations are abused by family members or close family friends. People they know. People they trust. But the film doesn’t go there. Why? Because it doesn’t fit the narrative they want to push onto viewers. And spoiler alert: the “hero” in Sound of Freedom saves one child. Just one. The others? Left behind. And the movie doesn’t even attempt to grapple with that morally. If we take the real guy at his word, he knowingly chose not to help the rest. That’s not a heroic moment—that’s a complete and total failure that the film has the audacity to try and spin as a win.

No One Watched It (Not Even the Right)

Meanwhile, the studio behind it—Angel Studios—spent more time on marketing gimmicks than on making a good or coherent film. You couldn’t scroll two seconds on right-wing Twitter or Truth Social without some grifter telling you to “buy tickets to support the mission.” But here's the kicker: no one actually watched it. I don’t know a single person in real life who even knew this movie existed. Not one. Because it didn’t really “exist” in any meaningful cultural way. It was astroturfed into trending by a handful of influencers and partisan hacks who cared more about owning the libs than watching the damn movie. Sound of Freedom wasn’t made to tell a meaningful story or resonate with anyone—it was made to be a partisan talking point, chewed up by the culture war machine and discarded as soon as the news cycle moved on.

Reagan: A Glossy Rewrite of a Bleak Reality

A poster for Reagan (2024) showing Dennis Quaid in a cowboy hat, gazing ahead, with bold title text and sunset skies. Photo credit: IMDB

And then there’s Reagan. A different kind of failure, but a failure all the same.

On paper, it’s a biopic. In execution, it’s the kind of movie that goes out of its way to avoid telling the truth. It’s propaganda that’s dishonest by design. A polished, puffed-up PR reel for a man who did real, lasting damage to the United States. This is the man who obliterated labor protections, laughed off the AIDS crisis, and waged class war with a smile on his face, and this film treats him like a misunderstood dad from a Hallmark movie. Sure, Dennis Quaid is a decent actor. I’m not out here trying to drag the man’s entire career. He’s had his hits. But Reagan was not one of them. The movie only seemed to resonate with people who already had a soft spot for the man—a nostalgic relic for boomers who still think “trickle down” was a great idea.

And just like with Sound of Freedom, it only really existed in a vacuum: people weren’t seeing it because they were interested in films. They were seeing it because it reaffirmed something they already believed, or at least, wanted to believe.

The Anti-Audience Effect

The connective tissue between Sound of Freedom and Reagan isn’t just political leaning—it’s creative laziness dressed up as ideological urgency. These films weren’t made with audiences in mind, at least not in the traditional sense. They were made for anti-audiences—not to be enjoyed, but to be weaponized. The goal wasn’t to move anyone emotionally or intellectually; it was to provoke outrage, to stir up culture war talking points, and to be talked about by people who, in most cases, didn’t even bother watching them. They’re not films—they’re content. Algorithm fodder. Performative gestures masquerading as meaningful work.

There’s no real emotional core, no sense of craft, and certainly no artistic risk involved. They exist to confirm biases, not challenge perspectives. You can feel the disinterest in every frame—they don’t care about cinema, and they barely care about their own message, assuming they actually did care in the first place. They just want attention. And that’s what makes them so dishonest.

The Apprentice Shows What Happens When You Care

Which brings me back to The Apprentice. Because that film? That’s what happens when you put actual artists in charge of telling a story they believe in. It doesn’t hide. It doesn’t compromise. It doesn’t waste your time. It takes a subject as controversial as Donald Trump and explores it with both anger and nuance, daring you to wrestle with what it shows you. That’s not just bravery—that’s cinema.

And yes, I’m progressive. But I’m judging these films not on ideology, but on merit. On their willingness to tell a story honestly, with care, with depth. The Apprentice was unapologetic—not for shock value, not to start shit on X, but because it had a story to tell and the guts to tell it right. And when talentless partisan hacks try to make movies—when they don’t give a shit about art, or story, or even truth—you end up with hollow garbage like Sound of Freedom.

Because at the end of the day, if you don’t give a shit about your message, no one else will either. And no one wants to watch a movie that doesn’t care.

Pierre and Ana Poilievre sit with two seniors, chatting and smiling while gathered around a colourful Canada map puzzle. Photo credit: Conservative Party Platform 2025

For years, the Poilievre Conservatives have been absolutely insufferable about the carbon tax. Every chance they got, it was "AXE THE TAX" this, "end the woke energy agenda" that. They hijacked Question Period, voted down anything that resembled public good, and acted like repealing the tax was going to personally bring down the cost of avocados. All of this without a proper election platform. Not one. Not in 2023, not in 2024. Just a vague policy declaration that reads like a newsletter from your local libertarian Facebook group.

