Lindsay Clancy, Psychosis, and the All-Too-Human Need to Explain the Inexplicable: A Psychiatrist’s Take

The story everyone seems to be talking about this week is the ongoing criminal trial of Lindsay Clancy. Clancy, as you probably know, is the suburban Massachusetts woman who strangled her three young children—Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months, then attempted to kill herself by cutting her wrists and jumping from a high window (leaving her paralyzed) in January of 2023. She did all of this during a brief interval when her husband had gone out to pick up a pizza. She’d been battling post-partum mental illness since the birth of her youngest child.

Her defence team is arguing that she is not guilty by reason of insanity due to post-partum psychosis. The prosecution is arguing that, although she was mentally ill at the time of the killings, she knew what she was doing (and that it was wrong) and therefore should be held criminally responsible for her actions.

Nobody disputes the basic facts of the case, save a few “true crime” nutbars on Instagram and TikTok who opine (without evidence) that the husband killed the children and convinced poor Lindsay to take the fall. The nutbars, predictably, have attracted a very large following.

Nutbars aside, those on the left of the political spectrum tend to view Clancy either as a victim of an abusive or uncaring husband (men are always bad, so he must, somehow, have pushed her into it) or as a victim of inadequate medical care (they should have been able to predict this tragedy. Women’s mental health issues are downplayed and neglected. Etc.)

Commenters on the right of the political spectrum, including the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh have called Clancy a “monster” who should be punished to the full extent of the law. They believe psychosis could not possibly explain Clancy’s actions, since there was some evidence of planning involved. Here’s a quote from Walsh, who appears to believe that “good” mothers are immune to the effects of post-partum depression:

“If you’re a mother who has ever entertained the idea of murdering your own children, or felt any desire to do so, it’s not because you’re a victim of ‘postpartum depression.’ You aren’t a victim at all… You’re a raging narcissist and you hate your children because they impose on your lifestyle… Hormones can’t cause you to develop murderous desires toward your own offspring. Your soul is the problem.”

On both sides of the political divide, some pundits believe it was psychiatric medications that made her do it. Many believe her psychiatrist should be punished for “allowing” this to happen. (Funny how no one blames the oncologist when cancer results in death.)

None of these armchair mental health professionals has, in all likelihood, ever met a person in the grips of full-blown psychosis. They’ve never gazed (as I have) on a young man strapped to a gurney because he was trying to gouge out his one remaining eye with a pen. (He’d gouged out the other one during a previous bout of psychosis.) The voices were telling him to do it. He believed that something worse would happen if he didn’t. Another young man I treated tried to attack anyone wearing eyeglasses, because he believed that these people—using their glasses—were able to manipulate his thoughts. I’ve talked to many people who believed their television was sending them personal messages or that the CIA had bugged their apartment. One woman thought Wayne Gretzky was communicating with her via the spirit world. He’d told her to get in her car and drive across the country, which she did—until she ran out of gas and the police picked her up on the side of the highway. If he’d told her to kill someone, she probably would have (but we all know Wayne Gretzky wouldn’t do that.) The same night I admitted Gretzky’s spirit-mate to hospital, I met the reincarnation of the apostle Paul, who had come to save the world except that he didn’t have enough money for a hotel room.* When someone is living inside a delusional belief system, things can seem perfectly reasonable to them that might seem bizarre or evil to those of us living in reality. A woman can come to believe the world is so full of suffering and evil that killing her children is actually doing them a favour. They can come to believe that their own children are not really their children at all, but demonic entities who must be eliminated. The voices inside their head might tell them to keep this information to themselves until after they’ve dealt with the problem. There might well be planning involved.

Most women with post-partum mental illness are not narcissistic baby-haters, as Matt Walsh seems to want them to be. It would be easier if they were monsters, though, wouldn’t it? Then we could rest assured that it couldn’t happen to us or the people we love. But in fact, the women who suffer from these conditions are often excellent and devoted mothers when they are well. It can happen to any woman. That’s the horrifying part. It could happen to Matt Walsh’s wife after she delivers her next baby, though I hope for her sake it does not.

Lindsay Clancy was, by all accounts, an excellent mother before her illness. She read to her children at bedtime, made up songs for them, filled the house with their art work, took them to music classes, made up monthly milestone photo collages. She was concerned about their safety and their diet and their sleep habits. Everyone who knew her, including her husband, the family nanny, friends and co-workers, described her as a loving, kind and caring mother. This was the “real Lindsay” according to the people who knew her best.

I’ve treated many women with post-partum depression, and a few with post-partum psychosis, which is much rarer and much scarier. The former can progress to the latter quite quickly. Thankfully none of the women I treated ever harmed their babies and most recovered fully. But when I read the account given by Lindsay Clancy’s psychiatrist I thought: that could have been me. It’s easy to predict these tragic events with the benefit of the “retrospectoscope”—but often nearly impossible in real time. Should we lock up every woman with post-partum mental illness because a tiny percentage of them might go on to harm their children? Where are we going to keep them all? Would women ever seek treatment if they knew this was our approach to the problem?

Yes, it’s possible that the medications Lindsay Clancy was taking contributed to her actions. In rare cases, SSRI antidepressants seem to induce violence. Maybe somebody—her doctors, her relatives, Lindsay herself—should have stopped the medications since, at best, they clearly weren’t working. But odds are good that it wouldn’t have changed the outcome. Reports of post partum psychosis (previously known as puerperal mania or melancholia) with infanticide date back as far as ancient Greece. Medical literature from the 19th century describes case series’ with recurring patterns of delusional thinking, such as women feeling that their child was damned, that the child must be “sent to God,” or that they themselves must die and take the infant with them. From Grok:

These cases were frequently recognized in 19th-century courts as temporary insanity linked to childbirth. Many women were acquitted, sent to asylums rather than prisons, or treated with relative leniency compared with other forms of homicide—reflecting the contemporary medical understanding that the puerperium could produce profound, often reversible, mental disturbance. Modern reviews of the older literature (notably by Ian Brockington and others) confirm that filicide occurred in a small but tragic minority of severe postpartum psychotic episodes long before effective antipsychotic or mood-stabilizing drugs existed.

So maybe it was the medications that made her do it and maybe it wasn’t. We will never know. I am no great fan of my own profession these days, but to the anti-psychiatric medication absolutists, I would ask: What, precisely, would you do with a young man who is strapped to a gurney because he’s trying to gouge out his one remaining eyeball?

The most interesting thing about the tragic case of Lindsay Clancy and her murdered children is what it tells us about ourselves. How uncomfortable we seem to be with not having someone—or some thing—to blame, whether it be Lindsay Clancy herself, or her husband, or her psychiatrists, or the medical system in general, or big pharma for over-promoting the medications she was given. All of these things may or may not have played a role. I don’t know. Matt Walsh certainly doesn’t know, and neither do the left wing demonstrators who’ve shown up at the courthouse each day during her trial to show support for Lindsay Clancy. Why, I wonder, do they feel the need to opine on this case at all?

In the old days people might have attributed Clancy’s behaviour to demonic possession—and that might not be such a bad way of conceptualizing it, even if just metaphorically. Or maybe it was just a tragedy, like metastatic cancer, that nobody could have stopped. What is it about mental illness in particular that makes this idea so hard to accept?

*some details were changed to protect patient identities

Losing Perspective

Some people called COVID “influenza with a great PR team”. Even Science™ himself, Anthony Fauci, admitted in his diary that the mortality rate was “acting like a bad influenza” with a mortality rate of “about 0.2 to 0.3%”. (Publicly he stated the number as 2-3%, and endorsed a dramatic and panicked response.)

Despite the mortality rate only slightly higher than typical influenza, media abounded with reports of “the worst pandemic since the Spanish flu”. They say if you repeat something enough it becomes true. But this assertion is not true, despite the repetition.

We have had many bad flu seasons since the famous Spanish flu of 1917-18. Do you remember any of them? Most people don’t.

In my 28-year-long career (yeah I’m that old) I’ve worked through several severe flu seasons. One year, all surgeries were cancelled for a spell because the post-op recovery room had to be commandeered for overflow of ICU patients—so many flu patients were flooding in. In contrast, during COVID, surgeries (and cancer screening and schools and sports and…) were shut down due to panic and not hospital overcrowding.

Two specific flu seasons are particularly notable. This was back at a time when naming them after their place of origin was not yet racist.

I am not old enough to remember either event, as I came into the world in the summer of ‘69. (That sounds like a great song title, eh?…) But my mom recalled the 68-69 flu well. My older brother was an infant, caught the flu, and became sick enough to be hospitalized. She recounted having to pass him off to a reassuring but harried nurse at the door of the peds ward. Inside she saw numerous oxygen tents (that’s the way they rolled back then) and sick babies and kids everywhere. It was packed. She told me that one or two babies in town actually died. My brother did not, thank God.

The ‘57-58 pandemic was actually a much bigger event per-capita than COVID. World population was about 1/3rd of what it is now, so 1-2 million deaths is the equivalent of 3-6 million people today. Yet schools generally stayed in session or if they shut down, did so briefly. There was no mandatory masking. No shutting down of businesses or sports. Life carried on.

In late 1968 world population was about 3.56 billion versus 8.54 billion today. So the 1 million estimate deaths from the Hong Kong flu would be the equivalent of 2.3 million today.

Now keep in mind that these flu pandemic death tolls occurred over one flu season: one winter. In contrast, the total toll of COVID deaths since stats began to be kept in early 2020 is about 7 million over 6 years, versus 6 million in one winter in 57-58 and 2.3 million in one winter in 68-69.

Also, one must consider that the definition of a “COVID death” was far more liberal than what a “flu death” back in the day. In the 50’s and 60’s we did not have PCR technology that could detect a fragment of flu virus code to magically turn any patient into a flu patient. We did not swab people with stage 4 breast cancer or end-stage dementia who were on death’s door and relabel them as “flu deaths”. Unlike with COVID, there were not perverse financial incentives to stamp patients with the “flu” label when they were hospitalized or died.

Had we had PCR technology during the flu pandemics of the 50’s and 60’s, and deployed it the same way as we did for COVID, the flu death tolls would have been dramatically higher.

Finally but importantly, COVID had an extreme preference for very elderly patients with severe comorbidities. In fact, in Canada the age of death for those deemed to have died from COVID was higher than average life expectancy at just shy of 84. Normally in public health we measure the impact of causes of mortality by how many “QALY’s” - Quality Adjusted Life Years - are lost. One child drowning can have a far higher impact on QALY’s than does a flu outbreak on the advanced dementia ward in the nursing home, even though many more people might die from the latter. For the 57-58 pandemic in Canada, 16% of those who died were infants, and it is estimated that two thirds of the decedents were under the age of 65. That is qualitatively VERY different than COVID. In Canada, 0.009% of COVID deaths were infants, and under 10% were under 65.

So to sum up, even just by overall numbers, but especially when we take into account the over-diagnosis of COVID, and also factoring in the ages of those who died, both of these flu pandemics were MUCH more impactful than was COVID. Yet neither caused mass panic, and both faded quickly from memory.

What changed between 1969 to 2020? There are many factors, but in my estimation the biggest contributor is that we have become a society of frightened people completely terrified of death and unwilling to take any risk.

I have great childhood memories of jumping into the bed of my uncle’s pickup truck with a bunch of cousins and friends and bouncing along a rural road to the beach. Now kids are not even supposed to be in the front seat of the frickin’ car until they are 13. Given this extreme safetyist mindset, is it surprising that we were so easily terrified by a bad flu?

Meme of the Week

Quote of the Week

The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism

-Sir William Osler

Happy Sunday, everyone.

#LetFreedomPlay

The WNBA has built its entire existence around “woke” politics. Commissioner Cathy Engelbert once described the league’s brand as a “bold, progressive entertainment and media property that embodies diversity, promotes equity, advocates for social justice, and stands for the power of women.” In 2020, the league dedicated its entire season to social justice, placed “Black Lives Matter” on courts, had players wear Breonna Taylor jerseys (“Say Her Name”), formed a Social Justice Council, and held moments of silence for various “progressive” causes. Players even postponed games in protest of the shooting of a black man, Jacob Blake, by Wisconsin police. The WNBA pioneered the whole notion of “Pride Night” at games and they continue to push the envelope on this spectacle even as mens’ sports leagues appear to be quietly backing away from it.

All of which puts the league and its virtue signallers in a bit of a pickle (no pun intended) with respect to recent developments. In case you haven’t been following this story, it all started with Indiana Fever player Sophie Cunningham who, during an interview with ESPN, made the astonishing claim that young girls and women shouldn’t have to compete in sports against transgender women—i.e., biological men—a statement which almost three quarters of the US population agrees with. This utterance should have been non-controversial, but of course there was pushback among the wokerati of the WNBA, with various coaches and players criticizing Cunningham and nattering on about “transphobia” and “inclusion” and “protecting trans rights.” Golden State forward Gabby Williams explicitly said she would welcome a transgender athlete “on my team or against my team, any time.” Well.

Enter Enes Kanter, a Turkish-American former NBA player and outspoken human rights advocate who officially changed his last name to Freedom after becoming a US citizen in 2021—and who recently declared that, if transgender women are welcome to play in the WNBA, and if gender is simply a matter of how you feel inside, then he she wants to be eligible for the WNBA draft next year. At six foot ten and 250 pounds, he she will no doubt be a formidable force on the court. Be careful what you wish for Gabby Williams!

Freedom was soon joined in his quest by Royce White, another former professional basketball player who says he’s beginning to feel like a woman (at least some of the time) and therefore wants to be included in the 2027 WNBA draft. White spent much of his pro career in the NBA’s developmental “G League”, where players are paid approximately $45,000 a year (as compared to salaries of top WNBA players in the $1.2 million dollar range.) His new pronouns likely reflect this.

To be fair, the WNBA does not have an explicit policy allowing transgender “women” to play—but they don’t have one that excludes them either. The only rule is that players must be “women” — but what, exactly, is a “woman?” It turns out they haven’t decided yet. The league’s “anti-hate” task force met on August 12th to discuss this very question and emerged without an answer. Fifteen women, who run a women’s basketball league, couldn’t come up with a definition of what a woman is. Maybe they should ask Matt Walsh. We are cursed to live in interesting times, no?

The encouraging thing about all of this is that the overwhelming reaction to Sophie Cunningham’s statements and the ensuing controversy was not a rush to cancel her or get her fired—though some half-hearted attempts were made. It was mockery. Jokes. Laughter at the absurdity of it all. Calls to produce the secret gender decoder ring that somehow allows the woke to distinguish between a “real” trans woman like “Lia” Thomas—wagging “her” penis all over the girl’s locker room and bravely shattering women’s swimming records—and a mere troll like Enes Kanter Freedom. The meme-lords are having a field day and the woke authoritarians are furious—presumably because people aren’t afraid of them anymore. Because they are getting hoisted on their own sanctimonious petard and people are laughing out loud at them. And this, friends, is how we finally defeat them. As one classic formulation puts it: a dictator can be hated, despised, or feared—but the one thing he cannot ultimately survive is being laughed at. So laugh away.

But of course, in the midst of all the laughter, there is a serious point to be made. Real women and girls have suffered—and continue to suffer in many jurisdictions. So keep up the fight, Enes Kanter Freedom, Royce White, JK Rowling. It’s hilarious, but what lies beneath it is dark—and not the least bit funny. #LetFreedomPlay.

The Avoidance Paradox: Lessons from the Great Peanut Panic

“There are things that make sense,” a wise old medical school professor of mine once opined, “and there are things that work.” These two things are not always the same—and we forget this at our peril. The history of medicine is rife with examples of things which seemed biologically plausible—things that made sense—but which turned out to have catastrophically negative effects. When the pairodocs were in medical school back in the 1990’s, for example, hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for postmenopausal women was all the rage. It was going to prevent heart disease by keeping every woman’s* sex hormones at pre-menopausal levels. The elixir of youth! It not only made sense, but observational studies proved women on estrogen had fewer heart attacks. The pharmaceutical companies were already counting their billions. Normal aging was about to become a disease to be treated—in 50% of the population, no less! (*this was back when we knew what a woman was)

The problem was that when they actually got around to doing randomized controlled trials, women taking HRT experienced higher rates of heart attacks, strokes and blood clots. The original observational studies were wrong because women taking HRT in the community tended to be healthier and wealthier than the population average. Of course they had fewer heart attacks! If the researchers had looked at rates of motor vehicle accidents, these likely would have been lower in the HRT group too. (Does anyone else remember the COVID vaccine studies showing reduced motor vehicle related deaths in patients who’d taken those miraculous injections? I rest my case. )

The great peanut panic of the late ‘90’s and early 2000’s is an even more stark example of a thing that made sense but backfired spectacularly. In the late ‘90’s, food allergies—and peanut allergies in particular—seemed to be increasing. Or at least there was more talk about them. So, in 2000, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP—the same august body that continues to recommend puberty blockers and surgery for gender confused children even as other countries and organizations acknowledge the potential harm of these interventions and back down—yes, that AAP) recommended that for high-risk infants, solid foods should not start until 6 months, dairy products until 1 year, eggs until 2 years, and peanuts, nuts, and fish until 3 years. They also recommended that pregnant and breastfeeding women avoid peanuts and other highly allergenic foods. While they acknowledged they didn’t have much evidence for these recommendations, they argued that avoiding exposure to peanuts while the immune system was immature would reduce the likelihood of “sensitization” to peanut proteins. It just made sense. It was the expert consensus. So everybody did it. Not just “high risk” families with histories of allergy and eczema, but pretty much everybody—in the US, and in Canada and in Europe. And guess what happened? The rate of peanut allergies in children more than tripled, increasing from 0.4 % of children in 1997 to 0.8% in 2002 to 1.4 % in 2008. (Though if you’d read the papers or womens’ magazines at the time, you’d have sworn the rates were closer to 50% and that children were dying every time a peanut butter sandwich managed to infiltrate the lunch room of their local elementary school. Fear sells magazines, apparently. Echoes of the pandemic.)

But then a group of researchers in the UK did something that should have been done decades earlier: a randomized trial with several hundred “high risk” infants, in which one group of babies was exposed to peanuts early (between 4 and 11 months) while a second group followed the standard APA advice to avoid early peanut exposure. By age 5, 13.7% of the kids who had avoided peanuts had peanut allergies, versus 1.9% of the early exposure group. It turns out that early exposure to antigens (like peanut proteins) actually trains your immune system to recognize these proteins as normal and non-threatening. Oops.

The guidelines were changed after 2015 (to pretty much the exact opposite of what they’d been) and, lo and behold, kids got healthier and peanut allergies declined dramatically.

There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, isn’t there? An immune system that goes unchallenged grows weak and incompetent. It can’t regulate itself properly. Sounds like a cautionary tale for child-rearing in general, doesn’t it?

Is there anything you can’t bet on now?

More on this next week, but does anyone else find this just a teensy bit creepy and weird?

Quote of the Week

“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

— Richard Feynman

Meme of the Week

Flu Vaccines now 27% more effective!!

I receive numerous e-newsletters from standard sources of medical “information”. These are sponsored by drug companies and often are associated with mainstream medical organizations. So their headlines are almost always predictable in that they endorse and highlight the benefits of vaccines and other pharmaceuticals. I couldn’t resist clicking on this headline that came today:

This is the headline that you’ll be seeing in the media and that docs and pharmacists will be repeating to their patients when advising them to get the shot. The question is, what does “27% more effective” mean in real life?