Erin O'Toole, for all his faults, had a platform. Canada’s Recovery Plan (2021) was solid. I actually kinda liked it. Still do. O’Toole had a detailed jobs plan, actual ideas for childcare and mental health, and at least a basic respect for how governing works. He said things like, "It’s time for Conservatives to take inequality seriously." That’s a man who’d at least skimmed a policy brief. It was the last time the Conservative Party even attempted to sound like adults. It was a roadmap. This, however? It's a billboard.

Poilievre ghosted us for over a year. Then, outta nowhere, on April 22, 2025, the 2025 platform drops. A week before the election. After advanced polls closed. Even the Canadian Future Party, a literal startup party, managed beat them to the punch and release their platform more than a week ago earlier. What the hell took so long?

Even though the Conservatives clearly couldn’t be bothered to pitch to undecided voters until the last advanced poll shut down and the lights were flickering, I figured—hell, let’s give their platform a fair shot. How bad could it be?

Spoiler alert: it’s a flaming pile of nothing.

20250418 Cpcplatform 8 5x11 En R1 Pages

12.2MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Axe the Tax. Axe Everything Else, Too.

Let me make this as clear as possible: nothing about this platform is fiscally conservative. Not even a little. The numbers don’t line up. The spending promises contradict the supposed cuts. And the cuts they do propose are based less on real fiscal discipline, and more on fantasy figures and ideological grudges. This is not the return of the penny-pinching Conservative, but instead, a new flavor of reckless.

Let’s start with the obvious. The Poilievre platform kicks off with the line: “Axe the tax: End Trudeau’s carbon tax on everything, for everyone, for good” (p. 5). Cool story. Except most of it’s already been repealed since mid-March. The home heating exemption? Already in place. Hell, some provinces have been shielded from the worst of it forever at this point. And here’s the twist: the legal authority for the carbon pricing framework actually came from legislation introduced under Stephen Harper. You wanna axe the Harper-era law? Go for it, Pierre. Let’s see that energy.

And then there’s the fake math. They claim axing the EV mandate will somehow net $10 billion over three years. The platform literally says it’ll bring in $5.1 billion annually by 2028–29 (p. 26). What is that based on? Nothing. No modelling. No auditor review. Just like the $3.1 billion they claim they’ll save by defunding “hostile foreign regimes” and the CBC (p. 27). It’s the budgetary equivalent of "trust me bro."

Even with all these cuts, they’re still projecting a $31.4 billion deficit in 2025-26, tapering to $14.1 billion in 2028-29 (p. 27). And you’re telling me this is supposed to be a fiscally conservative platform? They're literally saying, "We’ll cut the government, but also—surprise—we’ll still run a huge deficit."

My high school’s ‘dealer’ contradicted himself less while lying to the police for giving substances to children, and watching him lie was like watching someone juggle knives while standing in gasoline. Poilievre wants to pass a one-for-one spending law where every new dollar spent has to be matched with a dollar cut (p. 5), but also want to spend billions on military bases, Arctic infrastructure, 2,000 new CBSA agents, northern roads, a national energy corridor, and a whole bureaucracy to rank cities based on housing performance. You can’t scream “cut the red tape!” while building new tape dispensers in every ministry.

Their crime policy? A total overstep.

The "Three Strikes You’re Out" policy (p. 11) promises life in prison for “repeat violent offenders.” But violent crime is already complex and legally defined. What counts as “violent”? What gets swept into that net? The federal government doesn’t sentence people—judges do. This would upend discretion, fairness, and due process. It’s reactive, authoritarian policy dressed up as “common sense.” And let’s not kid ourselves: policies like this always hit hardest against racialized and low-income communities. They never catch the white-collar abusers or the hedge fund grifters. Just people with fewer resources and less privilege. If a politician's go-to move is “let’s just override the Charter,” that’s a walking red flag. Especially when they’re targeting the justice system. Section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedom guarantees us the right to life, liberty, and security of the person—unless it’s taken away in line with fundamental justice. Section 11 backs that up with due process rights. That’s the spine of Canadian law. You don’t get to wipe your ass with the Constitution just because the courts won’t rubber-stamp your tough guy cosplay.

Forget Dog-Whistling. This is a Foghorn.

The Conservatives have committed to repealing Directive 100 (p. 11), which ensures that federal inmates are placed in facilities consistent with their gender identity. In plain terms: they want to force trans women into men’s prisons. That’s not about safety. That’s not about fairness. That’s institutionalized cruelty, plain and simple.

It’s not a standalone policy, either. It’s part of a larger platform-wide silence on LGBTQ+ rights. There’s no mention of protections. No mention of inclusion. No strategy for ending hate crimes. Just... nothing. As if queer people don’t exist. As if we aren’t citizens. And guess what? It’s wildly unpopular. Most Canadians don’t buy the premise of transphobic legislation. They know that this kind of policy requires a deep, regressive level of misogyny to even make sense. And they’re not signing up for it.

As for addiction and homelessness? They want to “shut down tent cities” (p. 11), scrap “safe supply” (p. 19), and throw people into court-mandated rehab. They call it “compassionate intervention.” It’s forced treatment in all but name. There’s no talk of supportive housing. No long-term recovery funding. No understanding of the trauma that leads to substance use in the first place. Just criminalization. Just cops.

And this from the guy who oversaw housing policy while the affordability crisis exploded. Let’s be specific: under Poilievre’s watch as Stephen Harper’s housing minister, 800,000 affordable homes were sold off to private investors, and in that same timeframe? Only six new affordable homes were built. That is not a typo. Six. And now we’re supposed to believe he’s suddenly the champion of renters, the warrior for the working class? I simply do not believe him. He’s not here to fix the housing crisis—he’s here to finish what he started: turning homes into investment portfolios and cities into playgrounds for hedge funds. The same guy who helped create the housing mess now wants to clean it up with handcuffs? Give me a break.

O’Toole vs. Poilievre: From Policy to Populism

Let me say this again: I actually liked Erin O’Toole’s 2021 platform. It had structure. It had coherence. He proposed the “Canada Job Surge Plan” He had a real mental health strategy. He wanted to support small businesses with actual loans, not TikTok clips. He even supported child care in the form of a refundable tax credit. He didn’t shy away from climate policy either, proposing the very innovative idea of replacing the Carbon Tax with a “Carbon Savings Account.” It was the last gasp of adult conservatism in Canada. O’Toole understood the assignment. Poilievre skipped the class. Compare that to what we got now: 30 pages, 1/3 of which being glossy stock photos of Pierre looking pensive in plaid, like a real estate agent’s campaign flyer crashed into a Reddit thread. The substance isn’t just weak—it’s non existent.

The Bottom Line

Let’s call it like it is: a reactionary wish list wrapped in a busted calculator. The numbers don’t add up. The social policy is a regression. The timing is laughable. It’s six days before the election, and we’re just now getting a glimpse of the “vision”? Come on. This document will convince exactly zero new voters. If you weren’t riding the Conservative train before, this brochure full of Pierre Poilievre glamour shots isn’t gonna win you over. And for socially progressive Canadians—especially young people and queer folks? This is just more proof that the Poilievre Conservatives don’t want your vote. They want your silence.

This isn’t a plan. It’s cosplay. And the grown-ups clearly left the building.

When I heard that Jamil Jivani—the Conservative candidate for Bowmanville—Oshawa North—was hosting a rally with Pierre Poilievre in Oshawa on April 3rd, I knew exactly what I had to do. I had to go. Not because I support them. I don’t. Not even close.

I’ve been to my fair share of political events—mostly NDP stuff, LGBTQ rights marches, that sort of thing. But this? This was different. I’m not Conservative, and I sure as hell wouldn’t vote for any party led by Pierre Poilievre. Under his leadership, the CPC feels less like a political party and more like a TikTok content farm. Slogans and soundbites don’t put gas in the tank.

But still... something about this felt like it needed to be seen. Whether it was genuine curiosity or just morbid fascination, I had to be there.

So when April 3rd rolled around, I grabbed my bag, jumped on the bus, and made my way to Ryan Terminal. I had no idea what to expect—but I was ready to find out.

First Impressions

The rally was set up inside one of the hangars, the kind of place you’d usually expect to see a plane, not politics. I’d heard a lot of noise online from Poilievre supporters hyping up the crowd sizes. According to them, every single event this guy holds draws thousands of people, and every hangar he steps into supposedly transforms into a wall-to-wall sea of “patriots.”

While I was waiting in line, I saw this bald dude with a beard livestreaming the whole thing to his X feed, claiming without a hint of hesitation, that there were “thousands” of people waiting to see Poilievre.

Yeah… no. Not even close.

Once everyone had filed in and found their spot, I did a quick visual headcount. At most? 800 people. And I’m being generous. The hangar was maybe half full. It wasn’t packed, it wasn’t bursting, and it definitely wasn’t the mega-rally people were pretending it was online. Although, to be fair, it was brutally hot in there, so I can’t totally blame people for confusing heatstroke with high turnout.

Before I made it to the line this older gentleman started chatting with me and asked if I was there for the rally. Because I enjoy talking to people and getting a sense of where they’re coming from politically, I engaged. He looked like he was maybe a few years older than my parents. We ended up having a pretty casual back-and-forth, and once I got in line, I struck up a few more conversations. Kind of a vibe-check on what people were thinking, what issues mattered most to them.