What was very interesting is that clicking on the link didn’t take me to the actual study, but rather to a CNN article. Hmm. Strange that.

This was a drug-to-drug comparison of standard vaccine versus mRNA with about 40,000 participants. There was no placebo arm. So we don’t know how patients who chose no vaccine would compare.

During the study, any patient who got any symptoms (sniffles, etc) that could be compatible with flu got a nasopharyngeal swab, which was analyzed with highly-sensitive PCR (see my piece The King’s Chessboard to understand why this method of analysis can be problematic). By the end of the trial, 2.8% of those who received the standard vaccine had tested PCR positive for flu, versus 2.0% of the mRNA participants. 2.0% is 27.4% lower than 2.8%.

So it’s a no-brainer then, right?! Just get the new vaccine. It’s better.

But the headline and the CNN article avoid the nuances of medical decision-making.

First, odds are very good you won’t get the flu even if unvaccinated. The odds of testing positive for flu in a given year are somewhere from 4-8%, (it’s a complicated thing to measure, thus the wide range).

Secondly, and as I’ve written about before, medical decision making needs to be based on ABSOLUTE risk reduction, not RELATIVE risk reduction. Is the expensive and risky drug being offered to potentially cure a cancer that is going to kill you if left to its own devices, or is it being offered to reduce shark attacks in your bathtub? Even if you accept that it is “27% more effective” (27% RELATIVE risk reduction), the ABSOLUTE risk reduction is only 0.8%, or less than 1 in 100.

Thirdly, it is quite well established at this point that flu shots do not “save lives” as is advertised. Some iterations of the flu shot do seem to reduce the odds of getting flu, surprisingly they sometimes increase the odds, but overall, flu mortality has not changed since the advent of flu vaccination becoming common. Dr. David Zitner and I discussed this at length a couple of years ago.

Finally, the X-factor with mRNA vaccines of course is the side effect profile. What are the unintended consequences. Will it jiggle your DNA in some way as to increase cancer risk? Might it cause myocarditis? Increase risk of clots? Our experience with COVID mRNA shots gave us legitimate reasons for caution. There is no reason to assume an mRNA flu vaccine will be any different, and no reason to assume that the harms, even if rare, won’t outweigh a 0.8% absolute risk reduction.

I’ll throw in a last comment in anticipation of reader comments and a discussion I may happen in the comments. My opinion is that competent adults should be free to make their own medical decisions. They can take Ozempic, have as much plastic surgery as they want, eat cheesecake for breakfast, smoke, or hit themselves in the head. The government is not our nanny. I have no problem with these shots being approved for use. If a person wants to believe that Big Pharma as policed by the FDA (or Health Canada or their equivalents in other countries) are trustworthy enough to take these shots, I say have at’er. But in my experience, just because a drug is approved, it does not follow that “this drug is more helpful than harmful for me, and therefore I should take it”. These decisions are personal. Use at your own risk.

Pay for your own damn EV charger

I recently ran into this article at the same time I just bought a new charger for our plug-in hybrid. You might think that having a plug-in hybrid means I’m happy to see the government funding more chargers. Au contraire, let me tell you why I’m against this.

I’m not against electric cars in general. They are cool technology, and for certain applications make more sense than gas vehicles (short hops around town, stop and go, warmer environments, etc). There are real advantages about which EV owners will reasonably expound. Maybe they are the right choice for some people.

But I don’t buy that they are an environmental saviour, or the way of the future. And even if I did, as a libertarian-leaning conservative, it drives me BANANAS when the government uses collective tax money to subsidize EV owners. If they aren’t affordable, it’s not up to the taxpayer to subsidize those who buy them.

EV owners don’t need subsidies. For more than two thirds of EV owners, the EV is their second vehicle. The average EV owner has a far above average income (estimates are from 1.7 to 2X average) compared to the poor schmucks who subsidize their purchase but often can’t afford one themselves. I ran into a good friend at a coffee shop a few years ago who excitedly told me about his new Tesla, but I couldn’t see it because it was up the road at a “free” charger (at a Government of Canada historic site). He and his wife are worth somewhere north of 10 million bucks. That same year my mother and father-in-law had just managed to cobble together enough pension money to make the payments on a Hyundai Accent, and were struggling to fill the tank as gas prices had jumped recently. My Tesla-owning friend got a 5000 dollar subsidy on his car paid for by taxpayer largesse, my in-laws paid the full price for their gas car.

I’m sure commenters will expand on this, but the environmental footprint of copper and lithium mining, rare earth metal extraction and purification, etc. that are necessary to produce EV’s makes the up-front environmental cost high enough that some people debate whether they are actually environmentally superior to ICE cars. (Internal Combustion Engine, not those vehicles driven by Immigration and Customs Enforcement). In provinces like Nova Scotia, where a good chunk of electricity is still produced by coal, or imported from out of province at considerable line losses, how enviro-friendly is electricity? Do EV owners drive “zero-emissions vehicles”, or coal-powered cars?

The government doesn’t subsidize the building of gas stations or provide free gas for drivers. Nor should it. And for the same reasons it should not be building chargers or paying for electricity for wealthy EV owners. Choose whatever car you want, and pay your own way.

Have the Thought Police Arrived in Canada?

Bill C-9 (the Combatting Hate Act) received royal assent on June 18, 2026, and its provisions came into force on July 18, 2026. Shortly after it came into effect, our friends at the JCCF posted this:

Perhaps more alarmingly, within weeks of the bill’s passage at least two major Canadian police forces (apparently chomping at the bit to begin investigating thoughtcrimes) put out vaguely threatening social media posts regarding “non-criminal hate-motivated incidents.” First the Durham Police Force in Ontario posted this:

Not to be outdone, the Edmonton Police Force posted this on X, Facebook and Instagram:

Apparently having a bias, wanting certain groups of people to be deported, or even criticizing their driving skills, is now grounds for police investigation. It’s starting to sound alarmingly like the UK, where records are kept of “non-crime hate incidents” and tens of thousands of people have been arrested over the past few years for offensive online speech, including, most famously, comedian Graham Linehan, who was met on his arrival at Heathrow last year by five armed police officers after posting gender critical views (similar to my own) on social media.

So far, there have not been any arrests in Canada for social media posts and the thought police have not yet showed up on the pairodocs’ doorstep. Still, the trend is chilling. And even if offensive speech is never prosecuted criminally, all is certainly not well on the free speech front. (American readers: give thanks for your First Amendment protections. We envy you.) One of the tools available to petty tyrants in this country (even before Bill C-9 came into effect) is the kangaroo court system of provincial “human rights” tribunals, which, in truly Orwellian fashion, seem to have become more about squashing basic rights than defending them. Take the case of former Chilliwack school trustee Barry Neufeld who, in February of 2026, was ordered by the BC Human Rights Tribunal to pay $750,000 plus costs to several LGBTQ-identifying members of the Chilliwack Teachers’ Association for “injury to dignity, feelings, and self-respect.” The complaint arose from his public criticism of transgender ideology and its incorporation into school materials/curriculum. No criminal offence was ever alleged, let alone proven. Some people claimed that he hurt their feelings, and those people had the correct political views according to the BC “human rights” tribunal. That was it. (One wonders what would happen if a Christian teacher claimed that transgender drag queens twerking in front of small children offended them? Never mind, we all know the answer to that question.)

Meme of the Week

Please note that according to Canadian law, it is now illegal to laugh at this meme. Please conduct yourself accordingly. American readers are still permitted to laugh.

Quote of the Week

“One way to make sure crime doesn’t pay would be to let the government run it.” -Ronald Reagan

It’s been a crazy week for us with the build-up and then disappointment of Anthony Fauci’s appearance in front of congress. We certainly live in interesting times. Happy Sunday!

Sad But Not Surprised - Fauci states that pandemic truths would incriminate him

A friend of mine said it best this week. Anthony Fauci is an evil little gnome. AI obliged me with a picture. And I’ll refer to him as The ELG for the rest of this article.

When I first heard that his diary had been released, I thought it must be a hoax. Who keeps a diary these days? And if he did have one, wouldn’t it be on paper, in a bottom drawer somewhere in his house? Nope. It turned out he kept it on government computers, subject to scrutiny and public view. Apparently his narcissism knows no bounds.

Just how narcissistic was this diary? He sounds like a 14-year old girl whose Tik-Tok video went viral and now she is being recognized everywhere. This is a real quote.

Big front page article abut me appeared in the Washington Post. Very flattering. The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. It is not hyoperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable peson in the world. Countless profiles on me in multiple media. I cannot even read all the things that are written abuyt me since I am so busy . . . seriously. POTUS seems to be enamored of me even though I am taking the spotlight away from him. We are developing a very unique and interesting relationship. The entire secret service corps is coming over to me and chatting. They let me into the first gate without even checking ID.

How narcissistic. But how stupid to keep a record of his real thoughts, which can now be compared to his public utterances. The question of “did he really believe what he was saying?” has definitively been answered.

It was disappointing but not at all surprising that The ELG pled the 5th over and over, even to the question: “What colour is your tie?”.

Will he be jailed for contempt of congress, as were Republicans Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro? I don’t know. But what I do know is that someone who has said “I represent science” didn’t do a very good job of doing so by claiming that he would incriminate himself if he answered questions about science.

The pandemic debacle, and The ELG’s role in it, is bigger than Watergate. It’s bigger than Monica Lewinsky. It’s bigger than the Iraq WMD hoax. Our civil liberties were crushed. Our society was shut down. We were locked in our homes. Friends and family split over pandemic policy. Millions died. It should be the biggest news story EVER. And therefore, I believe that what is most staggering about this week is not the infuriating but entirely expected blanket refusal of The ELG to answer questions that Americans - and the rest of us around the world who followed in their toxic wake of pandemic policy - deserve to know. It is the complete disinterest of the mainstream media.

Here in Canada, the CBC.ca mainpage this week featured an Orange-Man-Bad story and fluff pieces about whales and a controversial prank by a Scottish golfer. Even if you scrolled to the bottom, there was no mention of the evasions of The ELG.

We are increasingly not simply polarized, but living in two completely different realities. As the late, great Scott Adams said, those on the different ends of the political spectrum are watching two different movies of reality play out. Those of us who feel that the pandemic was mismanaged, that crimes were committed, that many enriched themselves by preying on the public, and that accountability is essential watched this week’s happenings with great interest. To us, The ELG’s slipperiness, narcissism, and proven record of lying is more proof that we are correct.

Most on the left are completely oblivious. If they heard anything at all about what happened this week, it has been framed for them as a witch hunt by evil Republicans who hate science. They continue to worship in front of their ELG bobblehead, and continue to believe that masks, lockdowns, and vaccine mandates kept us all safe. To them, we “followed the science” thanks to the leadership of The ElG.

My life was forever changed by speaking out against pandemic policy. I was fired. Friends, family, and colleagues sneered at me, badmouthed me, called me an idiot. I ended up moving from my home in the neighbourhood where I was born, raised, and worked. I continue to live in hope that someday those who vilified me will learn the truth and that doing so will somehow temper their bitterness towards me. Sadly, I don’t think this week moved them any closer to doing so.

Your Tax Dollars At Work

Cape Breton University has consistently lived at the bottom of the MacLean’s rankings of universities in Canada. It’s only “success” has come from attracting legions of foreign students who use the student visa program to bypass Canada’s traditional, high-functioning, points-based immigration system. Despite many having very poor English comprehension, they pass courses that have been staggeringly dumbed-down. “If at first you don’t succeed, lower your standards.”

And like all universities in Canada (and, I daresay, the Anglosphere) it has long been captured by the forces of the far-left.

Total taxpayer funding of universities has increased by about 2.5X in inflation-adjusted dollars since the 60’s. And public funding was already very significant by that time. You’ll be happy to know that those hard-earned tax dollars that your government is appropriating from you are going to essential research projects like “Queering the Trail”. Nice. This is not a one-off, cherry-picked example. Over the years I noticed that a great number of the funding announcements at CBU were in fields like women’s studies or realms like “indigenization” and “decolonization”.

When research is published that has been done at an accredited university, it becomes legitimized. “Decolonizing light is real because I read a study from Concordia”. This is called “idea-laundering”.

It burns my bottom enough that this type of “research” happens at legitimate universities. It makes it ten times as galling that my tax dollars are being used to fund it.

Hey, if you’re not going to use that liver, do you mind if…

Canada is one of the few jurisdictions in the world that allows organ donation after doctor assisted suicide, and we do it more frequently than anywhere else in the world. This is already problematic from an ethical point of view, in that patients may feel pressured into proceeding with MAiD “to help others” and may feel reluctant to change their minds regarding if/when they want to die should they start to have second thoughts. (There’s somebody waiting for your heart and kidneys but, you know, no pressure.)

But a recently published paper in the New England Journal of Medicine takes the ethical challenges of MAiD/organ donation to a whole new level by suggesting that MAiD patients need not be dead when their organs are harvested, since they are voluntarily consenting to death and are being killed by a doctor anyway.

This would contravene current law, which requires that an organ donor be dead before organs can be retrieved (the Dead Donor Rule) and prohibits doctors from killing a patient by removing their organs.

The authors of the NEJM paper argue that removing organs before death would result in “fresher” and healthier organs, potentially improving the success of subsequent transplant(s) and saving the lives of more organ recipients. Since a doctor is going to kill the MAiD patient anyway, they argue, why not let them kill the person by removing their vital organs while the organs are still oxygenated and healthy? Under sedation of course. They’re going to be dead either way. Does it matter, ethically, if the organs come out before or after death?

Somehow, yes it does. We already have a system in Canada in which many people feel pressured into pursuing MAiD, as we’ve discussed at length in previous posts.

How might that dynamic get even worse if vulnerable patients come to be seen as a source of healthy organs for desperate people? (In fact, they would be the healthiest and freshest organs of all because, unlike other donors, these patients would be alive when their organs are removed.)

And what effect would this have on trust in the organ donation system? Would people refuse to sign their organ donation card for fear of being “MAiDed” when they go to hospital?

Once we’ve established the precedent of taking organs out of living bodies, where will it end? Is it such a stretch to think that the next step down this slippery slope might be sacrificing the severely handicapped to save the gifted? Sacrificing the old to save the young? Or at least pressuring them to sacrifice themselves? Would there not at least be a temptation to do so?

We’ve all heard about the (credible) allegations of forced organ harvesting from prisoners (including political prisoners) in China. How do the Chinese justify this practice to themselves? Are we so sure we’re never going to get there?

Quote of the Week

“It is a shame that things are moving so quickly that I don’t even have time to savor for a moment the many awards that I have been getting”

-Anthony Fauci, in his diary

Meme of the Week

Our Sunday Brunch comes to you from Canso Nova Scotia where The Pairodocs are soaking up the sea air and music here at the Stan Rogers Festival. If you’ve never been, you should plan to come.

Red Pill Green

I’ve always had a healthy dose of skepticism around what I’d call “motivated science” — think pharmaceutical companies conducting research on their new blockbuster drugs—but before the COVID debacle I was painfully naive about science that didn’t have any obvious financial angle. Oh, I was vaguely aware of things like the replication crisis in science and the growing ideological bias of scientific journals. But like a good little citizen, I (for the most part) trusted the experts™.

To say that the scales fell from my eyes during the pandemic would be an understatement. It was painful, in much the same way (I imagine) it must be if you find out your spouse has been cheating on you: it not only changed the way I saw the present and the future, it rewrote the past. Much of what I had believed prior to 2020—about my profession, about the physical world, about human nature itself—became suspect.

One of the most egregious lies during the pandemic—in part because it caused the greatest damage—came courtesy of Dr. Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College London. In March of 2020, Ferguson predicted—based on a model later found to contain numerous flawed assumptions and computer coding errors—a mass casualty event of apocalyptic proportions, with the potential for 40 million deaths worldwide. The only solution, he warned, was “radical physical distancing of the entire population,” a solution which had been discussed and dismissed as too damaging by the World Health Organization (WHO) mere months earlier. But Ferguson was a world-renowned expert™ and fear is a powerful motivator. People all over the world responded to his report by simply forgetting how to think and panicking: Hence the two years from hell we all lived through in Canada and elsewhere.

Ferguson’s predictions—and his proposed solution—were so egregiously wrong and so incredibly damaging in so many ways, its hard to believe anyone ever took them seriously. But alas. The people who died as a result of lockdown measures will never come back. The social and educational losses visited upon the most vulnerable children will never be undone. The economic damage continues to ripple through our lives. And trust in “Science™” and “Experts™” may never recover. Nor should it.

Which brings me, at last, to what I actually want to talk about today, i.e., the “climate catastrophe,” as our esteemed legacy media is fond of calling it. The same media which boldly claimed a bad cold was going to kill us all and which now claims that everywhere in the world is warming faster than everywhere else in the world:

First, though, a confession: I used to be a card-carrying member of the Green Party of Canada. (In my defence, this was a long time ago, back when the Greens had a libertarian-leaning “localist” faction and before they went completely batshit crazy.) Even after my Green Party days, I trusted climate “experts” and thought the science was pretty clear on global warming (“97% of scientists agree,” etc.). It seemed to me that it was a genuine issue and that it really was 1) probably due to human activity and 2) a potential existential threat.

But after the pandemic debacle, I couldn’t stop seeing echoes in the climate change narrative: the fear-mongering, the constant media trumpeting of worst-case scenarios, the silencing and shaming of even mildly dissenting (or even questioning) voices, the predictive models based on dubious assumptions and cherry-picked data, the insistence that “the science is settled,” the desire to attribute every bad outcome to the “big scary thing” (i.e. COVID/climate change) even when similar outcomes have always happened. And perhaps worst of all: the insistence on draconian “mitigation measures” with the potential to ruin economies and kill vulnerable people.

So I started to read more widely and listen to alternative voices. And what I discovered was, to say the least, thought-provoking: Credible alternative theories as to what is causing the planet to warm, such as changes in solar activity and natural multi-decadal ocean cycles. Critics pointing to unexplained past warmer periods (such as the Medieval Warm Period and the Holocene Optimum) when the planet had lower atmospheric CO₂ levels. Critics pointing to potential flaws in data collection (e.g. the “urban heat island effect.”) Credible people like Michael Schellenberger and Bjorn Lomborg, who believe climate change is real and probably human-caused but make a convincing case that it is not catastrophic and that proposed mitigation measures (such as “net zero” strategies) are potentially far worse than the problem they are trying to solve.

But questioning drastic action around climate change is verboten. The climate is one of the increasing number of areas where dissent is not permitted. Social policing starts with labelling anyone with questions a “denialist”. You can now be a climate change “denialist”, as well as a residential school “denialist”, or a COVID “denialist”. But you can believe that a man with a beard is a woman and not be a human biology “denialist”. The word “denialist” is a bludgeon swung at those who dare to dissent from approved mainstream narratives.

The narrative control seems to be working. Almost half of young Canadians surveyed in a 2022 study said they believed humanity is doomed because of climate change, 78% reported that climate change impacts their overall mental health, 37% reported that their feelings about climate change negatively impact daily functioning and 39% reported hesitation about having children due to climate change. (Once again we see echoes of the pandemic, when surveys showed people wildly overestimating the risk of the virus to themselves and others, and when our fear of the virus did more damage than the virus itself.)

This week, the climate catastrophe topic du jour is forest fires, with headlines like this appearing everywhere:

Yet in my home province of New Brunswick, the worst ever forest fire by far occurred in October of 1825. How do the “scientists” interviewed by CBC account for that?

From Wikipedia:

About 1/3 of the homes in Fredericton were destroyed, but the main devastation was 100 miles (160 km) to the northeast commencing from Bas Caraquet. The preceding summer was a particularity hot one, with bush fires common.^[1] On the evening of October 7, 1825, the firestorm roared through Newcastle, New Brunswick (now part of the City of Miramichi), and in less than 3 hours reduced the town of 1,000 people to ruins – of 260 original buildings, only 12 remained. Only 6 of 70 buildings survived in the adjacent village of Douglastown. The fire similarly destroyed other communities, including Moorefield, Napan, and Black River Bridge. Chatham, Nelson, and Doaktown escaped the fire. The cause of the blaze is not known, but it was likely human-caused.^[2]

About 160 people died in and around Newcastle, including prisoners in the Newcastle Jail. Elsewhere, the totals were likely higher, given the number of lumbermen in the forests at the time (about 3,000). To escape the blaze many residents took refuge with livestock and wildlife in the Miramichi River.^[3]

In total the fire(s) consumed almost 16,000 km² (about 1/5 of New Brunswick’s forests or 3.95 million acres). The blaze has been partly attributed to unusually hot weather in the summer and fall of 1825, coupled with outdoor fires by settlers and loggers.^[3]

And it’s not just New Brunswick. Worldwide, as Bjorn Lomborg has documented, although wildfire damage to property has gone up (likely a reflection of population and property growth in forested areas) the area burned annually has actually been falling.

Meanwhile, the West is destroying itself in its effort to do as the CBC “scientists” suggest (“just stop burning fossil fuels”)—even as China keeps building new coal-fired power plants at a furious pace:

One thing that’s always given me pause about the climate change narrative is that it seems to be overtly anti-Western, with China, India and other non-Western polluters given a free pass. Surely the atmosphere doesn’t care where the greenhouse gas came from, or whether the people who produced it are white or brown? Another is the environmental movement’s apparent aversion to the expansion of nuclear power. I mean, if they truly believe that burning fossil fuels poses an existential threat to the survival of the species, how could they possibly be opposed to the only realistic large scale carbon-free alternative? Unless the real goal (at least for some of them) is not to reduce carbon at all but to hasten the destruction of the West? Maybe, as one particularly cynical poster on X opined, “you are the carbon they want to reduce.” When you see the hordes of private jets rolling into Davos every year, it certainly makes you wonder.

Meme of the Week

Quote of the Week

Knoll’s law of media accuracy: “Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true, except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge”.

As a psychiatrist, I’ve watched with some dismay as the mental health of the political left has declined disproportionately over the past couple of decades, a trend which has become particularly alarming amongst younger “progressives.” Although young people in general are less mentally healthy than us “more experienced” folks, those on the left of the political spectrum are suffering through a truly astounding mental health crisis.

Most of us have heard the statistics in one form or another. We’ve seen charts like the one below showing that more than half of young liberal women have been diagnosed with a mental health condition—a rate more than twice as high as their conservative counterparts. This is not just the “I took the anxiety quiz in Cosmo and thought it sounded a bit like me” phenomenon, but an actual professional diagnosis of a mental health condition at some point in their lives. Think about this: If you are a mentally healthy young woman on the left of the political spectrum in North America, you are in a minority.

If we flip the numbers around and look at rates of happiness and life satisfaction, liberal women report significantly lower levels compared to conservative and moderate women. According to the 2024 American Family Survey, only 12% of liberal women aged 18–40 said they were “completely satisfied” with their lives, compared to 37% of conservative women.

Similar disparities were found in feelings of loneliness, with liberal women being the loneliest group in the survey.

As a former lefty myself, these numbers bring me no joy and lead me to wonder. What could possibly be causing a whole generation of young liberals* (*I’ll use this word as shorthand for “those on the left of the political spectrum” even though I believe it no longer accurately describes them) to become mentally ill? Or am I reversing the chicken and the egg? Could it just be that the mentally ill are more likely to embrace leftism? Could it be a bit of both, a circular thing?

Many have pointed to the role of social media in the declining mental health of young people and this is undoubtedly a contributing factor—but it can’t explain the ever-increasing difference between liberals and conservatives, which holds true across all age groups and both sexes. Conservatives have smartphones too—they just seem more resistant to being deranged by them.

If you listen to the leftists themselves, they’ll sometimes tell you (without evidence) that it’s because of having to endure the presidency of Donald Trump (even though the decline started during the Obama presidency and isn’t just an American phenomenon), or that it’s due to the pending climate apocalypse, or the fact that right wing troglodytes like yours truly simply don’t understand how bad things really are. (Don’t you see? It’s because they’re so much more intelligent!)

But when you look at the actual evidence, a number of factors emerge to help explain the left/right gap in mental health. Some are concrete and relatively easy to understand: conservatives, for example, are more likely to get married and are much more likely to go to church —and these factors alone (as we’ve discussed previously here at pairodocs) are associated with better mental and physical health, as well as longer lifespan.

To quote from our previous post on this issue:

Christians—and people of faith in general—have better than average coping skills and overall mental health. They have improved feelings of social connectedness and a greater sense of purpose than the non-religious. They report less depression, and have an improved ability to cope with adverse events. (They also make better lifestyle choices and live, on average, four years longer than non-religious people, but I digress). All of this is backed up by mountains of data.

Exactly why religious people experience better mental health has never been fully sorted out, but there are some plausible theories. It could the deep social bonds formed within religious communities. Or the emphasis on gratitude, which has been independently shown to reduce stress and feelings of depression. Or perhaps the sense of purpose which accompanies the belief that we’re created to serve something higher than ourselves.

Locus of Control and the plague of victimhood culture

A somewhat more abstract—yet real and well documented—difference between liberals and conservatives lies in how they perceive their own sense of agency in the world, a construct psychologists refer to as “locus of control.” In general, conservatives are more likely to manifest a primarily internal locus of control—meaning they perceive themselves as having a significant degree of control over the circumstances of their lives and the outcomes they wish to achieve. Liberals, conversely, are more likely to manifest an external locus of control—meaning they feel as if external forces—racism, sexism, illness, trauma, brain chemicals, you name it—have imposed a set of circumstances on them which they are largely powerless to change. Not surprisingly, people with an internal LOC tend to be mentally healthier and more resilient under stress.

Your grandmother knew this. Yet, as a culture, we seem to be actively promoting external LOC thinking—it’s in the media, in the arts and—perhaps most alarmingly—it has taken over our schools and universities. We no longer speak of “gluttony” and “sloth” as our ancestors did. We don’t even talk about “overindulgence” or “intemperance.” Instead we speak about “alcohol use disorder” and “living with obesity” (as if obesity were a slightly distasteful roommate we just can’t get rid of.) We are encouraged to think of ourselves as hapless victims. To do otherwise is “far right.” We prescribe pills. We look for childhood trauma to explain away bad decisions. We blame the patriarchy and systemic racism and hand out prison sentences based on skin colour. It seems so much kinder and gentler than just telling people they could do better, like grandma used to.

In universities, we teach young people that hard work, self-reliance and goal-directedness (which go along with internal locus of control) are symptoms of “whiteness”— and therefore should be treated with suspicion.

We no longer teach children the old adage: “sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me” — an internal LOC statement. We teach them that words can cause them serious and irreparable harm (with the logical corollary that people who offend them with words must be silenced.) Not surprisingly, people who buy into the belief that speech can cause lasting harm (an explicitly external LOC belief) tend to be younger, female and politically liberal. They are also more depressed— and more likely to endorse censorship and political violence. Just as killing the Jews made a twisted kind of “sense” if you bought into the underlying premises of Nazi “science,” so murdering Charlie Kirk might seem justified if you truly believe that oppositional words can maim and kill. Not surprisingly, studies confirm that young liberals are the most likely group to endorse political violence:

This cultural bias against self-reliance and individual agency (and in favour of victimhood and external locus of control) has created a vicious circle of perceived helplessness, medicalization of normal distress, and ultimately a real epidemic of anxiety and depression.

As Unherd’s Gurwinder Bhogal put it:

as society has liberalised, and medicalised, young people have lost both self-belief and resilience. Many have subsequently become trapped in a cycle where they feel distress, and pathologise it, causing more distress, leading to more pathologisation and more distress, which eventually becomes textbook anxiety and depression. The rise in diagnoses is therefore not simply an illusion caused by medicalisation; society is teaching kids to develop real dysfunctions.

This is the greatest danger of the pathologisation pandemic: belief in one’s sickness is self-fulfilling. It’s a disease not of any bodily organ but of hope itself, and it harms its victim by crippling their immunity to everything else

But it goes beyond even this. Now our culture is teaching young people to actively embrace their identity as victims, to seek out ways in which to make themselves victims, and to vilify normality. Ideas which were once considered common sense (and which formed the cornerstone of the most effective schools of psychotherapy) are now branded as “right wing tropes.” Even going to the gym is “far right.”

It’s considered wrong to even want to be better. And to imply that a person could change their thinking or behaviour to achieve a better life for themselves and their community? Blasphemy. Literally Hitler. (Just ask Jordan Peterson.) The more of a victim you are, the higher your status in this brave new upside down world. And there are perks that go beyond social status, as many university students have discovered:

I wish I could tell you to look to the mental health profession for answers, but alas. The cultural forces pushing young people in the direction of helplessness and victimhood are exactly the opposite of what patients are supposed to learn in psychotherapy, but many (?most) therapists—perhaps victims of these cultural forces themselves—appear to have forgotten this. Or were never taught it in the first place, since the cultural Marxists seem to have captured most of the psychology and social work faculties. Therapy itself—or what passes for therapy today—has become an enabler and legitimizer of this toxic way of thinking, as Abigail Shrier pointed out in her excellent book Bad Therapy. Maybe instead of spending still more money on “mental health” we should just tell young people to go to the gym and go to church. Or to listen to their grandma.

As if this wasn’t all bad enough, those on the political left are forced to live with deep contradictions in their philosophy. Women need special treatment, but a woman is anyone who claims to be a woman. I support gay rights, but I also support Hamas. We are living on stolen land and don’t deserve to be here, but I believe in open borders. Stay tuned to Pairodocs for part two of this series, where we’ll look at this important factor impacting the mental health of the political left: the demoralizing effect of what Solzhenitsyn called “living by lies”.

Please just let me watch the game

We have a long connection with North Carolina and have become Hurricanes fans (for the non-sporty amongst you, that is the NHL franchise based in Raleigh). A couple of years ago we attended a home game, only to find out on arrival that it was “Pride Night”. We were subjected to numerous information (advocacy) booths and tables staffed by legions of odd looking humans with multiple piercings and tattoos and brightly coloured hair, passing out pamphlets and selling rainbow t-shirts and hats. They seemed to be much more representative of the T’s, Q’s, and other letters that have appended themselves to the original G and L of the original acronym. Announcements were made before the game and the Jumbotron flashed pro-pride messages during breaks and intermissions. We went to a hockey game and a pride festival broke out. All we wanted to do was watch the game. Sigh…

It’s been interesting to see more and more athletes saying no to the rainbow mafia in the last few years. Clayton Kershaw caused controversy by scrawling a bible verse on his baseball cap in response to the LA Dodgers’ decision to include open mocking of religion as part of pride celebrations. NHL goalie James Reimer refused to wear a pride jersey, citing his Christian faith.

NHL players Eric and Mark Staal refused to don pride jerseys in 2023, speaking for many when they said:

Put more simply: live how you want to live, just don’t shove the pride stuff down my throat.

There has been enough pushback that several NHL teams have dropped or toned down their pride night events (although of course MSM is portraying this as a bigoted move, potentially a result of pressure from the Russians). I’m guessing that it was pressure from both fans and players that forced this change.

I have lots of gay and lesbian friends who I admire and love. They don’t have blue hair. They don’t wear rainbow shirts or fly rainbow flags on their lawn. They don’t have more piercings and tattoos than I have follicles. They don’t need pride nights for their self-esteem, which instead comes from providing value to their communities as physicians, lawyers, accountants, aunts, uncles, friends and more. They make our world a better place.

Pride nights do not make the world a better place. Shoving pride down the throats of people who just want to watch a hockey game is annoying, preachy and divisive. Data suggests that the aggressive approach of the modern pride movement may be creating a backlash, decreasing support for gay marriage and other LGB issues. If these type of pride events do anything, it is to hurt the reputation of gays and lesbians, and as such it is good to finally see the rainbow tide receding.

The trans movement is not just anti-woman, it’s anti-gay

Several years ago I was chatting with a friend of mine—who happens to be a gay man—about the then emerging transgender craze. I treaded carefully, not wanting to offend my gentle and largely apolitical friend, but it was him who pointed out the inherent homophobia of the transgender movement. He wondered aloud what would have happened to him, as a sensitive and somewhat effeminate boy, had the trans craziness been around when he was young. He was right to be concerned. As Andrew Doyle noted recently in UnHerd:

The statistical evidence of the risk to gay people is clear. Data published by the Tavistock’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) — the NHS pediatric clinic that was shut down in March 2024 after it was determined by the Cass Review to be providing treatment that was unsafe and unevidenced — showed that an overwhelming majority of its adolescent patients were either gay or bisexual. In 2012, this amounted to around 90% of females and more than 80% of males. By 2015, the proportions had declined but remained a majority, with 70% of females and 60% of males falling within this category.

This topic exploded in the Twitterverse this week after Amnesty International first published and then rapidly withdrew—probably after talking to its lawyers—a report naming several gay and lesbian groups (along with a women’s rape crisis centre) on its list of “anti-rights” organizations. Several Christian groups also ended up on the list, but, oddly, not a single Muslim organization.

Very quickly, posts like this began proliferating on X:

What are we to make of all this? Is it yet another example of “enantiodromia” — the tendency for things to come full circle and eventually turn into their opposites? Has the far left become anti-gay? Tell us your thoughts in the comments.

Women are Destroying Free Speech

I’ve written extensively in the past (mainly here and here) about how the feminization (and to some extent secularization) of our culture and institutions is inextricably linked to the emergence of the monstrously destructive set of ideas which has come to be known as “wokeness.”

As I said in a previous post:

You see it everywhere, once you start to look: this weird contorted projection of the caregiving instinct onto a world teeming with child substitutes. Entire groups of “marginalized” people get swept up in this raging tide of misplaced compassion and infantilization. Hence the ubiquitous pseudo-religion of Wokeness, that strange and deformed love-child of subverted maternal and religious instincts.

Helen Andrews popularized a similar argument in her essay “The Great Feminization,” published in Compact magazine on October 16, 2025, and in her subsequent interviews on the Triggernometry podcast and elsewhere. (This was many months after we’d first written about it here at pairodocs—just sayin’ )

But today I’d like to emphasize one particularly pernicious aspect of our descent into what I’ve previously called gynocratic techno-authoritarianism: this being its chilling effect on free speech.

Have you noticed that pretty much everywhere censorship is being pushed, the justification for silencing others is inevitably “safety?” And how can one argue against safety without sounding like the bad guy? The ultimate example of this was, of course, during the COVID pandemic, when people were routinely censored for saying things that in many cases turned out to be true. The justification for the censorship, as always, was “public safety”— but one wonders how much misery could have been avoided if we’d been allowed to have honest discussions about things like school closures and vaccine side-effects and risk-benefit analysis in general?

And now we have governments across the Western world (with the notable exception of the USA) pushing various iterations of “online safety” legislation designed to “protect us” from various forms of “hate speech” and “misinformation.” In Canada and several European countries, governments seem very concerned with protecting us from people who disagree with the government, or who offend the sensibilities of that government’s base. Because, you know, safety.

So what does this have to do with the Great Feminization? Well. I’ll give you two guesses which of the two (or 65, or 102, or whatever) genders is most likely to support censorship. Hint: it’s not men. In study after study, men support free speech more strongly than women do, while women are more likely to value—you guessed it—safety, and other related concepts like “inclusivity.” Women are also more likely to support the cancellation of speakers whose ideas they deem offensive, and more likely to support a person being fired for what they deem offensive opinions, even if those opinions are scientifically based. Much of this data is reviewed nicely in Dr. Cory Clark’s paper in Psychology Today. In Dr. Clark’s original research, findings were similar:

In one study with 559 online adults, participants read five passages from books (that were made up for purposes of this study) and reported their desires to censor those books by indicating their agreement with statements like, “They should remove the book from the library” and “A professor should not be allowed to require the book for class.” The passages included one containing swear words, one containing a gory description, one arguing that there are evolved sex differences in leadership ability, one arguing that certain religions inspire violence, and one arguing that there are race differences in intelligence test scores. Across all five statements, women were more censorious than men.

Some people think its unsafe to misgender a big hairy man in a dress who wants to force a woman to wax his balls. Or to cast doubt on the “climate catastrophe,” even if you are just publishing your weather data. Something can be factually true, after all, but still deemed unsafe, as we found out during the pandemic. Will things like these be illegal in Canada in the future? Once we’ve capitulated to the assertion that safety is the highest good, I guess it just depends on who gets to define safety. Vote carefully.

Morbid Management Miasma

I’ve written about this before, but the issue is on my mind again since one of my pieces last week touched on the issue of over-management in publicly-run healthcare. Lately I seem to have more and more “managers” telling me how to do my job. So I sought catharsis this week with a shorter Sunday Brunch take on over-management in healthcare

I have learned not to get excited when politicians campaign on “fixing healthcare”. In Nova Scotia, premier Tim Houston charged into government in 2021 with that promise. My skepticism about his sincerity and ability to affect change has been borne out. When discussing the future of healthcare in Nova Scotia, there is no difference between a pessimist and a realist.

Since Houston took office, his mantra seems to be “there is no problem that can’t be solved by hiring enough managers”. The NS Health org chart is more complicated than the blueprints for a nuclear reactor. I have multiple managers in every aspect of my job (IT, primary care, emergency medicine, finance), but good luck finding someone who can answer a question, let alone someone who has the authority to make a change. I once had an hour-long meeting about resolving a long-overdue overtime pay issue. On the call were four highly-paid and highly-placed managers in my zone. I added up the 4 hourly rates in my head and realized I had just cost the taxpayer a bundle. The conclusion of the meeting was not a solution but rather “we’ll have to find someone who can fix this problem”. It took several more months before anything happened.

The name “manager” implies decision-making authority; that the person can assess a problem, come up with an approach, and implement a solution. In that sense, these people are not managers, but rather “MINOs”: managers in name only. Many have zero experience in the realm they are “managing”. Especially as you go higher up the chain, these positions are more likely to be sinecures - high-pay, low-work positions doled out as rewards for years of loyalty and not rocking any bureaucratic boats.

The Soviets had the right name for these “managers”, who they called “apparatchiks”. These people are not there to listen to frontline workers and help them solve problems. They don’t see there being any value in, or reason for, a bottom-up flow of information. Management in bureaucratic organizations is top-down. If they do anything at all, these “managers” enforce rules. Many of these rules are actually more harmful than helpful, making real work more cumbersome and difficult for those in the organization who actually do it. If 90% of “managers” disappeared tomorrow, the organization would run better, not worse.