And look, credit where it’s due: some of the folks I talked to were genuinely kind, down-to-earth people. The kind who just feel like Canada’s heading in the wrong direction and want something, anything, that isn’t branded Liberal red. Fair enough. Totally valid feeling, even if I don’t agree with their solutions.

But others? Oh boy.

The overwhelming majority of people attending this rally were very loud, condescending, ill-informed, and mean-spirted. A good example of this was the reaction counter protesters outside the event faced. The protesters were protesting Poilievre’s unapologetic support of the Israel expansionist state, where Poilievre has declared before he thinks the international court should be disregarded, and his repeated implication that anyone criticizing Israel might not belong in Canada.

One man went over before the event started with his streaming set up and begun bringing their citizenship into question. Not their views. Not their signs. Just where they were born. He tried to use their potential nationality of origin to invalidate their opinions. The protesters were yelled at and heckled in a very harsh manner by several people in the line. It only got worst in the night when the event was over and the protesters were still their. Attendees went over and got into shouting matches with the protesters, in these exchanges very ugly things were said to the protesters. They were called terrorists. They were told to “go back to Palestine” by several event goers and that their opinion were invalid due to their faith of choice.

The shameless and unapologetically racist things said by Poilievre supporters before the event were appalling. For a political faction that loves to preach about free speech and wanting to unify and not divide, they were quick to contribute to the divide we face and they were even quicker to tell people what they are and are not allowed to say and think.

But it was not just racist things said to those protesting the murder of children in the middle east that caught me off guard.

At one point, I passed a life-sized cardboard cutout of Justin Trudeau—and this thing was decked out like someone lost a bet on bad taste. Whoever set it up had drawn a toothbrush moustache on him—you know, that kind of moustache. He was holding a Chinese flag in one hand, wearing another like a cape, and in the bottom-left corner, someone had slapped a cutout photo of Mark Carney’s face with the handwritten label: “black face racist.” Subtlety? Not exactly the vibe here.

It didn’t stop there. I saw multiple “F#CK CARNEY” flags waving proudly off the backs of pickup trucks in the parking lot—because apparently, that’s a thing now—and one guy even brought his flag inside like it was a family heirloom.

Again: we’re at an airport hangar, not Thunderdome, but okay.

Now, I obviously didn’t talk to every single person there. But I didn’t have to. You just had to listen. A lot of conversations were basically people rehashing vaccine mandates and COVID lockdowns like it was still 2021—despite the fact that it’s 2025 and we’ve long since moved on. But not them.

Some were so far gone they straight-up admitted their own kids cut them off because of their obsessive political takes. And instead of maybe—just maybe—doing a little self-reflection, they decided the real issue is that Mark Carney isn’t stepping in to control what their grown adult children think.

Yeah. That’s where we’re at.

The amount of detached-from-reality rambling I overheard that night was honestly unlike anything I’ve ever witnessed in a political space. And the weirdest part? Not a single mention of “gender ideology” or transgender people. I was honestly shocked.

For a crowd that loves to blame all of society’s ills on anyone who dyed their hair in college, this was… uncharacteristically quiet. Almost eerie.

Gen Z Conservatives Are a Different Beast

Doors to the event opened at 6PM. And even though I got inside in decent time, it felt like an eternity before anything actually started.

Maybe that’s just me being impatient. Or maybe it’s the smug, self-congratulatory energy that seems to hang in the air at these things like a bad cologne.

Whatever it was, time crawled.

The whole setup had the vibe of a school assembly you didn’t sign up for, except instead of announcements and applause, it was a room full of people waiting to clap for someone who already agrees with them.

Quick sidenote: this experience reminded me exactly why I can hold a civil conversation with older conservatives—but Gen Z conservatives? Yeah, no. Not happening. Not for more than five seconds.

See, the older folks usually come at you with some combination of lived experience and concern for the future. You can at least follow the thread.

Gen Z conservatives, on the other hand, seem to have skipped that part entirely and jumped straight to being a walking PragerU video. They don’t just embrace the toxic edge of right-wing politics—they perform it. Like it’s cosplay. Like being a jerk is a brand.

Some of them—roughly my age—were standing close enough to me in the crowd that I couldn’t not hear them. And what did they decide to do? Vocally mock me.

Loudly.

Not because of anything I said. Not because they knew I wasn’t Conservative. Just… my clothing. That’s it.

The windbreaker I wore. The way I looked.

They openly mocked me like they were trying to win points with each other for being the biggest asshole.