As far as I can tell, the only function of some is to forward email messages from the elites of the organization to the grunts. God forbid that an elite would ever have to interact directly with a grunt! Eww!

The cloud of MINO-apparatchiks serves a protective function for the elites. It is a feature and not a bug. Each complaint or problem from the trenches passes through so many layers that it is like the telephone game, and when the problem is inevitably left unresolved, or made even worse, elites have plausible deniability with a miasma of MINOs to blame. Fighting with such an organization is about as satisfying as trying to punch a cloud.

Here is one quick example of a hundred that I could give you. A couple of years ago when working in ER I wanted to sew a laceration. I opened the cupboard where the lidocaine (freezing) has been kept since time immemorial, only to find it empty. I was informed that it was now being kept “in the machine”, an industrial-freezer-sized monstrosity that nurses have to log in to, type the drug name, wait for the proper drawer to pop open, then remove the med. Assuming a nurse is free to do so, it is a several minute delay for me and the patient. If there is no nurse available, it’s a longer delay.

After numerous emails, texts, and 2 phone calls up the management chain of command, the best I could get was that the change was decided “by a committee” and that “it was done for efficiency”. Nobody asked my opinion, as the one who would actually use the lidocaine at the point of patient care at our hospital. I doubt it ever occurred to them to do so. I can’t get mad at someone for being an idiot, because I can’t even find the idiot to get mad at. So I grumble and try to work around the problem as best I can. And every time I wait for lidocaine I get crankier and am more convinced I should just pack it in and retire. Or maybe I’ll go into management…

Meme of the Week

Quote of the Week

Doublethink is not only harmful for individual humans, but destructive for society as a whole. My article spells this out to some extent (or at least, I hope it does).

If you don’t follow MLI you should. And the NP is one of the last newspapers in Canada that remains readable. I get hives whenever someone sends me links to something in the Globe and Mail. I already can predict their slant with 99.9% accuracy.

You can read the piece at the NP website HERE or an archived version HERE, or read the text version I’ve pasted in below in bold. I hope you enjoy it, and feel free to comment about whatever you think I got right, wrong, or missed entirely.

In this article I brush by the issue of how holding doublethink ideas in one’s mind is highly destablizing to the individual psyche, a concept that Julie does a deep dive into in a series of articles, the first of which will be coming out next week. Stay tuned.

Are we really past “peak woke,” as some think? Perhaps it’s true elsewhere. But recent events suggest the underlying ideology remains deeply entrenched in Canada.

On June 8, the Standing Committee on Science and Research met to examine explicit affirmative action hiring practices for women. However, when Conservative MP Vincent Neil Ho asked a witness — Dr. Mona Nemer, a molecular biologist and Canada’s chief science advisor — to define “woman,” chaos erupted.

“You know a thing or two about X and Y chromosomes,” Ho asked, “so I want to ask you: what is the definition of a woman?”

Immediately, Liberal MP John Paul Danko interrupted on a point of order. “It is Pride Month,” Danko said, clearly agitated, “and Order 18 prohibits personal attacks, insults and offensive language.” Danko’s interjection kicked off several minutes of acrimonious debate as Ho pressed the question, and his colleague persisted in trying to shut him down.

For viewers, it must have felt like stepping into 2021–22, when “What is a woman?” became one of the defining flashpoints of the culture wars. While many countries have since begun retreating from the postmodern ideology that fuelled that moment, Canada remains stubbornly mired in it.

Postmodernism’s most damaging legacy has been its insistence that even our most basic and self-evident truths — including the biological reality of womanhood — are open to question. This wasn’t a problem when the ideology was confined to obscure fields like 19th-century French literature or 1920s feminist art. But like a malignant cancer, postmodernism spread quietly at first before metastasizing throughout our cultural and societal institutions.

Along the way, it produced increasingly absurd ideas, such as “decolonizing light” and “queering math.” But to most people, the most visible consequence has been the efforts to “break the gender binary.”

As science fiction author Philip K. Dick said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Activists can try to “break the gender binary,” but its existence is as fundamental a truth as the physics of light or the reality of mathematics. Our human existence as male or female is as definite and fundamental a distinction as black and white or up and down.

So why do governments and institutions in Canada continue to push forward this harmful, unscientific ideology through, for instance, the recent appointment of a gender activist as the head of the Canadian Pediatric Society?

Wokeism’s advocates will, no doubt, claim that the United States’ recent retreat on the issue is fuelled by the supposed transphobia and bigotry of the Trump administration and the MAGA movement. However, countries that would normally be considered “progressive” are also eliminating ideologically based policies and returning to a science-based approach. In the United Kingdom, the government closed the infamous Tavistock Clinic and greatly restricted hormonal and surgical manipulation of children in the wake of the release of the Cass Review, while Denmark, Sweden, and Finland have restricted the use of puberty blockers.

Gender activists may believe that it is harmless to view sex and gender as fluid. But there are very real-world consequences. Just ask the biological women who, almost overnight, were forced to share women-only spaces such as changing rooms, prisons, or rape crisis centres with biological men. Or ask the women and girls who watched biological men take their places on sports teams and their spots atop the podium.

More than a half-century ago, George Orwell warned of the dangers of “doublethink” — the psychological process of simultaneously holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind and accepting both as true. He also wrote, “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

Today, Canadians are forced to engage in doublethink on a range of contradictory ideas, from “I’m a proud Canadian … but there is no Canadian culture” to “We are living on stolen land … but I support open borders and mass immigration” to “Women need affirmative action in hiring … but asking for a definition of ‘woman’ is deeply offensive.”

The heated exchange between MPs Ho and Danko and Dr. Nemer highlights how “double-thinkers” can retreat to defensiveness and anger when their contradictions are challenged. For many Canadians, it was another moment adding to a growing sense of unease.

Doublethink is not just bad for individuals, it is unhealthy for our country as a whole. We need to be able to agree on basic realities, such as the sex binary. Canada needs to break wokeism’s grip on the nation. How can we begin to find answers if we can’t even ask questions?

Chris Milburn, a Macdonald-Laurier Institute contributing writer, is a family and ER physician with 25 years of experience working in communities of all sizes. He has worked on public health policy with the Canadian Medical Association, Doctors Nova Scotia, and community groups.

Bottom-Up or Top-Down? Are they mutually exclusive?

Some of you may have followed the recent release of information from outgoing US Department of Justice head Tulsi Gabbard around the COVID-19 origins issue. Cast your mind back to 2020 when the idea that The Wuhan Coronavirus might have excaped from the Wuhan Coronavirus Research Lab was crazy talk, and saying so would get your social media account deleted. The only one allowed to speak about it seemed to be Jon Stewart (watch below starting at 2:45 if you haven’t already seen it), who despite being insufferably woke 99% of the time nailed this one on the head.

Some of us knew it from the start, but it is now confirmed that the “scientific papers” showing COVID to have a natural origin were fabricated, and the attacks on anyone who suggested a lab leak were a psy-op.

Fauci may be called to testify about the new information release. He will be in an interesting pickle. Tell the truth and admit that he and his minions lied and misled the public, or commit perjury by claiming innocence. The blanket pardon granted by outgoing turnip-brained “President” Joe Biden in 2024 would not cover perjury in 2026. What to do! Perhaps the media will not remain sycophantic for much longer if he fesses up?

I generally hate simplistic top-down explanations for debacles like COVID policy. “This would never have happened if it wasn’t for [insert name here: Trump/Elon Musk/George Soros/Justin Trudeau/The Rothschilds]”. In my opinion, we regular citizens are fallen creatures who are easily led and thus often create great havoc and destruction in the name of good. Yes Hitler was a horrible human but it took the complicity of millions of Germans to create the Third Reich. Morally corrupt leaders are often a symptom - not a cause - of a morally corrupt populace.

If even a significant minority, let alone a majority of us, had stood up against CoronaCraziness, governments would have been forced to stand down. Let me suggest a modified version of Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to conspiracy what can adequately be explained by age-old human cowardice and evil.

It is this bottom-up vs. top-down argument that caused a great rift in the anti-narrative alliance in the COVID war. Peter and Ginger Breggins lined up against Robert Malone and Matthias Desmet, with the Breggins insisting that COVID was a top-down issue, the result of an evil cabal of which they insinuated Malone was part. Malone on the other hand agreed with Desmet’s theory of mass formation, a bottom-up explanation detailing how and why we went collectively bonkers when fed fear-porn about an unprecedentedly deadly virus.

I don’t consider myself a “first-rate intelligence”, but I think that both of these explanations are right at the same time. Anthony Fauci is evil and did great harm. I believe he will face justice at some point, be it man’s or God’s. But it is also true that we went collectively insane during COVID. In fact, many people have not yet regained sanity. Evil can be visited upon us, but it can also come from within our own hearts. It finds many ways into this world and we should defend against them all.

A Literary Sokal Hoax

Those of you who read UnHerd may be aware of the scandal surrounding the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, won by Jamir Nazir of Trinidad. Mr Nazir’s story, The Serpent in the Grove, was selected from more than 7800 entries, having passed through multiple tiers of “expert” judges before being awarded the top prize “for its lyrical precision and haunting atmosphere.” The Chair of the judging panel was effusive in her praise:

Well, it was diverse all right. So diverse that it probably wasn’t even written by a human. One of the perks of winning the prize (in addition to a cash prize of 5000 pounds) is publication in the prestigious literary magazine Granta—and it was only after the story was published and read by people who are not literary “experts” that suspicions began to arise. To make a long story short (so to speak): Nazir’s story was run through AI-detection software (which is remarkably accurate) and voila! It was a 100% match for AI generated content. Three of the remaining four regional finalists were also found to be suspicious for non-humanity. Well.

The Commonwealth Foundation conducted “an investigation” and claimed they were satisfied the stories were legit. (And besides, the writers were diverse! Not a single white male on the short list! ) Granta, on the other hand, had its suspicions and decided to end its partnership with the Commonwealth Prize. (There is more to this sordid story and you can read the details of it here and here if you’re interested.)

If I sound a tad bitter, it’s because this story has a personal angle for me. Like Mr. Nazir’s chat-bot, I’m a writer of literary fiction. In fact, way back in the dark ages (2008, to be precise) I was the winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Competition. (If you’re interested you can listen to my story, World Backwards, here, as it was recorded for radio. I assure you it was not written by a chat-bot.)

Since that time back in the dark ages, I’ve watched, horrified, as literary fiction (along with movies, live theatre, visual arts, science and just about every other aspect of Western arts and culture) has been more or less completely devoured by the identity politics monster.

I can’t put a finger on exactly when (or how) this started but about ten or fifteen years ago I began to notice a decline in the quality of “award winning” stories—and it just kept getting worse. At some point I couldn’t stand to read them anymore. So much self-indulgent, moralizing tripe. So many untalented hacks. So much overt ideology. So little artistic merit. The same boring story told over and over and over, as if anything other than extolling the virtues of victimhood had become verboten. It doesn’t surprise me one bit that the judges of a prestigious literary contest could be fooled by a chat-bot. There is nothing authentic or creative about “literary fiction” these days. Incoherent claptrap like the story that won this year’s Commonwealth Prize is welcome, as long as it flatters the ideological sensibilities of the woke judges. Why not let a machine write it and give the award to the cleverest LLM?

Are good stories still being written and just not published and rewarded? Piling up in the desk drawers of talented writers? Possibly, but I doubt it. My own interest in writing that kind of fiction has waned as the opportunities for publication and recognition have all but disappeared for people unwilling to play the new game. Established conservative writers like Lionel Shriver and Andrew Klavan keep writing, but both have acknowledged they’re unlikely to ever win another literary award—and they’re not getting any younger. If JK Rowling were starting out today—with her openly “gender critical” views—do you think she’d find a major publisher for the Harry Potter books? Or would she even bother to write them, knowing (as every serious writer does) the current lay of the land in the publishing industry.

In his 1951 book The Captive Mind, Nobel Prize winning Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote about what it was like to be an artist in Eastern Europe under communist rule. He described the soul-deadening intellectual and artistic contortions writers had to put themselves through to achieve the ideological conformity demanded of them.

The parallels between that time and place and the present day Anglosphere are, sadly, not insignificant:

The objective conditions necessary to the realization of a work of art are, as we know, a highly complex phenomenon, involving one’s public, the possibility of contact with it, the general atmosphere, and above all freedom from involuntary subjective control. “I can’t write as I would like to,” a young Polish poet admitted to me. “My own stream of thought has so many tributaries, that I barely succeed in damming off one, when a second, third or fourth overflows. I get halfway through a phrase, and already I submit it to Marxist criticism. I imagine what X or Y will say about it and I change the ending.” (p14-15)

Of another more experienced writer, Milosz wrote:

He felt as empty as a sieve with the wind blowing through it. The wind of historical necessity swept all meaning out of literature. One more astute ideological question, several more pages of doctrinal prose! Why write when everyone knew in advance exactly what was to be said? He played bridge in his gilded and mirrored salon not because he was tired but because he was afraid to find himself alone before a blank sheet of paper. (p.172)

Indeed, why write—why read, why go to the movies—when everyone knows in advance exactly what is to be said? For that matter, why not let an AI chat-bot write the story when it’s always going to be the same story anyway?

For my part, I feel a certain amount of schadenfreude at seeing the literary establishment get scammed—hoisted on its own pretentious petard in much the same way the academic social sciences establishment was with the Sokal Hoax and later the “Grievance Studies Affair.” Will AI chatbots eventually spell the death of literary competitions? Sadly, at this point my answer is “who cares?” Identity politics has already killed them.

Government-FUNDED versus Government-CONTROLLED

By almost any measure - patient satisfaction, waiting lists, frustration level of docs and nurses, ER waiting times: you name it - Canadian healthcare has been getting worse for decades.

What was the inflection point? It seemed to be the advent of Medicare, when the government socialized not only the funding of healthcare but also took over control of the administration and provision of healthcare services.

What we Canadians don’t understand is that just because health insurance is administered by the government, it does not necessarily follow that government bureaucrats must dictate every detail of how we get that healthcare. The fact that the two are not a package deal is critically important. And yet most average citizens, and even the majority of healthcare professionals I work with, don’t understand that they are different things.

In Canada, any mention of privatization of healthcare services meets with screams and a rush to the fainting couch, followed by accusations of wanting “American-style healthcare”. Arguing to allow private healthcare is seen as equivalent to wanting to see people dying in the streets.

But most G20 countries have systems where citizen’s healthcare insurance is government-FUNDED (more accurately taxpayer-funded) but many or most hospitals and clinics are privately-run. In such a system, if you need your knee replaced you can choose which doctor and which hospital you prefer. The government funds a basic level of service, but you could choose to pay for upgrades like a private room or edible food. Private enterprise (nurses, doctors, and businessmen) can set up clinics and hospitals which vie for business by providing excellent service. They are incentivized to be excellent and efficient if they want to stay in business and turn a profit. Countries with such systems (Sweden, Switzerland, Germany) have better access to care and much higher patient satisfaction at a lower cost. But here in Canada, like North Korea and Cuba, the government has a monopoly on healthcare and private provision of care is verboten. Anyone who has worked in Canadian healthcare has noticed that there is no “Department of Healthcare Efficiency”.

One can debate whether government-funded healthcare is sustainable in the first place. But we can’t even start to have a real conversation about how to improve Canadian healthcare until we understand that government control of healthcare service provision does not inevitably follow from government funding.

Until we break the government monopoly on healthcare provision, state-run healthcare will continue to be wasteful, full of graft, and overly-bureaucratized while Canadians continue to suffer and die in ER waiting rooms and on wait lists.

Quote of the Week

Meme of the Week

We Canadians celebrated our country’s 159th birthday recently, but our US readers celebrated an even more significant milestone with their 250th yesterday. We hope you had a great time, and that your hangovers are mild. A sincere CONGRATS to a country that we have spent much time in, and whose people we have great respect for.

The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations Corrupts Justice

From preferential admission (read: “lower standards”) for natives and blacks in law schools and med school to jobs for which whites (especially heterosexual white males) need not apply, cultural marxism has become cemented in policies in any institution into which the government’s long tendrils invade.

But perhaps the most dangerous instance is when this toxic ideology corrupts the justice system. Two-tiered racial justice has been de rigueur in Canada for a generation or more, with Gladue Sentencing (reduced penalties for those with native heritage, “because historical racism”) having been made a standard by our esteemed Supreme Court of Canada back in 1999.

Predictably, other “marginalized” groups have tried their best to jump on the “I’m a Victim Too!” bandwagon. A recent story in my new hometown of Moncton is case-in-point.

To summarize, police were called to mediate an altercation, but rather than submit to arrest, Mr. Mascary - a Haitian immigrant - was uncooperative and violent, and ended up stabbing one of the officers several times in the head and neck. (As an ER doc I can tell you from experience that stab wounds in that area are extremely serious and potentially life-threatening.)

The defence did not argue that police behaved inappropriately, or that Mr. Mascary did not commit the stabbing. He made a plea bargain to a lesser charge of assault (presumably in lieu of being tried for attempted murder).

The Crown has asked for an anemic 5-year sentence. But as if that wasn’t already inadequate enough for such a serious crime, his defence lawyer (Mathieu Boutet) is asking for that to be cut in half.

How is this argument problematic? Let me count the ways.

In a country where essentially everyone is black, I’m not clear how he would have come across “anti-black racism”, unless it was from other blacks.

As to his “difficult upbringing”, in my time working in medium and max-security institutions, I don’t recall having met someone who did not have a “difficult upbringing”. That said, and thanks be to God, the vast majority of those with “difficult upbringings” do not stab police officers in the head, nor commit any crime for that matter. Using it as a partial explanation for his behaviour is perhaps valid, using it as an excuse is not.

The argument now used for lighter sentencing of indigenous and increasingly for black offenders is that because of their backgrounds, they cannot be expected to refrain from committing crimes. But if one buys this bill of goods, the conclusion that one should draw is not that a shorter period of incarceration should be prescribed. If an offender for historical reasons is less able to control himself, he must then logically be assumed to be at much higher risk to re-offend. And since the primary functions of the justice system are protection of the public, crime prevention, punishment, and maintaining order, it makes sense to lengthen his sentence as opposed to shortening it. The goal of the system is not to be as kind as possible to the offender. Or at least it was never supposed to be.

I would venture a guess that Mr. Boutet is a raging woke leftie, with the package of beliefs that comes with that vision of reality. One of these beliefs is in an extremely liberal immigration policy. As such, I doubt he has really considered the knock-on effect of successfully arguing “You can’t expect Haitian immigrants not to stab police officers in the head when they come to Canada because their country is such a mess”. That is actually a fairly strong argument for those of us who might not want them in our communities.

Not to mention that they are not the most productive demographic.

The issue of Haitian immigration should be of particular concern to Canadians right now, as in all likelihood we are about to be hit by a flood of Haitian immigrants wanting to come across our southern border rather than return home to their own country, since the Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS) recently upheld the plan to end TPS (Temporary Protected Status - basically carte blanch to come to and stay in the USA, and a ban on deportations) for both Haitian and Syrian recent arrivals.

It is amusing to see the same people on the open-borders left - the ones who attacked Trump for calling Haiti (and similar countries) “shitholes” - cry and wail and rend their clothing about Haitians being forced to return to their home country. So which is it? A shithole that we can’t in good conscience send them back to, or a wonderful rich culture?

The article ends with this, which is (I hope?) reassuring that the judge isn’t buying it. Methinks Mr. Mascary may have been trying to use the George-Floyd-inspired get-out-of-jail-free card.

Ah, it was his perception. Great.

All we can hope for is that New Brunswick does not join Nova Scotia and other provinces which already standardly reduce sentences for blacks “because racism”. If they do, it will mean that blacks in New Brunswick are added to the current list of indigenous and mentally handicapped people who are not felt to be fully responsible for their actions and decisions.

Preaching in the Church of Woke

Some of you here in The Frozen North may have followed this story in the last few weeks. The announcement that parents would no longer be able to access their adolescent children’s medical records was made by Lela Evans, Newfoundland and Labrador’s Minister of Health and Community Services (and also Minister of Women and Gender Equality), who just coincidentally happens to be a proud member of the 2SLGBTQ++ican’tpossiblykeepupwiththeeverexpandingacronym community. The move was largely because, y’know, what if the parents are horrible bigots who don’t agree with gender transitioning?

This trend of increasing state control of and intervention in children’s lives and concomitant reduction of parental control has been in full swing for generations. Decisions around education, daycare, vaccinations, and increasingly medical decisions are more and more often being ripped away from parents and given over to bureaucrats.

Although the Newfoundland decision was backpedaled after a backlash, it is frightening that there were enough people who thought that it was a laudable idea that it made it that far.

The Pairodocs were struck by the remarkable similarity to the rainbow flag on the lectern to what we see in many churches. It is a visual reminder that wokeness is a religion, and a reminder that:

Apologizing for being Canadian

I long ago gave up on the newspapers (sadly, as I was a great fan for much of my adult life), but one of my FB friends had posted this.

We have come to a sad time when the newspaper feels it has to apologize for including a clippable Canadian flag for Canada day.

I wonder if they would make the same smarmy apology if they included a clippable pride flag?

But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to see this in Halifax, where 9 years ago a student union leader successfully argued a motion to refuse to celebrate Canada’s 150th birthday, since our nation was too racist and colonialist to celebrate. To make it even more galling, the student (Masuma Khan) is of Afghani extraction. She was given a gentle ride by the media, despite making sneering comments about “white tears” when asked about her critics.

Is diversity really our strength? I won’t apologize for being Canadian, or for being proud of Canadian culture, or at least what it was before we committed cultural suicide. Yes, Justin Trudeau, there is - or at least there was before you diluted it - such a thing as Canadian culture.

The Ministry of Truth takes a smack down from Clarence Thomas

George Orwell viewed language not just as a means of communication but as a shaper (and potential limiter) of thought itself. He believed language could literally shape our perception of reality—and that totalitarians (and aspiring totalitarians!) could weaponize this in various ways to limit opposition to their preferred narratives.

He explored this idea primarily through two works: his dystopian novel 1984 (via the engineered language “Newspeak” — an entire language designed to make heretical thoughts literally unthinkable) and his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.”

The idea draws from “linguistic determinism” — also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Language, the theory goes, limits the boundaries of cognition. If you can’t say it, you eventually can’t conceive it.

The good news is (and Orwell argued) that defending precise language can help to preserve independent thought. Which is why my heart warmed this week when US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the following in the context of the court’s 6-3 ruling that states can lawfully ban men who claim to be women from competing on female school and college sports teams:

Men and boys with gender dysphoria are not women or girls, even if they believe that they are. Sex is an immutable, ‘biological’ characteristic; it is binary; and ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ ‘boy’ and ‘girl,’ are the terms that correspond to adults and children of each sex…

To use language to obscure reality—to show ‘indifference regarding the truth’—is to lie to the public and cease to treat our fellow citizens ‘as equal[s]….

“A man does not have a legal right to compete against women just because he believes that he is a woman.”

Thomas further argued that transgender status (or “gender dysphoria”) is a mutable mental condition subject to psychiatric treatment, not an immutable characteristic like race or biological sex warranting heightened scrutiny under equal protection analysis. His concurrence was short (about two pages) and went further than the majority in rejecting the legitimacy of gender identity claims in this context, framing them as contrary to biological reality. The full opinion is available on the Supreme Court’s website (e.g., 24-43 West Virginia v. B.P.J.)

If the wording of Thomas’s opinion seems jarring when you read it, it just shows how far we’ve ceded the linguistic ground—and therefore our ability to think clearly—on this issue. As soon as we started calling men suffering from gender dysphoria “transgender women” (or just “women”) and referring to them by feminine pronouns, the battle to keep them out of women’s spaces became infinitely harder to fight.

Similarly, when we agree to call puberty blockers and double mastectomies in adolescent girls “gender affirming care,” when we call illegal aliens “undocumented migrants” and criminals “justice-involved persons” and killing a full formed human fetus “reproductive care” — we are handicapping ourselves in our ability to form cogent arguments about these things. It’s not “polite” or “compassionate” to allow yourself to be forced into using euphemistic or otherwise inaccurate language, however much the purveyors of these slippery words try to convince you it is. It’s just wrong. It’s a diabolical ploy to control your thinking. Don’t fall for it. Do not cede the language! Remember Orwells warning and be like Justice Thomas.

Meme of the Week

Quote of the Week

Strange Bedfellows

In 2020, an organization calling itself “Borderland Pride” requested that the tiny township of Emo, Ontario, proclaim the month of June “Pride Month” and raise the rainbow flag at the town hall. The town council voted to refuse this request in a 3-2 decision. Borderland Pride promptly complained to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal which, quelle surprise, ruled that the provincial human rights code had indeed been violated and fined the town and its mayor, Harold McQuaker (who had cast the deciding vote) $15,000. When Mayor McQuaker refused to pay his portion of the fine, the money was forcibly recovered from his bank account. Council members were also forced to undertake mandatory “reeducation.” Legal appeals ended in failure for the town and its mayor this year.

Contrast this with the town of Hamtramck, Michigan, population ca. 28,000. Formerly a Polish American enclave, Hamtramck became the first Muslim majority city in the USA in 2013. In 2015, it became the first city in US history to have a Muslim majority city council. Progressives were downright giddy. Diversity had triumphed! Islamophobia had been vanquished! Take that conservatives! In 2022, it got even better for the leftists, as Hamtramck became the first city with a fully Muslim city council. Six out of six. No women were permitted at the post election party, but hey. Then, in 2023, Hamtramck city council banned the display of the Pride flag on city property. Oh-oh-spaghetti-o.

From the Guardian at the time:

Muslim residents packing city hall erupted in cheers after the council’s unanimous vote, and on Hamtramck’s social media pages, the taunting has been relentless: “Fagless City”, read one post, emphasized with emojis of a bicep flexing.

In a tense monologue before the vote, Councilmember Mohammed Hassan shouted his justification at LGBTQ+ supporters: “I’m working for the people, what the majority of the people like.”

…

“There’s a sense of betrayal,” said the former Hamtramck mayor Karen Majewski, who is Polish American. “We supported you when you were threatened, and now our rights are threatened, and you’re the one doing the threatening.”

One wonders how the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal would have handled this if it had occurred in its jurisdiction. What if the mayor and council of Emo had rejected the Pride flag based on their Muslim faith, as happened in Hamtramck, rather than being just a bunch of old white guys who were tired of having leftist virtue signalling constantly shoved down their throats. Can’t you just picture the brains of the tribunal members exploding as the rights of their two favourite “historically marginalized groups” came into conflict? Perhaps its only a matter of time until this is more than hypothetical. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, even after years of “Queers for Palestine/Chickens for KFC” memes, the strange coalition between leftists and Islamists continues—united, perhaps in their common goal of destroying western civilization and their hatred of Jews “settler colonialists.”

The Twitterati discuss the strangeness of this ad nauseum:

Perhaps the leftists should study their history, though, because when it comes right down to it, the Islamists tend to be the more motivated of the two groups. During the Iranian revolution in the late 1970’s, for example, communists, socialists and Islamists fought together to overthrow the US-backed Shah. Shortly thereafter, the Islamists consolidated power and violently purged their left-wing allies, executing tens of thousands of them.

The women in the iconic photo below were leftist university students, celebrating the success of the revolution in 1979. The one in the foreground, Maryam Rafie, later opposed the regime (presumably she wasn’t too keen on wearing a hijab) and was executed during the 1980’s purges. Her companion fled to Sweden, where she resides in exile today. Do they remind you of anyone?

Are physicians more irrational than the average citizen?

A few months ago I wrote a piece on the contradiction between how we defined a COVID death (anyone who tested positive, even if they already had two feet in the grave) versus our new definition of MAiD deaths (you weren’t euthanized, you died of cancer, even if you were euthanized).

I posted the link to the Substack in numerous groups, one of which is a private group for Canadian physicians. The difference in nature and tone of response between physicians and non-physicians was striking.

Response was very positive from non-physicians, and many cited experience with a friend or loved one whose death was reported as being “from” COVID, when in fact they were on death’s door from cancer or other terminal diseases.

But the response I got from the physicians’ group was almost entirely negative and nasty. I had ad-hominems thrown at me, was accused of spreading misinformation, and there were threats to have me kicked out of the group. Docs – at least those on that group – are generally still VERY supportive of the measures taken during COVID and do not feel that there were excesses or mistakes in our approach to COVID

Why might docs be less willing to admit they were wrong?

We doctors like to think we are smart, and like to be seen as smart. Why do you think we feel it necessary to give complicated latin names to common diseases?

Most docs jumped strongly on board the public health COVID policy bandwagon in 2020, not just complying but vocally supporting masks, lockdowns, and “vaccines”. And having been so “all in” for so long, intellectual hubris creates a strong psychological block to integrating new evidence and modifying theories that suggest that we erred.

Financially, docs did just-fine-thank-you-very-much during COVID. Many were paid large amounts to staff near-empty COVID wards or to be on call for nearly-work-free COVID intubation response teams. At a time when many Canadians forced off work were entitled to 1000 dollars every 2 weeks on CERB, physicians in NS, for example, could receive up to 23,000 dollars every 2 weeks for being off.

The degree to which physicians benefitted from COVID policy makes it hard to admit - even to ourselves- that what we participated in was a sham.

After the creation of the National Health Service (the socialization and centralization of the medical system) in Britain post WW2, the health minister was asked how he silenced skeptical physicians. He replied that he “stuffed their mouths with gold”. This is a technique that still works.

Docs were mandated to comply with public health diktats during COVID. They allowed themselves to be bullied. Very few of us spoke out. I think it’s hard to admit that weakness of character accounted for your complicity. It is easier and more ego-syntonic to say that you truly agreed all along.

Medical doctors believe themselves to be of the intelligentsia, and therefore are more susceptible to groupthink. Perhaps physicians are in that “useful idiot” sweet spot of education and indoctrination. We are selected for academic ability, but that ability is mostly demonstrated in subjects where mastery can be strictly from rote learning, as compared to application of critical thinking. (Think biology versus physics).

It was interesting that both data, and my personal experience, showed that it was folks who had never been through the university indoctrination mill (high school only), or folks who were smart enough to ride the education train right to the last station (PhD’s) who were least likely to be vaccinated and to buy into the COVID hysteria. Folks with undergrad and master’s degrees seem to have just the right amount of educationindoctrination to make them nicely compliant.

In my hockey locker rooms - where there is a diverse representation of society including profs, fishermen, electricians, IT guys, financial managers, contractors, and more – there is general agreement if not consensus that we collectively went insane during COVID, and that the rules and measures made no sense. But in the physicians’ lounge there is still insistence that the COVID response was reasonable, ethical, scientific, and correct. Physicians seem least able to update their prior theories based on now available statistics (like, say – the data from Sweden).

Docs are reaping the reputation they have sown. Loss of trust is well-earned, and not due to “anti-vaxxers” or “misinformation”. We have given the public very good reasons not to trust us. It must be hard for those docs who still see themselves as white knights to even countenance the fact that in the minds of the majority, we have gone from healthcare heroes to healthcare zeroes.

Will we ever gain back public trust? I’m not sure, but I do know that the solution is not to scream louder at people who criticize us. Docs need to engage with ideas and arguments in a reasonable and non-defensive manner if they are ever again to be trusted by the majority of society.

There was a time long ago when I was proud to be part of a noble profession. I’m sad to say that I am embarrassed of what it has become.

Two-Tiered Media

It was interesting to read a recent BBC take on anti-migrant protests in South Africa.

As with many countries around the world that are (relatively) stable and prosperous, SA is experiencing a large influx of “undocumented migrants” (or in oldspeak, “illegal aliens”). And as with many countries around the world, citizens are getting fed up with the expense, labour competition, litter, crime, and other problems that come with them.

But unlike inmost other countries, the pushback has not been gentle or entirely civilized.

I recommend reading the article if you’re interested, and note the tone. It is very sympathetic towards the migrants, but also very sympathetic towards the South Africans who feel the migrants should leave. The article seems to lay out in a balanced way the concerns of the illegal immigrants while at the same time helping the reader understand why South Africans may not be so keen on a flood of unvetted people teeming across their border.

Compare this to the slanted coverage that folks like Tommy Robinson, who as far as I know has never attacked a migrant with a machete, has gotten from the BBC.

And the BBC was likely the most balanced of the bunch, with most other lamestream media sources just defaulting to the term “far-right” for any Brit who dared to think that open borders is a bad idea. Mind you, to the modern political left, anyone to the right of Mao is “far right”

One can speculate as to why machete-wielding anti-migrant protesters in South Africa got fair shrift from the media while Union-Jack-wielding protesters in London were “far-right”. Methinks it may have something to do with their skin colour, and the difficulty that presents to media when deciding on the basic premise of every recent MSM article: victim, victim, who’s the victim?

Controlling the Message

If you weren’t already concerned enough about free speech, given all the Orwellian legislation working its way into law in Canada, this article over at the Free Press ought to send a chill down your spine. It describes how Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger was pushed out and finally banned altogether from his own creation—all for the sin of pointing out that the quintessential online encyclopedia had become politically biased and attempting to reform it. Sanger writes:

I watched in dismay as the site I’d created began to drift from its founding mission. The weakening of Wikipedia’s basic principle—neutrality—was my main concern. Instead of maintaining strict neutrality when it comes to the most important and contentious topics, Wikipedia has, over time, become decidedly globalist, academic, secular, and progressive. In other words, it has become the mouthpiece of a relatively narrow liberal establishment, which has left perspectives beyond its borders out in the cold.

For example: Rising anti-Zionism in leftist circles means pro-Israel views are disfavored, while pro-Iranian regime sentiments are permitted to spread. Many confessional Christian sources have been disallowed due to the tacit prioritization of secularism in Wikipedia’s principle of neutrality. Hindu organizations have been censored and smeared. And American political topics—about politicians as well as issues like abortion, illegal immigration, and transgenderism—are covered from a broadly progressive-left perspective: The Republican Party, for instance, is classified as being on the “right-wing to far-right” of the political spectrum. And the Democratic Party? “Center to center-left.”

Relax, I hear you saying. Wikipedia has become virtually irrelevant in the age of AI chatbots! Who needs it anyway?

But then, there’s this. Oh-oh-spaghetti-o:

More and more humans base their knowledge of reality on the answers that AI gives them to their questions. And since AI is fed left-leaning “facts”, more and more humans will lean more and more left. Scary times indeed.

Quote of the Week

If you don’t read the newspapers, you’re uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you’re misinformed. -Unknown

Meme of the Week

Protecting Children or Ushering In The Surveillance State

Many of you are following the new social media bans for children and youth either just passed or about to be by governments around the world. The shortlist includes the UK, Denmark, Canada, Turkey, Brazil, Malaysia, and Australia. Numerous others are in preliminary discussions. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that this is happening around the world all at the same time. Just like “Build Back Better”.

There’s no doubt that social media has pernicious and destructive effects not only on kids but on adults as well. But government censorship and bans seem a rather heavy-handed and authoritarian way to deal with this issue. Despite its dark side, social media is also where many of us stay connected with family and friends, meet and converse with both like-minded and unlike-minded people, and find practical information and humour. Used responsibly, it can at least in some respects be a force for good.

Should child and youth access to social media not be determined by that child’s parents, who know and understand them best? And can bans really prevent the end-runs of false ID’s, VPN’s and more? In this dark age of increasing government information control, this feels like a move that one would expect more from the Chinese Communist Party than a modern democracy.

Critics of these bills also warn that the child protection angle is really just a way to indirectly bring in a universal digital ID. After all, “we’re protecting kids” sounds all rainbows and unicorns, but if you want to use social media and have to prove you are of the required age to do so, giving up a good deal of personal info is unavoidable for adults as well. Submitting a government-issued ID, facial scans or biometrics, or credit card or other information pushes us one step closer to the panopticon that many writers have warned us we are walking into.

But it gets worse. Australia has officially made an exception for Bluesky and other countries are considering similar exemptions. So your 13-year-old can’t follow the prepper on Twitter who posts about how to plant a food forest and how to deal with the deer that pillage it. But they can follow the blue-haired transexual Bluesky influencer who screams about how Trump is making zhe/zher unsafe and how zhe is literally at risk of getting killed every time zhe goes to the store. This sounds like a great recipe for making our kids more mentally healthy.

Apartheid in Canada

Apartheid (from the Afrikaans for “apartness”) was a formal system of institutionalized racial segregation and discrimination enforced by the white-minority government in South Africa from 1948 until the early 1990s. It mandated the separation of racial groups in nearly all aspects of public and private life. The system involved petty apartheid (segregation of public facilities, transportation, and social spaces) and grand apartheid (spatial separation, denial of voting rights, and restriction of employment).

I don’t know anyone who thinks apartheid was a good idea. Didn’t we figure out decades ago that dividing people up based on race is just wrong? But it seems that Canada - once a central voice in fighting for ending apartheid in South Africa - is now bringing in our own version in which white people (and especially white men) are the ones being excluded and disadvantaged.

We’ve all seen job postings like this one from Memorial University in Newfoundland. These types of postings seem to be increasingly common, especially (and infuriatingly) in jobs funded by our tax dollars. White heterosexual men need not apply.

I suppose an applicant could slap a dress and wig on for the job interview? Or claim to have a disabling anxiety disorder? Or pull an Elizabeth Warren and just claim to be indigenous even though they clearly aren’t?

And then, of course, there is differential sentencing in the courts, based on race, with black and indigenous offenders getting more lenient sentences, like this one just a few days ago:

And this one (also this week) in my home town:

In order to combat past systemic racism, we have introduced present systemic racism. Got it. Straight out of Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, which is, IMHO, one of the worst books ever written.

But it gets worse. We are now beginning to see the division of physical spaces based on race.

First it was the provincial parks in BC, some of which have been closed for periods of time to everyone except indigenous people. Our friends at the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms are challenging this one. Again, just this week:

But this, I think, takes the cake: Canada now has its first race-based parking spaces:

The people claiming to fight racism have themselves become racists. The far left and the far right have become hard to distinguish from each other, united in their race essentialism, both pushing for their own version of apartheid. It’s another example of enantiodromia—the psychological and philosophical principle describing the tendency of things to transform into their opposites, particularly when pushed to an extreme. The video below is short and hilarious and illustrates this point better than a serious essay ever could. Double click on the image below to watch:

What Comes Around Goes Around: Woke Purity Spirals

Previously a winter sport, the NHL hockey playoffs no longer finish until after the last frost date in Cape Breton (and that’s saying something!). So it was just last week that Julie and I - both Carolina fans - happily watched the Carolina Hurricanes defeat Las Vegas to win Lord Stanley’s Cup.