They didn’t care who heard. Didn’t stop to consider that I might’ve been someone they’d actually agree with. Or that I could’ve been a stranger with zero patience for nonsense. It was all ego. All attitude. All performative cruelty masquerading as “being based.”

Whether it’s ideological or just pure unchecked arrogance, most Gen Z conservatives come off as entitled and willfully ignorant. The only reason they weren’t immediately humbled on the spot was because I didn’t come there to argue. I came to observe.

But trust me—if I had flipped that switch, it would’ve been over quick.

The Man Himself: Poilievre Up Close

After what felt like three episodes of a podcast you didn’t subscribe to, the event finally kicked off and the crowd snapped to life. First up was some new Conservative candidate I only recognized because my dad listens to AM talk radio. Can’t remember his name, and honestly? Doesn’t matter. The room popped for him, and even louder for Jamil Jivani, Ana Poilievre, and of course, the main attraction: Pierre Poilievre himself.

Now, I just so happened to be standing close to the little pathway where Poilievre made his entrance up to the stage. So yes, I got a close-up look. And let me tell you: he is a lot shorter in person than you’d expect. I figured he’d be eye level with me, maybe even a touch taller. But no. He’s probably a centimeter or two shorter. Not a huge deal, but it’s one of those things that sticks when you’ve only ever seen someone in carefully framed press shots or standing at a podium.

And speaking of appearances, I don’t want to sound shallow, the man looked like someone dipped him in chalk. He was caked in makeup, this weird ashy beige that looked less like TV-ready and more like whiteboard eraser. It was distracting. Not subtle. Not well-done. Just… dusted.

On top of that, he’s clearly testing out a new look with the hair; subtle grey streaks, clearly dyed in, probably to bite Mark Carney’s aesthetic. It’s like he’s trying to cosplay as “financially competent dad” while still keeping that frat-boy energy.

And maybe this is petty, but I’ll say it: he looked way better back when he wore glasses and didn’t try to hide the fact that he’s just a regular, pasty guy with sharp elbows. Now, he’s going for some filtered Instagram version of himself, and it just feels off. Manufactured. Uncanny.

Seeing him that close—like, right there—didn’t change anything for me. If anything, it confirmed exactly what I already thought: this guy is pure stagecraft. There’s nothing authentic about him. Just layers of branding and chalk dust.

But that wasn’t the most offensive thing that happened that day.

Slogans Over Substance

Listening to that room erupt in applause like their team had just won the Stanley Cup every time a politician vomited out another empty slogan? It was surreal. It made me want to walk out.

I came in expecting something—even just a sliver of substance. A new idea, a half-coherent policy, maybe even a crumb of vision.

But what did I get?

Nothing.

Just more of the same tired rhetoric. Slogans repackaged with a fresh coat of smug. I’m not even gonna waste time on his bad-faith spin on what Donald Trump said about Mark Carney, that deserves its own reality show.

Let’s focus on the original stuff, which was still painfully hollow.

He dragged out that tired “[verb] the [noun]” formula from 2022 over and over again, especially when it came to the carbon tax. You know, the one that literally doesn’t exist anymore? Yeah, that one.

Poilievre went full technical, talking about how the law still exists, as if that somehow justifies fear-mongering about a policy that’s been effectively repealed. And let’s not forget, he was part of the government that cooked this thing up in the first place. You really think he’s gonna torch the legislation? Please.

At best, we got loose outlines. Vague gestures at ideas. Like his plan to ban safe supply programs and fund treatment facilities instead. Sounds good on paper until you realize… he has no plan for the fallout. No roadmap for preventing withdrawal deaths. No answers for addicts who’ll just end up using more dangerous street drugs—or worse, using in jail. Especially in prison, where overdoses skyrocket.

But sure, let’s risk people’s lives to own the harm reduction crowd.

Then there’s his “hard-on-crime” fantasy. The kind of thing that makes you think he read a Batman comic and thought it was a policy brief. Under his plan, the very kids he claims he wants to “bring home drug free” would be locked up for simple possession.

Because nothing says healing from trauma like slapping handcuffs on it.

At one point, Poilievre spoke about his own struggles, including being adopted. I won’t take that away from him. But you can absolutely tell he grew up without ever having to seriously worry about money, because his budget “plan” is so out-of-touch it belongs in a freshman econ course.

His whole idea? For every dollar the government spends, it must find a dollar in cuts.

That is not how modern economies work, that’s how you end up gutting healthcare, veterans’ services, education; you know, things people actually need. All so you can pump billions into more cops with questionable training and vague military investments that’ll vanish into defence contractor spreadsheets.

And then—because no Conservative rally is complete without it, he turned his attention to Mark Carney. Said he’d “run him back to Europe,” which got a cheer.