Those of you who watched the 6th and final game may have noticed a particularly grovelling apology from Ron MacLean, longtime hockey commentator with CBC-cum-Sportsnet. It was cringy and weird, and very out-of-place in a hockey context - somewhere that we go to get away from politics.

MacLean is a master of The Pun, and known for his witty yet groan-inducing one-liners just before commercial cuts. In this particular case, there was a skit earlier in the hockey broadcast that was based on the movie “The Hangover” and showed the two keepers of the Stanley Cup passed out in a Las Vegas hotel room with the cup beside them. Those who remember the original movie will recall that in the equivalent scene, the revellers had been sedated with rohypnol. MacLean quipped “The roofie will get you every time”.

Back after commercial, he gazed deeply into the camera and, looking as if he might cry, apologized that he might have “triggered” someone.

It is a matter of taste whether one found the joke funny or not, or maybe some just didn’t notice it. But “triggered”? Hockey fans are self-selected to be the kind of folks you don’t have to worry about triggering. We don’t mind when someone gets splattered on the boards by a thundering body check, or seeing someone’s “chiclets” get scattered on the ice by a poorly-aimed slap shot or perfectly-aimed fist. In short: don’t worry Ron, we’re not a bunch of sensitive snowflakes.

I like Ron’s commentating and I actually like his puns. But I am NOT a fan of his politics. The fact that the incident could potentially have compromised his ongoing employment is a great example of the circular firing squad/purity spiral of the Woke Left in Canada.

Many of you may recall that back in 2019, Rogers Sportsnet - which had taken over Hockey Night in Canada from CBC a few years earlier - fired longtime commentator Don Cherry for comments he made about those new immigrants who did not show respect by wearing the poppy for Remembrance Day. Julie and I were very much on Cherry’s side and were disappointed that Ron MacLean - whose career was founded on being longtime interlocutor and straightman to the wide-collared, loud-suited Cherry - did nothing to defend him and instead watched passively as he was thrown under the woke bus. He didn’t have to agree with what Cherry said, but as per Voltaire, he should have defended to his death (or in this case, his firing) his right to say it.

Grovelling apologies and circular woke firing squads are a fixture of the CBC family. Longtime reporter and news anchor Wendy Mesley was suspended in 2020 for using the N-word in an editorial meeting. She did not use it in a racist way, but in quoting the name of a 1968 book with that word in the title at a meeting which in part was to organize a piece about racism. Mesley was never accused of being racist, or even having intent to aid or abet racism, but was still forced to apologize and endure a suspension. And after 37 years with the broadcaster by that time, nobody came to her defense.

I recently read the book “Darkness at Noon” by Arthur Koestler about a man tortured and kept in solitary confinement and forced to apologize to the Soviet regime. Mesley’s apology has the same I’m-being-held-hostage tone as in Koestler’s book.

Many of you have noticed the uncanny prescience of Monty Python in predicting the insanity of modern society. (Just think about the Stan-Loretta scene in Life of Brian which was ridiculous parody in 1979 and now in 2026 we have a “pregnant man” emoji.) In the case of Mesley, the Jehovah stoning scene is uncannily on-point.

Despite his lack of nuance and blunt delivery, The Pairodocs feel that Canada needs more Don Cherries and fewer Ron MacLeans. Otherwise we will continue to kowtow to the most sensitive and entitled in our society, and the purity spiral will continue.

Quote of the Week

Meme of the Week

Everybody in Zimbabwe is a Trillionaire. Take that and Send it into Space, Elon Musk.

With the initial public offering of Space-X shares this past Friday, Elon Musk officially became the world’s first trillionaire. According to Bernie Sanders (who became a multi-millionaire selling books about the evils of capitalism—you really can’t make this shit up) it’s downright obscene that one man can have this much money while people like him have only three houses and can’t always afford to order dom perignon with their beef tenderloin. ***When questioned on “how much wealth is TOO much, the answer with these folks always seems to be “anyone who is richer than me”.

Champagne socialists like Bernie seem to think that wealth is a zero-sum game and that people like Elon have stolen their wealth from the poor and are just sitting at home on vast piles of cash and gold bars (or perhaps swimming in all that money like Scrooge McDuck.)

In reality, of course, Bernie is just a jealous old man who can’t stand the fact that Elon Musk—the ultimate capitalist—is doing what Bernie claims to want to do with his stale socialist ideology: He’s helping the poor by accelerating cheap internet access around the world. He’s literally giving the means of production over to the workers—more than four thousand of whom (Space-X employees who’ve taken part of their compensation in shares of the company in lieu of pay increases and cash bonuses) became millionaires themselves on Friday. Right down to the welders, labourers and cafeteria workers. Millionaires. Just like Bernie.

Musk meanwhile, puts pretty much 100% of his money back into the companies he owns, advancing technology for all of us and keeping somewhere between 150 and 200 thousand people gainfully employed.

But, alas, it wasn’t just Bernie and his ilk spewing the resentment toward Elon. In Canada, the socialist media (but then I repeat myself) was literally running opinion pieces about how to properly “hate” Elon Musk. This was Canada’s “paper of record” (I’d insert a vomit emoji here if Substack had one) on Friday:

Because in Canada, resenting (and attempting to undermine) the successful is our national sport. (**The headline provoked a significant backlash and was later changed to “SpaceX is set to make Elon Musk the first trillionaire. Is that a bad look for capitalism?” Too little too late, IMHO. The Globe, ironically, is owned by Canada’s richest family, the Thompsons, multi-billionaires who inherited their money. No Globe opinion pieces on hating them, though. Funny that.)

But look, socialism isn’t all bad. It can produce trillionaires too. Just not in American dollars. For example, not so long ago, every man, woman and child in Zimbabwe was a multi-trillionaire after the government spent its way into runaway hyperinflation so bad that they actually issued paper currency worth 100,000,000,000,000 Zimbabwean dollars to try to keep up with the cash shortage. That’s 100 trillion, in case you lost track of the number of zeros. At the time these notes were issued they were worth around 30 or 40 US dollars, but they quickly collapsed to just 40 cents US—not enough for a basic bus fare—before the currency was suspended altogether.

Canada, I’m sorry to say, could learn a thing or two from Zimbabwe and its tragic recent history. Because we seem to be heading in the same direction, if not quite as dramatically. Like Canada, Zimbabwe is rich in natural resources, particularly when it comes to growing food: a warm climate, rich, fertile soils, and regular rainfall—perfect for farming. Up until the early 2000’s it was known as the “Breadbasket of Africa” and was a major exporter of food. It kept neighbouring countries fed. Now, 20 odd years of “land reforms” later (meaning kicking the white farmers off their land and “redistributing” it to black government cronies who don’t know the first thing about farming) Zimbabwe can’t even feed itself. Poverty and misery abound.

Meanwhile, in resource rich Canada, we continue to fall further and further behind our neighbours to the South in GDP per capita.

Not only are our young affluent professionals fleeing the country in record numbers, but starting a business has become so burdensome in Canada that our own entrepreneurs are increasingly going elsewhere to start businesses:

Canada is the only country in the G-20 in a recession. (Although, quelle surprise, the Globe and all the rest of the government subsidized media are calling it a “technical recession” because that sounds better for their paymasters the government.)

And, as if to rub a bit of salt in the this festering wound of economic bad news, Space-X is, by some estimates, now worth more than the annual GDP of our home and native land. Which is doubly sad because Elon is actually a Canadian citizen who started his university career at pairodocs alma mater Queen’s University in Kingston Ontario— before doing what so many other bright young Canadians do and departing for the USA.

The meme-lords of the Twitterverse have been having a field day:

The Saga of the $16 Orange Juice

Since I’m picking on the Globe and Mail, is anyone else here old enough to remember Bev Oda, the conservative cabinet minister who resigned in 2012 after the media went after her relentlessly about her lavish spending on travel? Specifically, about her billing taxpayers for a $16 bottle of orange juice from a hotel mini-bar?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the media holding politicians accountable for spending taxpayers money. But if Oda had to resign over a bottle of OJ, how is Mark Carney getting away with this?

Prime Minister Mark Carney and his entourage spent $195,400 indulging in in-flight meals such as veal, beef tenderloin with bordelaise sauce and Scottish salmon fillet, according to documents obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation….

The catering menus on Carney’s international flights included beef tenderloin, a salad topped with “cucumber pearls,” braised beef served with a red wine reduction, “Italian, Spanish and European selection of charcuterie” and a “luxury Normandy butter cup.”

…

Carney and his entourage billed taxpayers $195,400 for airplane food during three trips to London, U.K., Rome, Italy and Brussels, Belgium in 2025, according to government records.

For context, that in-flight catering bill could pay for a family of four to enjoy steak dinners, wine and crème brûlée at The Keg once a month for 50 years.

That catering bill could also cover a Canadian family’s groceries for more than a decade.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are told that “sacrifices” will be necessary. If this isn’t a “let them eat cake” moment, then what is?

Pick a doc who is a hunter and not a fisherman

Every once in a while a medical study comes across my radar that I think is really important for people to understand.

In this case, a Finnish study took hundreds of random people from 41-76 years old and looked at their shoulders in an MRI scanner. Over 99% had “abnormalities” of their rotator cuffs.

Why is this important? Because they weren’t people with shoulder pain necessarily. They were just a random sample.

I can’t tell you the number of people I see who tell me that their shoulder are “a mess” because they had a scan that showed “abnormalities”. But everyone who is lucky enough not to “die young and leave a beautiful corpse” has “abnormalities” on scans of back, shoulders, neck, knees. Just like we get wrinkly and saggy on the outside, we get wrinkly and saggy on the inside

The great majority of folks who think that their spine or shoulders or other joints are “a mess” because of findings on a scan actually have normal aches and pains, which were overdiagnosed. A well-meaning doc did a scan, saw what is actually normal aging changes (in the case of rotator cuffs these include small and even large tears, signs of roughness and inflammation, and more) and told the patient that they tore their rotator cuff. In some cases this was true, in many (perhaps most) it wasn’t. In most cases I see, the tear was almost certainly there long before the injury and had nothing to do with the pain the patient was experiencing. (There are clues on an MRI to suggest a tear is fresh versus degenerative.)

And thinking one’s shoulder is “a mess” is not without consequence. Data clearly shows that most people who get scans that show “abnormalities” become more fearful of activity and therefore less active. Which is bad for the health of their joints, and their health overall. Movement is healthy.

Sometimes a scan is a good idea. But before it is ordered, the doc should know exactly what he is looking for. A decent physician can examine your shoulder and tell you what he is pretty sure is and isn’t wrong. A scan should be a targeted shot to confirm a specific diagnosis, not a dragnet to “find out if something is torn”. Because there is always something torn.

Put simply, if your doc is fishing instead of hunting, anything he dredges up will be bycatch.

Measures vs. Targets

Goodhart’s Law states:

In other words, given an opportunity, humans will game systems. I’ve known normally terse doctors who, when they get paid per page for a report, switch to triple-spacing, start using words like sesquipedalian, and use a font size readable from the space shuttle. I’m pretty sure most readers have seen systems gamed in your workplace, especially if you work for the government or a big bureaucracy.

It’s harder to game hard data than fudgeable numbers. If you hire someone to build your deck and he doesn’t build you a functional deck, it’s pretty obvious that he failed. But if a bureaucracy builds your deck, all bets are off. They will inevitably set targets like hours worked, nails used, board-feet of lumber accounted for, etc. And even though those targets may be met, it is quite possible that you’ll have 10 people working on it all year but just end up with a jumble of loose boards lying on your lawn. And so it is with government-run healthcare.

I’ve been railing on a bit lately about wait times. It’s hard as a family doctor to watch patients suffer, decline, or even die while waiting for care that you know they need, and that you have long-ago sent requests to arrange.

A while back, a very egregious example of Goodhart’s Law crossed my desk from the office of Drs. Smith and Jones (not their real names). It struck me as so ridiculous that I kept it.

Paraphrased, what is being said “we plan to make our wait time parameters look better by refusing to let any more people on our wait list”. It is a beautifully simple and effective plan, that I am 100% certain will work, making Dr. Smith and Jones look efficient and “within parameters” to the bean counters that count their beans. Success!

Timely access to care is not the target, Drs. Smith and Jones’ wait time is. And on that one line on one spreadsheet in bureaucratic la-la land, wait times will indeed improve. But IRL, actual patient wait times will lengthen (to infinity for any patient referred to Smith or Jones, as referrals are not even permitted). So it’s not a great solution if you’re a patient waiting for necessary care.

Out of many other examples of Goodhart’s law in our healthcare system, one of the most egregious I can think of in the last few years is the 2021 ministerial order regarding ambulance offload times in Nova Scotia.

A wee background: Like the rest of our over-regulated and fully socialized healthcare system, the ambulance system became increasingly shaky and unreliable over the last few decades. It got to the point where people were suffering and dying due to long waits for urgent 911 calls. As more and more cases came to the attention of the media, there was more and more pressure on the government to solve this problem.

From the bean-counter perspective, the most obvious “fix” for this problem was to improve ambulance offload times, since when response times were poor, many ambulances were stuck waiting at the door of overcrowded ER’s that were too busy to accept them. (As an aside, a common misperception is that ER’s are too crowded because they are under-resourced. They are actually overcrowded because they are trying to function not only as ER’s but also as family medicine clinics, urgent care centres and inpatient wards all at once. Somewhere from 60-80% of what happens in ER doesn’t need to happen in ER.)

So to a midwit the solution is obvious. Simply demand that ER staff take handover from paramedics within a specified, limited time. Problem solved, right?! The minister sent a directive/missive to ER’s telling us that we were to accept all patients within 30 minutes of arrival.

The problem, of course, being that - like how Drs. Smith and Jones “fixed” their problem - the “solution” ignores second-order effects.

Pre-directive, paramedics stayed with patients until the ER had a space and a nurse available to look after the patient. Post-directive, paramedics quickly gave report to an overwhelmed nurse and then left. More often than not that meant the patient was left alone on a gurney, most often in a back hallway, with nobody to monitor them or attend to their needs until a space and a nurse was available. It was the medical equivalent of leaving a baby on the convent steps, knocking on the door, and running away.

As per Goodhart, a measure (ambulance offload times) of patient care became a target. Rather than use a real measure of care - how long were patients waiting before they received real care - bean counters selected a target of decreasing offload times and then “fixed” it. The number looked better, but the result was patients lying alone in back halls of ER’s.

Several ER nurses told me that this was the last straw for them: the trigger that made them leave for jobs elsewhere in the hospital. Who gets blamed when a patient, abandoned by the paramedics who have been ordered to leave the hospital to be available for other calls, dies in a hall in the dark recesses in the back of an emergency department? I can tell you that for sure it will not be the minister of health who issued the directive, nor the bean counters who assured him that it was the solution. In my experience, when things go sour in an ER, the nurses are the ones left holding the bag.

Quote of the Week

“What exactly is your ‘fair share’ of what someone else has worked for?”

- Thomas Sowell

Meme of the Week

Cultural Double Standards

A couple of months ago I was going through airport security in the USA and realized I had forgotten to take my nail care kit out of my carry-on and put it in my checked bag. The x-ray machine saw it, and it was seized. It seems that, as could a Mission-Impossible-fit Tom Cruise, I appeared capable of taking down the plane with a nail file and toenail clippers. I suppose I should feel flattered.

The nail set was a gift I received for being an usher at my brother’s wedding in 1991.

In 2019 I was travelling with my mom, who had a tiny pair of fold-up sewing scissors with a blade about 1/2 inch long seized by airport security. My mom was disabled from the effects of bone cancer - a little old lady near 80 years old who planned to do a little mending while on the flight. The scissors were a high-end pair from Germany that her mom had given her in the mid-1980’s. She protested to no avail.

But the same security system that seizes a 2-inch pair of sewing scissors from a little old lady and nail clippers from a skinny grey-haired dude will allow you to carry a real knife with a blade of up to 6cm in length onto an airplane “because religion”. According the the World Sikh Organization’s web page on “Flying with your Kirpan”:

Far worse than losing nail clippers, this double standard recently facilitated the murder of Henry Nowak, stabbed to death with a “ceremonial” kirpan. This happened in Britain, the same country that strictly restricts the carrying of knives for anyone who does not claim it is their religious “right”.

In case you missed the story, Nowak died, handcuffed by police instead of being rushed to the hospital because he was suspected of “racially abusing” a Sikh man. The suspicion was solely based on a claim by the same man - the one who stabbed Nowak to death. The knee-jerk assumption was that the white youth was abusive and racist and that the brown man was honest and good. This was not just an error in judgment by one misguided officer, but a predictable result of police being trained to be “racially and culturally sensitive”. Officers in Britain are being taught not to treat everyone “the same”, but instead to assume the best about minorities and the worst about whites, with a goal of producing equal outcomes. The below excerpt is from the UK “Police Race Action Plan. This does not promote “Equality under the Law” or procedural fairness, but rather equality of OUTCOME. According to this philosophy we should be arresting as many whites as blacks, and I suppose as many little old ladies as young males, or else we are not producing “equity”. No wonder the police are handcuffing nearly-dead white youth.

Most people now fail to realize that when we treat people fairly, outcomes are often unequal. To produce equal outcomes we must treat people unfairly.

Our grotesque system forces many people to do things that are unreasonable: use preferred pronouns, mouth pieties like native land acknowledgments, put up pride flags and lower Canadian flags to half-mast. And yet at the same time in the name of diversity we fail to restrict people from doing things that are UNREASONABLE. Like carrying a knife on an airplane.

Perhaps I’ll try showing up for my next flight wearing only a ceremonial Amazonian penis sheath, and shout at the security agent that he is a bigot if he tries to stop me from boarding. I’ll let you know how it goes, although I definitely won’t post photos.

The Long March to the CBC

Yuri Bezmenov was a Soviet Informant and former KGB agent who defected to the USA in the early 1970’s. Many of our readers will be familiar with the now famous interview Mr. Bezmenov gave with G. Edward Griffin in 1984. A guy sitting next to me on an airplane told me about it a few years back, and the world hasn’t quite looked the same to me since. What Bezmenov described was nothing short of a long, quiet war being waged against the United States and its Western allies by radical Marxists—a war that would eventually lead to the downfall of Western democracies via a deliberate, decades long process of “ideological subversion.” No guns or tanks needed.

You can watch the full interview by double clicking on the image below.

The first stage of this war on the West, said Bezmenov, would involve the Marxist infiltration of education, media, the legal system and cultural institutions with the intent of reshaping how the population thinks—until they are so demoralized and confused that they can no longer recognize truth or resist the ideology.

This is the Marxist idea of “the long march through the institutions,” first proposed by Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci several decades before Bezmenov defected to the West and told us that it wasn’t just a pie-in-the sky idea anymore—it was actually happening. Gramsci is sometimes referred to as the “godfather of cultural Marxism.” He believed a direct, violent revolution would fail in Western democracies but that a Marxist takeover could nevertheless be achieved via a slow (possibly even multi-generational) campaign by intellectuals to shift society’s cultural beliefs from the inside.

It’s hard to dispute, in 2026, that the “long march” has been an overwhelming success. The Henry Nowak case in the UK has provided an unusually clear illustration of this in recent weeks. First, as Chris talks about above, it appears that the reason Mr. Nowak was treated poorly by police was because of his skin colour, an indication of just how far police forces in the UK have been infiltrated with culturally Marxist ideas. But although the murder and the indifference of the police was in itself horrific, perhaps more deeply disturbing was was the response of the mainstream media. CBC didn’t mention the case at all until it became too big an issue to ignore—and then they did this:

Like George Floyd, Henry Nowak died in handcuffs after saying he couldn’t breathe. (Unlike George Floyd, he was not a convicted felon, had committed no crime, was not resisting police, and had not taken enough fentanyl to kill three normal people. But I digress.) The difference in how these two deaths were covered by the media illustrates just how embedded the culturally Marxist worldview has become in the mainstream media. The media outrage surrounding Floyd’s death in police custody led to hysterical calls to “defund the police” and sparked a summer of violent riots across the Western world. That the likes of CBC could accuse the “far right” of politicizing Henry Nowak’s death is so richly ironic, you almost have to laugh.

But I also see signs of hope arising out if this tragedy. It was so grotesquely unjust, and such an obvious example of leftist institutional bias, that it served as a wake-up call for many. Reports are coming in from across the UK of a viral new trend: people filming themselves “taking the knee” for Henry Nowak, with the Michael Jackson song “They Don’t Really Care About Us” playing in the background. The left, so used to having cultural hegemony, has predictably gone apoplectic about the new trend. They control the media. They control Hollywood. They even control the algorithms! How can (some of) the people still be thinking for themselves? They are all racists! So many racists! But it doesn’t seem to be going away. Keir Starmer’s annus horribilis may be about to get even worse. We’ll see.

SPLC: Southern Poverty Lies Creator

In more good news on the pushback against cultural Marxism, the Southern Poverty Law Centre appears to be in serious trouble. It turns out the SPLC, which bills itself as a nonprofit legal advocacy organization specializing in civil rights and public interest litigation (but which, like so many similar institutions, has actually morphed into a hotbed of far-left/culturally Marxist activism) has been charged with 11 counts of wire fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering by the US Department of Justice. The charges were filed a few weeks ago but this week the DOJ expanded its case by filing a “superseding indictment” outlining new allegations and more details on the alleged crimes. The new filing alleges the SPLC secretly funnelled (through a series of fake bank accounts and shell corporations) more than $4 million in tax-exempt donor funds to far-right extremists over several years (up from the $3 million originally cited.) Prosecutors claim the funds were used to purchase materials for cross burnings, buy Ku Klux Klan robes and hoods, fund extremist rallies, and expand local Klan chapters. The DOJ alleges that instead of gathering intelligence to dismantle hate groups, the SPLC actually incentivized Ku Klux Klan members to remain active and recruit new members, in exchange for payments and continued access. This included paying $300k to a member of the leadership chat for the Charlottesville rally in 2017, a person who made racist posts under an SPLC employee’s supervision and arranged transport for others to attend the rally. (Charlottesville, you may remember, was the rally at which a leftist counter-protestor was killed, and the entire nation was understandably outraged.) For its part, the SPLC saw its annual contributions and grants surge from $50 million in 2016 to approximately $132 million in the year following the 2017 Charlottesville rally. Pretty good ROI on $300k, no? Turns out anti-racism is big business—if you can just drum up enough racists. As Thomas Sowell famously said “Racism is not dead. But it is on life support – kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as ‘racists.’”

Of course the SPLC strongly denies all allegations, arguing that the government is attempting to criminalize “standard investigative tactics and confidential informant programs.” Of course they would say that, wouldn’t they? They’re lawyers, caught with their hands in the race-baiting cookie jar. But the (alleged) lengths they went to to hide things—and the nature of the things they funded—sure makes you wonder. As usual, the meme lords have won the day.

An American doc hits the nail on the head about US vs. Canadian Healthcare

Those on the left of the political spectrum in Canada react to any suggestion of private “US-style” healthcare about as positively as a vampire does to an appetizer of roasted garlic. And in the USA, those on the Bernie-Sanders-left look at Canada as the land of “free” healthcare, where everyone gets the care they need in a timely fashion, at zero cost.

And while both groups stew in their misperceptions, many countries have much more functional and less expensive healthcare systems than either of us. They manage to provide care that is reasonably affordable while at the same time being high-quality and accessible. There are no medical utopias, but we might do well to open our eyes and look beyond our nearest neighbour.

The best comment I have ever seen on this matter was posted by an old friend in response to our last week’s article on wait times in Canada that stretch out beyond the horizon. A surgeon in Florida, he was born and raised in Canada but moved to the USA many years ago and has never looked back. He knows both systems, sees the flaws in both, and posted this insightful and succinct summary.

From the perspective of a physician practicing in the United States, the Canadian healthcare debate often looks very different from the way it is presented politically.

Americans are constantly told that Canada has “free healthcare,” while the U.S. system is portrayed as uniquely cruel because it involves private insurance, deductibles, copays, and out-of-pocket costs. But there is nothing free about a system funded by heavy taxation, and there is nothing compassionate about making patients wait years for diagnosis, specialist assessment, or treatment.

In the U.S., our system is certainly imperfect. It is expensive, administratively bloated, and often maddeningly complex. But when a patient has a serious cardiac, neurologic, oncologic, orthopedic, or surgical problem, the expectation is still that they should be evaluated and treated in a clinically meaningful timeframe. A three- or six-year wait for a specialist would not be viewed as a normal inconvenience. It would be viewed as a system failure.

One of the core problems with the Canadian model is that it is not merely publicly funded; it is heavily centralized, bureaucratically controlled, and largely insulated from normal economic feedback. In most areas of life, price signals, competition, consumer choice, entrepreneurship, and innovation force systems to adapt. If people are waiting too long, someone finds a better way to serve them. If demand exceeds supply, capacity expands. If a service is inefficient, competitors create alternatives.

Canadian healthcare suppresses much of that. Patients are not treated as customers with choices. Physicians and hospitals often cannot respond entrepreneurially to demand. Capital does not flow easily toward unmet need. Prices do not signal scarcity. Instead, access is rationed through queues, budgets, bureaucratic allocation, and political management. The result is predictable: shortages, bottlenecks, demoralized providers, and patients waiting months or years for care that should be timely.

The cultural problem may be even harder to fix. Canadians have been taught for generations that “free healthcare” is not just a policy arrangement but a marker of national identity and moral superiority. To question the system is often treated as if one is attacking Canada itself, or advocating some caricature of the American system. That makes honest reform nearly impossible. The debate becomes emotional and tribal rather than practical.

The real question is not whether healthcare is “public” or “private.” The real question is whether patients actually receive care when they need it. A healthcare system should be judged by access, timeliness, quality, outcomes, innovation, and accountability — not by whether politicians can describe it as free.

I could not have said it better myself. Mic drop.

Meme of the Week

Quote of the Week

Henry Nowak died the same way a civilization dies: abandoned, handcuffed by authorities who neither trusted nor cared for him, and accused of hate crimes he did not commit. --JD Vance

YouTube says it’s safe to listen to me again…

This week I received a message from Gifford Watkins, who back in 2021 organized and hosted an online event to discuss COVID policy. He messaged to tell me that the video of the event was reinstated, years after it was censored, after an unexpected message from YouTube.

The online event was well attended, and IMO the discussion was useful and reasonable. The three speakers included Nurse Carolyn who had worked at Northwood - the nursing home that was the epicentre of COVID deaths (if one believes that’s what they were) in NS , Scott Spidle (People’s Party of Canada candidate and COVID dissident), and myself.

It was particularly elucidating to hear the inside scoop on what actually happened in Northwood nursing home from Carolyn. I felt it was important information for the public.

But, like so many videos and social media posts that spoke out against The Narrative™, it was quickly disappeared down the memory hole by YouTube, as it “violated community standards”. (This wasn’t the only video I did that was disappeared, plus my FB profile was throttled and I was blacklisted from CBC radio Sydney where I had once been a regular)

What standards we violated were beyond me. Nothing unreasonable was said. We didn’t dox Bill Gates or suggest he was injecting us with nano-robots to control our brains. We didn’t suggest a violent overthrow of the government or suggest that people could prevent COVID by eating hot coals. In fact, there was nothing factually inaccurate said. But as Dries van Langenhove recently found out in Belgium, telling the truth is not a protection against repercussions for speaking out against the narrative. I suppose I was lucky that I only got disappeared off social media. Remember that governments are not just revving up censorship for mis or dis-information, but also for MALinformation. And malinformation is any fact that the government thinks might be used for purposes with which they do not agree.

Five years later, our video is back. Why? I’m not sure. Perhaps The Overlords feel that with the new Hantavirus and Ebola panics, the hounds of terror are well fed and the public is distracted enough that they won’t notice nor care that the truth now leaks out about COVID. In any case, it is now apparently safe to listen to what we have to say.

Matt Strauss for Prime Minister!

A few years back when we hosted our Free Speech in Medicine Conferences (in response to the craziness of the COVID pandemic) we were lucky enough to attract some truly phenomenal speakers: Jay Battacharya, Iain McGilchrist, Gad Saad, Amy Hamm, Rupa Subramanya—and the list goes on. Needless to say, our alumni have gone on to do some truly remarkable—even, dare we say, world-changing things. It’s surreal. We listen to them on Joe Rogan and read about them in the New York Times and say hey, I know that guy/gal!

Some of our speakers were already well known at the time of our conferences. Some less so. One of the youngest and least well known of our speakers (at the time) was a young physician named Matt Strauss. We knew Matt through the loose network of dissident physicians that had formed around public health overreach during the pandemic. He struck us as a principled and extremely intelligent young man who was destined to go places. We took a chance on him. And boy were we right to do so. Matt went on to become the Member of Parliament for Kitchener South-Hespeler. (Don’t be surprised if he eventually becomes Prime Minister—you read it here first!) I joked with Matt that some day I’d say “I knew him when….”

Amongst a slew of important issues that Matt is working on, he has been one of the leading voices opposing the Orwellian Bill C-22, which we discussed in detail in a previous version of Sunday Brunch. The video below is well worth a watch. Double click to play:

Where are the bodies?

It’s now been five years since “the remains of 215 indigenous children” were “discovered” by ground penetrating radar at the former Kamloops Residential School in BC, an unsubstantiated claim that led to flags being flown at half mast for months on end and a rash of church burnings which continues to this day. Chris, who during his time in physics had done work on sonar imaging, was skeptical from the start and said “there is no way that they could be sure there are bodies by only using radar”. It just didn’t make sense.

But the “215 bodies” lie has been repeated so many times that it has now become truth for most Canadians. Serious thought has been given (and a bill introduced to Parliament) toward making “denial of residential school atrocities” a crime. And yet. Twelve million dollars later, not a single body has been dug up and skeptics—also know as “residential school denialists” and “aspiring thought criminals”—have pointed out that the “anomalies” discovered in 2021 are just as likely to be an old septic field as anything else.

From the Western Standard:

Ottawa has sealed all progress reports connected to the federally funded search for the alleged graves of 215 children at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, citing confidentiality to block public access to documents detailing how the money was used and what was actually found.

Blacklock’s Reporter says the Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations refused an Access to Information request for the records, saying the reports submitted by the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation were protected under the Access to Information Act as confidential third-party information.

The decision effectively shuts down scrutiny of a project that received $12.1 million in federal funding for what Ottawa described as the “exhumation of remains” and forensic DNA testing.

The First Nation announced in 2021 that ground-penetrating radar had detected what it described as the graves of 215 children buried in an orchard near the former residential school.

More than four years later, no human remains have been recovered.

As a condition of the funding, the First Nation was required to file regular Activity Progress Reports with the federal government.

Blacklock’s Reporter requested copies of those reports to determine what work, if any, had been carried out.

The department rejected the request, invoking section 20.1.b of the Act, which restricts release of financial, commercial, scientific or technical information treated as confidential by a third party.

The department did not explain why the reports were deemed confidential, despite the original claim about the graves being publicly announced in a news release and widely cited by politicians, media and activists.

Internal federal correspondence obtained separately shows that other agencies were privately skeptical of the claims from the outset.

In internal emails, Parks Canada staff questioned whether the radar findings supported repeated references to “graves” or “burials.”

“Authors refer to the 215 ground-penetrating radar hits that were reported in 2021 as ‘graves’ or ‘burials,’” wrote a Parks Canada consultant in one email.

“But none of these sites have been investigated further to determine that they are graves.”

The consultant warned that ground-penetrating radar frequently produces false positives.

“Ground-penetrating radar often throws up false positives, anomalies that are not indicative of anything significant,” the email said, recommending the sites be described only as “possible,” “probable” or “likely” graves until further investigation occurred.

By 2024, even that language was viewed as too strong.

Senior staff cautioned internally that radar data does not establish the presence of unmarked graves at all.

“The challenge is that ground-penetrating radar does not provide evidence of potential unmarked graves,” one staff email stated. “It provides evidence of anomalies. I am quoting the archaeologists here.”

In another exchange, a manager suggested avoiding the terminology altogether.

“Regarding the topic of ground-penetrating radar, I’ve made a suggested revision,” the email said. “It might be preferable to not use the term ‘anomalies’ for now.”

Staff were also advised to “stay extra quiet” while Parks Canada moved ahead with the designation of the Kamloops residential school as a national historic site, despite the unresolved questions surrounding the original grave claims and the absence of any recovered remains.

Free Healthcare!

Isn’t it great to live in a country with “free” healthcare! Thank goodness we don’t have to pay for it like those poor schmucks in America.

A colleague recently referred a patient for a seriously problematic condition, and got this very pleasant and helpful (or was it passive-aggressive) letter back. Is the fact that waits range from one to six years made more or less deranging by their finishing the letter with “We understand the importance of your healthcare needs and assure you that we are making every effort to schedule your appointment as soon as possible”. It reminds me of being over an hour on the phone waiting for service from a bank and being told “Your business is very important to us. Please continue to hold for the first available representative.” Sorry, but hearing you say that doesn’t make me feel less angry.

As a family doc, I get this kind of letter regularly, although the 6-year wait time beats my record of 4 years.

For example, below is a PFO letter I got when I sent an updated consult on a patient who had already been waiting for 3 years. Current wait list for semi-urgent cases is 3.5 years, so just imagine the wait if it wasn’t semi-urgent!

It’s bad enough that bone and joint problems are waiting for many years, but the wait time is arguably more dangerous and destructive in realms like neurology.

This was in fact a second consult, that was already marked “please see ASAP” with details of WHY that was important. The consult was for Parkinson’s disease that was profoundly impacting the patient’s life, not for a minor disorder. Anyone who has personal experience with Parkinson’s knows that 3+ years is a LONG time to wait. Parkinson’s is a progressive disease and someone can lose a great degree of their function while on a wait list. And after 3 years of dysfunction and deconditioning, even if the neurologist they see is the best in the world and prescribes the best treatment, much of the decline may by that time be irreversible.

Not long ago I saw a patient with symptoms that convinced me he was gunning for another heart attack (he had already had one in the past). I spoke to a very pleasant specialist who reassured me he would be seen “urgently” and when I asked what that meant said “within a week… well, 2 at most”, despite my protestations that she should see him that day, or next at latest. About 4 weeks later he was brought to ER unconscious after collapsing at home of the heart attack I had predicted was imminent. He had not yet had a stress test. Despite (not because of) our “free” healthcare, and only by the grace of God, he recovered fully and is alive and well.

About 1/3rd of the taxes Canadians pay go to healthcare. If you paid that much to a private insurer for health insurance, would you put up with years-long waits?

Meme of the Week

Quote of the Week

The following is a long quote, but I felt it was worth including and I think you’ll agree. This was written by Nova Scotia vascular surgeon Dr. Dion Davidson to his MP.

Mr Blois,

I’m writing as a constituent, a vascular surgeon and ICU physician who’s served this community for 20 years, and someone who has watched with growing concern as your government erodes the principles that distinguish a free and prosperous society from a managed and failing one.

Free speech is not a policy preference or a cultural nicety — it is an ontological human right, foundational to every other liberty. Without it, no other right can be asserted or defended. Bill C-63’s vaguely defined hate speech provisions and its “duty to act” on platforms guarantee pre-emptive censorship. Bill C-11 handed the CRTC bureaucracy power over user-generated content. Bill C-18 got Canadian news blocked on social media. Each intervention expands state control over what Canadians can say while producing outcomes opposite to their stated intentions. A government that fears free speech fears its free citizens.

On firearms, your government has banned over 2,500 makes and models, confiscating legally acquired property from licensed, law-abiding citizens while the illegal guns flooding across the border go unchecked. After October, apparently citizens who passed background checks and followed every law become criminals retroactively. This will do nothing to curb actual gun-related crime, even though that is how your government has sold it to the populace. If public safety were the goal, resources would follow the crime, not the confiscation.

On the economy, Canada now trails nearly every G7 nation in productivity growth and GDP per capita. The government’s response has been debt-fueled spending and money printing that devalues the dollar in your constituents’ pockets while inflation eats away at wages. We’re borrowing against our children’s future to fund your government’s political and social priorities, while the structural rot — stagnant investment, regulatory bloat, a hollowed-out private sector — goes unaddressed. When even middle aged and middle class adults cannot afford their own homes, society collapses. Canadians are getting poorer in real terms, and the policies of more spending, more regulation, and more centralization - hallmarks of your Liberal government - are making it worse.

I’m asking you to be a voice within caucus for the rights, prosperity, and freedom of the people of Kings-Hants — not just the Liberal caucus. Please do what you can to protect our God-given rights; our right to speak, our right to protect ourselves and our right to work for real wages, save and prosper, without government interference.

Regards,

Dion Davidson MD FRCSC FACS

Assistant Professor - Dalhousie University Department of Surgery

Kentville NS

Are you an Alpha Gal?

X was abuzz this week with a wild new conspiracy theory involving Bill Gates, genetically modified ticks, and a plot straight out of a dystopian medical thriller. Like most conspiracy theories, there’s at least a grain of truth underlying it. The story begins with a lowly critter called the “Lone Star Tick” which, when it bites you, can induce an allergy to galactose-α-1,3-galactose, also known as alpha-gal, a sugar found in the tissues of all mammals except humans and other primates. Alpha-gal syndrome, also known as mammalian meat allergy, alpha-gal allergy, red meat allergy, and tick bite meat allergy, can cause symptoms ranging from itchy rash, vomiting and diarrhea to full blown anaphylaxis and death when sufferers consume mammalian meat. Some (but not all) sufferers also exhibit an intolerance to dairy products.

Here’s what we know to be true:

1. The incidence (or at least the recognition) of alpha-gal syndrome has been increasing exponentially in recent years.

2. Certain hard-core leftists, including a few who call themselves “professors of bioethics,” have, in all seriousness, suggested a program of “moral bioenhancement,” wherein bioengineered alpha-gal ticks would be deliberately released on the population, pretty much everyone would get bitten, and red meat (and possibly dairy) consumption would be dramatically reduced or even disappear altogether. Voila! A vegetarian Utopia! Reduced cow farts to save the planet!

Bioethics? More like bioterrorism. Yet this article was written by two professors of bioethics at an American university and published in a moderately prestigious, peer-reviewed journal. Is it just me or does the term “moral bioenhancement” send a chill down your spine too?