But the guy in front of me? He took it way further. He said we should hogtie Carney and do violent things to him. People around him cheered.

This wasn’t an outburst. This wasn’t one unhinged dude. It was part of the vibe. And Poilievre clearly took no issue with the calls to violence made by his own supporters.

One thing that really needs to be brought up is how four people fainted in the audience during the rally. Not one. Not two. Four. And each time, Poilievre turned it into a little PR moment. A spectacle. A chance to look like a hero.

I’m not gonna speculate on whether those faintings were real or staged; that’s a whole other rabbit hole, but what I can say is that his reactions felt incredibly performative. Like clockwork.

The fact that no one around me seemed to notice or care about how shameless it was? That was its own kind of horror.

A billboard questioning Mark Carney's association with Ghislaine Maxwell, authorized by "FOR CANADA" with contact details. Photo credit: Will Adams

When it finally ended, I ran into Durham MP (Bowmanville—Oshawa North candidaye) Jamil Jivani outside. I’ve met him a few times before, so we caught up briefly before he and his entourage disappeared into whatever SUV they rolled up in.

On my way out, I saw a “For Canada” ad trying to tie Mark Carney to Ghislaine Maxwell—and all I could think was: this is why Rebel Media lost their press badges.

What this says about us?

I can’t stress enough how hostile the crowd was to the counter-protesters. The treatment they received was nasty, dehumanizing, and filled with bigoted venom. They were shouted down, ridiculed, called terrorists, and told to “go back to Palestine.” And all of this for protesting the killing of children.

It says a lot when peaceful dissent is met with that kind of hate.

The most satisfying part of the entire night? Honestly? It was leaving. Grabbing dinner at Arby’s. That’s the peak. And the real kicker is I could’ve stayed home, hit up SkipTheDishes, and avoided the headache altogether.

The Oshawa rally told me everything I needed to know: Pierre Poilievre’s base isn’t just misinformed—they’re actively toxic. Their rhetoric mirrors the worst elements of the PPC crowd, and Poilievre hasn’t pushed back on it, he’s amplified it. He’s normalized it. He’s invited it into the national conversation like it belongs at the grown-up table.

The fact that people were openly wishing death on the prime minister in the middle of a political event and no one batted an eye? That’s abhorrent.

And what did we get for all that? A reheated version of his 2022 platform, served cold. No vision. No depth. No growth. Just makeup, slogans, and spectacle.

Poilievre isn’t offering leadership, he’s offering a vibes-based brand of politics that runs on fear, resentment, and attention-seeking.

And unfortunately? That’s enough for far too many people.

This week, the Durham Regional Police Association (DRPA) got people talking. Not for community service or a landmark case—but for a social media post. In it, they announced their support for a political party in the upcoming federal election.

In an X post made on April 8th, 2025, at 1:03 PM, the DRPA voiced their opinion on issues that are on the minds of a lot of Canadians: bail reform, repeat violent offenders, and the flow of illegal firearms and drug trafficking. The post in question featured an official endorsement for Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party.

“The Conservative Party of Canada and Pierre Poilievre have made a pledge to Canadians to deal with issues surrounding changes to bail reform, repeat violent offenders, the flow of illegal handguns, drug trafficking, and most importantly, hold criminals accountable, ensuring the hard work done by Officers and risks to communities are addressed.” The DRPA said.

“His commitment to public safety aligns with the needs of Officers and Police Associations across the country. It is imperative that we protect our communities with legislation that does not limit the effectiveness of the great work done by Officers daily.”

Reading between the lines tells us that the DRPA has, without actually saying it, made a scathing critique of what the right-wing establishment media has dubbed as Trudeau-era bail policies, which law enforcement feels make their job more difficult.

The problems start from the realization that the DRPA operates in Ontario, with issues such as bail reform, catch and release, and issues of this nature being provincial, not federal. A lot of Canadians will agree that there is a serious issue with repeat offenders being released into the public and police having to warn the neighbourhood, only to arrest the same individual 2 more times in the span of the same month. However, in blaming the Liberal Party of Canada, a federal party, you take attention away from the fact that this issue is the result of Doug Ford’s provincial government being an incompetent mess, and not the result of Justin Trudeau.

Police Endorsements Undermine Public Trust

No matter which political party you support, police departments and associations doing things like this should concern you. When police organizations take sides in partisan politics, it erodes the already fragile line between law enforcement and democratic governance. Police officers are in a position of power. The badge they wear grants them the power to detain, to arrest, to use lethal force.

That power must always remain nonpartisan. Allowing police associations to officially endorse political candidates blurs the boundary between public servants and the political circus. In a time where trust in law enforcement is already low, you might as well be pouring gasoline onto a bonfire.

Let’s not forget: public trust in policing is damaged in this country. That trust wasn’t just damaged by isolated incidents, but by patterns. Over-policing, systemic discrimination, lack of accountability, and excessive use of force have drawn deserved criticism in the unchecked privilege law enforcement bodies have. In many communities, particularly those that are marginalized, the relationship with police is not one of safety and support but is one of fear and frustration.

Endorsing a political party, regardless of which political party, sends the message that the people with authority on our streets are not just enforcing laws, but choosing sides, and a message like this could very well resonate with the wrong kind of people, and lead to Durham Regional Police’s future staff being there for the wrong reasons.

If we want policing to be fair, unbiased, and in service of all Canadians, not just those aligned with a particular political ideology, we need clear, enforced boundaries. That means legislation barring police organizations from making political endorsements of any kind and demanding more from those who hold immense power in our society.

Raise your voice. Contact your local representatives. Share your concerns. Democracy only works when those who enforce the law are held to it and kept out of the political arena. It’s about time we remind them who they really work for.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh on the campaign trail with NDP candidate Craig Sauvé (Source: NDP)

The NDP has this ongoing habit of ditching their core values in favor of centrism. It’s a problem that’s cost them, time and time again. Take Thomas Mulcair, who refused to commit to running a deficit in 2015, a blunder that helped him get steamrolled by Justin Trudeau.

Then Jagmeet Singh came onto the scene, and people expected more of the same. The Right-Wing establishment media jumped all over him, branding him as part of a so-called "coalition" with the prime minister and accusing him of only being in it for a pension. They pushed this narrative to keep the NDP looking weak, and people actually bought into it.

But all of that is changing—and fast. Jagmeet Singh recently ended the supply and confidence agreement with Trudeau, making it clear he’s done with the prime minister’s inability to stand up for workers. In a campaign-style video uploaded shortly after breaking ties with the Liberals, Jagmeet Singh declared that he had "ripped up" the supply and confidence agreement.

Source: Jagmeet Singh, X/Twitter

"Justin Trudeau has proven again and again he will always cave to corporate greed. The Liberals have let people down. They don't deserve another chance from Canadians," Singh said

"There is another, even bigger battle ahead. The threat of Pierre Poilievre and Conservative cuts. From workers, from retirees, from young people, from patients, from families — he will cut in order to give more to big corporations and wealthy CEOs."

The message was clear: Singh isn’t just walking away—he’s taking a stand, sending a bold signal that the NDP won’t be held back by Trudeau’s failure to deliver for everyday Canadians. This move shows Singh isn't playing the compromise game anymore. He's drawing a line in the sand, and it’s about time.

Naturally, the Liberals weren’t happy with this move. They’ve shifted their campaign strategy, accusing the NDP of "caving into conservative pressure." But it’s the Conservatives who are really feeling the heat—they’re scrambling, desperate to figure out how to attack the NDP now that Singh has thrown a wrench in their usual playbook. With the political landscape shifting, both parties are being forced to rethink how they handle the NDP’s new direction.

Two by-elections dropped right after, with the NDP putting up Craig Sauvé in LaSalle—Émard—Verdun and Leila Dance in Elmwood—Transcona. Both heavy hitters. Sauvé had the radical right losing their minds for straight-up calling out the Israeli expansionist state and demanding recognition of Palestinian rights. Dance didn’t have a bold headline like that, but she’s everything you’d expect from the NDP—fighting for progressive values, standing up for the working class, and holding the rich accountable. She was stepping up to fill the seat left by former NDP MP Daniel Blaikie.

September 16th came and went, with LaSalle—Émard—Verdun being the target of the Longest Ballot Initiative. Craig Sauvé started off strong, but just like in Toronto—St. Paul’s, the promising MP that could’ve been got edged out by Bloc candidate Louis-Philippe Sauvé, landing in third place behind the Bloc and the Liberals with 26.1% of the vote.(Source: Elections Canada)

It wasn’t all bad though—the NDP scored a solid win in Manitoba. Leila Dance took the Elmwood—Transcona by-election, beating out Conservative Colin Reynolds and Liberal Ian MacIntyre with 48.2% of the vote. (Source: Elections Canada)

Pre-2024, the NDP’s message sucked

The NDP has historically struggled to nail by-elections, and I’m saying this as someone who’s been in the trenches. I worked with Durham’s NDP candidate, Chris Borgia, and during that time, I met Peter Julien and Jagmeet Singh. Chris is a great candidate with untapped potential, but the way the NDP campaigns—how it reaches out and competes—has been, at best, ineffective. In my riding, I saw the Liberals and especially the Conservatives campaign way more effectively. I even saw more lawn signs for independent candidate Pranay Gunti than for the NDP. This had nothing to do with Singh or the candidate—it was simpler than that. Compared to the competition, our campaign was a joke

Say what you will about the Conservatives, but they know how to mobilize everyone—from diehard Poilievre cultists to the average Joe walking down the street—to show up and vote in a by-election, even when they’re running wildly unqualified candidates like Don Stewart, who was literally drunk during his victory speech and campaigned by just walking around town in a T-shirt. This works because, yeah, Poilievre is toxic, a liar, transphobic, and a whole lot more—but people don’t focus on that. His message, even though it’s basically just ‘[verb] the [noun],’ taps into the negative feelings Canadians have, and it hits the lowest common denominator just right.

With the ripping of the SCA and a new MP at the table, the NDP seeks to reignite it’s campaign, it’s bold, it’s new, and it seeks to “Restore Hope.”

New NDP campaign podium, with new slogan “Restore Hope” (Source: Cambridge NDP)

Since publishing that video and officially ending the SCA with the Liberals, the NDP has shifted gears with a brand-new campaign slogan for the 2025 federal election: 'Restore Hope.' It’s a clear pivot from their 'Fighting for You' tagline they’ve been running with since 2021. 'Restore Hope' signals a fresh focus for the party, moving past the collaboration with Trudeau’s Liberals and setting their own course. They’re putting forward a message that speaks to rebuilding after years of disappointment, with a vision aimed at real, tangible change for Canadians who’ve been let down by the status quo.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh hasn’t just ripped up the deal with the Liberals—he’s been showing Canadians that he’s an unapologetic voice for progressive values, standing firm against extremists. When a group of keyboard warriors filmed themselves harassing him, Singh made headlines for facing their hate head-on, calling them out directly and asking who was shouting profanities at him.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh confronting a heckler who shouted profanities at him (Source: National Post)

“You’re a coward you’re not gonna say it to my face, that’s whats up.” Singh said

When Singh went to confront the heckler in this video, he immediately looked down, scrambling to delete the footage off his phone. Whether you’re left, right, or center, this was a complete joke—a keyboard warrior who forgot real life isn’t some exchange on Gab.com, and then ran off like a little girl. If you’re gonna insult someone, have the honor and conviction to stand by your words when they confront you. And if you regret it? Own your mistake.

The important takeaway here is Singh didn’t back down and instead stood his ground. This is the kind of leadership we need in Canada right now. Singh’s not here to play politics as usual; he’s here to fight for a future where Canadians can afford to live, where we’re not divided by hate and fear. He’s taken on the extremists, faced down the bigots, and shown that standing up for everyone in this country isn’t just talk—it’s action. And that’s what sets him apart from the rest.

Now, compare that to Trudeau, who straight-up runs away at the first sign of real pushback—just like that heckler he couldn’t handle. Or take Poilievre, who’s practically a walking strawman of a conservative. The guy can’t go two seconds without labeling you 'woke,' 'leftist,' 'groomer,' 'socialist'—whatever buzzword he thinks will rile up his base that day. It’s all performative nonsense. No substance, just empty labels and finger-pointing. but Jagmeet Singh? He’s out here actually fighting for real change, while these guys are playing a tired game of political dodgeball.

The New Orange Wave

The tide is finally turning, and the NDP has shown they’ve got a real shot at winning. They’ve proven they can put in the work—now they just need to go for it. Canadians want one thing above all else: to be able to afford life. That’s what’s on everyone’s mind. Sure, other issues are important, but if you're not addressing the cost of living, you're not getting people to the polls. The NDP is uniquely positioned—they’re progressive, they back blue-collar workers, and that’s a powerful combination.

On one side, you’ve got disillusioned Trudeau Liberals, who care about reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, union rights—you name it. On the other side, you’ve got center-leaning (non extremist) Poilievre Conservatives who are tired of Trudeau’s carbon policy and just want lower taxes for the middle class. The NDP can bring both of these groups under one banner because Jagmeet Singh stands for exactly that: a more balanced carbon policy, so middle-class Canadians aren’t crushed by the current tax, and unapologetic support for reproductive rights and the LGBTQ community.

Let’s not forget, the NDP is the party for unions, and Singh has always stood for making the millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share. No dodging, no lies—just straight talk about fixing a system that’s stacked against everyday Canadians. The NDP has the ball rolling, they’ve got the policies that could actually improve people’s lives, and they’ve got a leader who’s not a lying coward. This is their moment to shine. They’ve got the strongest platform for the working class, for progressives, and for anyone fed up with a broken system.

It’s time to give Jagmeet Singh the credit he deserves—he’s leading the charge for real change in Canada. The NDP’s on the rise, the momentum is there, and it’s time to ride that wave all the way to victory!