3. Bill Gates is involved in funding research on bio-engineered ticks. Bill Gates is also involved in funding and promoting lab grown “meat” (i.e., he is eager to reduce cow farts). Bill Gates did some things before and during the COVID pandemic—like investing in a tiny unknown company called Biontech in the Fall of 2019—that really made you scratch your chin.

But this, I regret to inform you, is where the facts end and the crazy conspiracy theories start. On X and other social media platforms, reports started appearing in early 2026 that boxes of ticks were being dropped from helicopters onto farms in the mid-west. None of these reports was confirmed and the sources were sketchy, but the claims nonetheless went viral on social media. Someone then pointed out that Bill Gates was involved in genetically engineering ticks—not to mention lab-grown meat and efforts to reduce cow farts. Joe Rogan repeated these claims. And thus the theory that Bill Gates was trying to save the planet by turning us all into reluctant vegetarians was spawned and proceeded to go viral.

I’m no fan of Mr. Gates—and I don’t doubt he’s been involved in a few real conspiracies—but there are a number of problems with this scenario. First, the ticks he’s involved in bioengineering are called Rhipicephalus microplus (tropical cattle tick or Asian blue tick), a major pest that transmits diseases to cattle, causes significant economic losses, and is widespread in Africa and other regions. The bioengineered male ticks are designed to produce offspring who die early, thus reducing the population of ticks without having to use pesticides. Perhaps a bad idea, but nothing to do with the Lone Star tick or alpha-gal syndrome. Second, according to every source I could find, lab-produced meat of the kind Mr. Gates has been involved with still contains alpha-gal, so he’s not going to sell any more of it if we all become allergic to meat.

Bill Gates sure makes a great supervillain—and the whole modified tick/alpha-gal/modified meat story line would make an excellent medical thriller. But just because it would make a good story doesn’t make it true. Sorry, Joe Rogan. Take off that tinfoil hat.

Struggle Sessions, Canadian Style

As a psychiatrist who works primarily with military veterans and first responders, I almost threw up when I heard that my tax dollars were being used to fund what essentially amounted to a Maoist-style struggle session for retired RCMP officers. The officers were reportedly lured to a Vancouver TV studio under the pretence of being honoured for their service. They were told that Prince William would be in attendance and that they should wear their ceremonial red uniforms. But instead of receiving an award, the officers were subjected to a “humiliation ritual in which (they) were subject to allegations of mistreatment of Indigenous peoples.”

Per the National Post:

In an hour-long video posted to his personal channel, a YouTuber under the name Clinton Jaws, a nearly 40-year RCMP veteran, said he and other former officers were invited to attend a Vancouver event that was hosted by a production company funded by the broadcaster, which organizers reportedly said would be attended by Prince William.

The whole thing was in fact a prank performed by Northland Tales, a satirical program described as an “unscripted, half-hour comedy series where an Indigenous activist trio uses pranks as a form of social action,” which is being produced by the CBC. Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (ATPN) is a co-producer.

The program has come under fire in recent days for the way its organizers duped some conservative-leaning activists and former RCMP officers into appearing on the program, with critics — including some Conservative MPs — saying the broadcaster was using taxpayer dollars to promote activism disguised as comedy. None of the episodes of Northland Tales have yet run, but the CBC on Tuesday announced it was pausing the program before its airing to ensure that the series “does not negatively impact our news brand.”

While Jaws is quite frank in the video about how he fell for the trick, he also speaks repeatedly to the overall strangeness of the setup, and his ongoing confusion around what the organizers intended to achieve.

“They got me, hook line and sinker,” Jaws said. “I’m one of the cops out of six that they pranked.”

“It wasn’t even a prank, it was something very odd. I felt evil around me when it was happening to me.”

“Activism disguised as comedy” is putting it kindly. “Demonic” seems more appropriate. I happen to live in Moncton, where five RCMP officers were shot (three killed) about a decade ago. I lived in Nova Scotia in 2020 when officer Heidi Stevenson lost her life trying to stop Nova Scotia’s worst ever mass killer (who was eventually shot by another officer, putting an end to the killing.) And this is the thanks they get? Anyone else think its time to fully defund the Communist Broadcasting Corporation? Let the four people in the country who actually think struggle sessions are funny (and who still watch CBC) pay the bills. I’m out.

If Women Ruled the World, Everything Would Be…

Once upon a time there were female politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Indira Ghandi. Agree with their politics or not, they were as tough as nails. They voluntarily threw themselves into the dog-eat-dog world of politics. They put up with the torrents of abuse that come with being a politician. They asked no quarter and gave it as good as they got it.

But times changed. Anything masculine became toxic, and since competition, vehement disagreements and heated debate (ie: politics) are masculine-coded, politics was one of those realms that was declared toxic. Masculinity needed to be purged and replaced with “superior” feminine standards. Many parties (and even many countries) now have affirmative action programs to push women into political positions that - if things had been left to develop organically - men probably would have held.

The number and percentage of women in positions of power and influence - both in politics and elsewhere - has increased dramatically over the last few decades as a result of this push. Is the world a better place as women have had more and more of a hand in running it? The Pairodocs are not so sure that women are capable of managing our way to utopia any more than men were, as Julie has written about.

Feminized politics is certainly different.

In 2017, MP Alice Wong declared that a heated exchange between her (a “Conservative”) and “Liberal” MP Adam Vaughan was definitely an example of sexism and ageism. I seem to recall she later threw in racism to complete the trifecta. I was a young lad at the time, but I don’t recall Maggie Thatcher “The Iron Lady” ever resorting to hurling “isms” at her political foes when she put them in their place.

More recently, there has been a decidedly feminine uproar in the political arena in the sleepy backwater of Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia. Which is sad, because not that long ago, politics there was a shining example of progressivism. It was “historic”.

It has certainly ended up being historic in one regard. Less than two years in, this same all-female council has voted to end livestreaming of council meetings “because safety”, an unprecedented move which triggered a warning letter from the Canadian Constitution Foundation that the move was unconstitutional and flagrantly undemocratic.

What is the “safety” issue? Were there actually legitimate threats of murder or bodily harm? No there were not. Rather, the “safety concerns” were just that. They were “concerns” expressed by the all-female council. As per the mayor in this video:

“It’s enough for me if something is being done that makes somebody uncomfortable, where they believe they could be harmed by something. Or their family could be harmed”.

Her short homily on safetyism is sweet, and lovely, and stereotypically female. But does wanting every last person to feel “safe” truly justify taking away the public’s right to view council meetings, listen to what their elected members propose and argue, and to have the opportunity to understand how political decisions are being made?

I have had a taste of the tyranny of the sensitive. As head of ER, I was tasked with dealing with one of our peripheral emergency departments. They were at the same time underperforming in terms of efficiency and claiming unusual amounts of overtime. The data was damning. Perhaps it was a coincidence, but the majority of the ER docs there were female.

The meeting was not a happy one. I presented the data showing how inefficient the ER was on average compared to other similar sites, and explained that the OT claimed was hard to justify. There was some polite but tense back-and-forth. Then one of the physicians, who had been getting more and more visibly upset, jumped in. In a voice cracking with emotion, and then bursting into tears as she spoke, she said “you just don’t understand how stressful it is working here!”. I had been an ER doc for 20 years, including a veteran of well over one hundred shifts at that very site. But what could I say? What kind of a heel would I have been for pressing my point against a weeping woman. She who cries first, wins. The meeting ended uncomfortably with nothing more said by anyone. I reported to my superiors about what I thought needed to be done. Nothing happened.

The world certainly is different with females in power positions. The question is whether it is better or worse.

Spaced Out - Your tax dollars at work

Reagan said it best. The most frightening words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”.

Having been born, raised, and then having lived back on chronically-economically-depressed island of Cape Breton, I have seen the work of government economic development agencies up close.

After decades of watching them, my gestalt is that they

1. pay their employees very well

2. are very opaque - good luck trying to find data on money spent versus success rate in creating employment, loans paid back, or any performance metric

3. have very few successes

4. have a proven track record of funding losers

Two quick examples.

Tax dollars funded a high-end restaurant at Sydney airport. The problem with this is that Sydney airport is not a hub. People show up there to fly out or they fly in and get in a car and leave, but nobody hangs out there. It’s in the middle of nowhere with no view and no traffic. Neither of the Pairodocs is an expert on restaurants, but when we heard that a few hundred thousand in tax dollars was being routed to this venture, we correctly predicted a rapid failure. The equipment was eventually sold off to a political insider at a fraction of the original cost.

A front-page article touted a proposal to create a piezo-electric highway between Sydney and Glace Bay in Cape Breton. You can read the article, but the idea is that the special road surface produces “free” electrical energy as cars drive over it. The fact that the proposal violates the fundamental laws of physics didn’t prevent the proponent from being flown to Cape Breton several times, wined and dined at high-end restaurants at public expense, and it did not prevent public employees from listing the wining and dining as one of their accomplishments on their yearly progress report.

The most egregious recent example of this grift/graft/waste is the Canso Spaceport (officially “Maritime Launch Services”). This is near and dear to my heart, as I have been one of the family docs working in Canso since early 2020, and the community is dear to my heart.

You can read a good article on it HERE, written for the Halifax Examiner by someone I know personally.

To summarize, the “spaceport” has already chewed up millions of your tax dollars. For that largesse, you - the taxpayer - are the proud owners of a couple of re-purposed shipping containers, a small shed, and a concrete pad similar to what you’d put your new garage on. The CEO and CFO salaries (including stock options and director’s fees) total to just shy of 1 million per year, and they are a number of years into this. Nice work if you can get it. So far they have launched 2 small demo rockets, something that could have been done from any farmer’s field.

The company has some Ukrainians at the helm, and given that Ukraine is debatably the most corrupt country in Europe, it may not be surprising that some proponents have questionable backgrounds (including fraud charges).

Over 5 million of your dollars have already gone into this project, and the federal Liberal government just committed 200 million more over 10 years (the first 20 million already payable). For this investment, theoretically someday someone could launch rockets from the site, were anyone to come knocking who just happens to have a few unlaunched rockets sitting in their backyard.

I can’t rule out that a rocket, or many rockets, will someday be launched from the site, But I highly doubt it. And more importantly, if I’m wrong and the site becomes the next Cape Canaveral, will the financial benefits pay back the well-over-200mil giveaway of taxpayer dollars?

If it fails and the 200 million dollars disappears or if rockets are launched and you’d like to see the cost-benefit analysis, don’t hold your breath on any accountability. The federal Liberal government recently made a move to end any critical oversight of such expenditures. The one thing you can count on is that taxpayer dollars will line the pockets of the CEO, CFO, and a few lucky hangers-on. Whether anyone else will benefit is at best highly questionable.

Quote of the Week

“Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.”
- Dr. Thomas Sowell

Meme of the Week

Here at the Pairodocs household, we do a lot of reading and thinking. We share things with each other—articles, podcasts, videos, tweets, memes, quotes, scientific studies and other odds and ends—and then sit around discussing them for disturbingly long periods of time. Sometimes heatedly. Chris is usually wrong—he is, for example, a Montreal Canadiens fan—yet here I am still married to him after 30+ years!

I’m kidding, of course. We are both wrong much of the time but we like to think we become less wrong—and maybe a little closer to the truth—in the course of bouncing our ideas off each other.

Much coffee—and occasionally wine—is consumed in the course of these conversations and sometimes an idea for a new Substack post is spawned. But alas, for every idea that results in a fully developed essay, there are dozens that interest—or infuriate—us but which just don’t quite make the cut for a full Sub.

So we’ve decided to start a weekly compendium of everything we’ve found noteworthy during the previous week, from the sublime to the ridiculous to the downright terrifying, topped off with a few of our favourite quotes and memes.

Let us know in the comments what you think of the format—and the title. It’s a work in progress.

A Giggle and a Tickle. But We’re not Laughing.

An Australian appeals court this week upheld a lower court’s decision against Sall Grover, the woman who founded “Giggle for Girls” (a female only networking app) for excluding a big hairy man who calls himself “Roxanne Tickle.” The court awarded the big hairy man $20,000 (AUD) in damages plus up to $100k in legal costs—to be paid by Grover. The court found that Grover “directly discriminated” against Tickle under the Sex Discrimination Act which was amended in 2013 to include “gender identity” and to remove definitions of “man” and “woman”. Ironically, this amendment was brought about by Australia’s first and only female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard.

I believe this is an example of what the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus (and later Carl Jung and still later Iain MacGilchrist) called “enantiodromia” — the idea that when an idea or tendency is taken to its extreme, it naturally becomes its opposite. This is feminism come full circle and become the destroyer of women. This is the logical endpoint of the idea that differences between men and women are socially constructed, and that biology is irrelevant: an idea the feminists have been pushing for decades. Just as the anti-racists have become the worst racists and the anti-fascists have become the most ardent fascists, the feminists (at least the ones who insist on taking their underlying premise to its logical conclusion) have become the undisputed champions of destroying women’s sex-based rights.

The Twitterverse was not amused:

Safer snorting

When I was a kid, they taught us that drugs were dangerous and that we should “Just say No.” Now Ontario school kids are being taught how to safely snort coke.

Meanwhile, Canada’s new Chief Public Health Officer, sporting a dead-eyed stare and creepy monotone straight out of the zombie apocalypse, refused to even acknowledge that “injecting fentanyl is bad” when pressed to do so by Conservative MP Dan Mazier. Take your fentanyl kids, it’s good for you! Or at least not bad. It’s complicated. What was it George Orwell said? There are some ideas so absurd, only an intellectual could believe them? You have to hand it to them for their consistency, though. These are the same people who believe killing mentally ill people is “health care” and aborting an eight month old fetus is just another choice, like deciding which brand of cereal to buy. Death cult all the way down. The moral relativism is breathtaking. Life? Death? Meh, whatever. We’re all just inconsequential bags of chemicals on an inconsequential speck of dust in a dead mechanical universe anyway. So whatever.

Berenson v Biden—A Victory for Free Speech in Medicine!

In wonderful news for us fans of free speech in medicine, former New York Times journalist and now popular Substacker Alex Berenson won his lawsuit against the US Government (in which he alleged that they violated his 1st Amendment rights during the dark days of the COVID pandemic.) Berenson argued that the government pressured Twitter into suspending his account back in 2021 for saying things the government didn’t like (things which were quite reasonable and turned out to be true, but that’s beside the point). Not only did they award him a cash settlement, they agreed to admit wrongdoing. A quote from the actual settlement:

The United States Government. . . has acknowledged and conceded that the Government did in fact violate the First Amendment by exerting substantive coercive pressure on social media companies such as Twitter to suppress disfavored speech like Plaintiff’s.

The Free Press (conspicuously unlike the mainstream media which hardly covered it at all) does a good job of summarizing the story here.

This is one of the Tweets that got Berenson banned. Does it make you feel nostalgic?

Meanwhile, back here in Canuckistan,

we not only don’t have a First Amendment to protect our freedom of speech, but the government is trying to gain access to everything we say and do on the internet. If the proposed Bill C-22 passes, tech companies will be compelled to share all of your now private data with the government. Thankfully, although Canadians don’t seem to be grasping the potential of this Bill for facilitating authoritarian overreach, the tech companies are saying “no way, not happening.”

From the Canadian Press:

MONTREAL, May 16, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- As international scrutiny intensifies around Canada’s proposed Bill C-22, a growing coalition of global technology leaders, cybersecurity companies, and international lawmakers are warning that the legislation could severely damage Canada’s digital economy.

Prominent Canadian technology entrepreneur and investor Yanik Guillemette states that the debate surrounding Bill C-22 has evolved far beyond privacy concerns, rapidly becoming a defining economic issue for Canada’s future competitiveness in artificial intelligence (AI), cloud infrastructure, and cybersecurity.

Meta and X (along with Apple and Signal and various VPN providers) are strongly opposing the bill due to severe threats to user privacy and encryption.

Key concerns driving the opposition include:

• Encryption Backdoors: Tech giants warn the bill would allow the government to force providers to break end-to-end encryption. Meta stated this would “conscript private companies into service as an arm of the government surveillance apparatus”.

• Mandatory Data Retention: The bill enables regulations forcing service providers to retain user metadata for up to one year.

• Platform Pullout Threats: Companies like Signal and various VPN providers have threatened to leave the Canadian market entirely rather than compromise user privacy.

And to add a bit of icing to the cake, the US Congress has also voiced its displeasure:

The Lab-leak Saga Continues

The mainstream media is finally coming around to admitting that the “crazy racist COVID lab leak conspiracy theory that could get you banned from Twitter and Facebook” is not only true, but that Fauci et. al. deliberately covered it up and should be held accountable. This is a headline from the Wall Street Journal:

The intelligence community long ago figured out that the COVID virus most likely came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But in a sad comment on just how corrupt formerly prestigious medical journals have become, the Lancet has never retracted the nefarious February 2020 letter which supported mysterious “natural origins” and condemned alternative theories as "conspiracy theories" — even after it became obvious to anyone paying attention that the real purpose of the letter (orchestrated by Teflon Tony himself) was to cover the butts of the people who had supported and funded gain of function research in Wuhan. And they wonder why people don’t trust The Science™ anymore?

Say his name: Henry Nowak

Just when you thought the UK couldn’t descend any further into self-destructive absurdity, a murder trial this week makes you wonder if you’re actually asleep and about to awaken from a nightmare.

The facts according to the decidedly-not-right-wing BBC:

A first-year university student was stabbed to death by an attacker captured saying “I am a bad man” moments before inflicting the fatal wound, a court has heard.

Henry Nowak, 18, from Chafford Hundred, Essex, was killed as he walked back from a night out in Southampton on 3 December.

A trial at Southampton Crown Court heard that alleged attacker Vickrum Digwa, 23, was filmed by Nowak carrying a shastar – the Punjabi word for weapon or knife – which had a 21cm (8in) blade.

The attacker was allowed to carry the deadly knife (the UK has strict laws about carrying knives) because he is a Sikh and, well, multiculturalism and all that. But the worst part of the story is this: Instead of immediately arresting the attacker, the police handcuffed the bleeding British boy after Mr. Digwa claimed (without evidence) that the boy had made “racist comments.” After which, the boy lost consciousness and succumbed to his wounds. Again, the Twitterverse was not amused:

Whew. Heavy stuff. Let’s end on a lighter note:

Memes of the week

Quote of the week

“We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which furious party cries will be raised against anybody who says that cows have horns, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening mob with the news that grass is green.”

― G.K. Chesterton

Pairodocs addendum: “Or a woman can get fined $120,000 for saying a big hairy man is not a woman.”

Cast your mind back 6 years, when COVID was not a cold, but a terrifying disease coming for us all. Like a meteor hurtling towards earth, death and destruction was on the way.

Public health/the government/legacy media promoted ideas and rules that were somewhere between ridiculous and insane, but definitely evil: “lockdown” (prior to 2020 a word only used for prison riots or school shootings), masking rules (put it on when you stand up, but you can take it off if you sit down, or are eating—as logical as taking off your condom when you switch positions), and later “vaccine” mandates (we know there are no long term side effects even though it’s brand new!). To bring people on side, it was necessary to terrify them by exaggerating the threat of COVID. And it worked. This is not news to readers of this Substack.

A terrified populace is a compliant one. Statistics (and our post-COVID voting record in Canada and other countries) shows that most of these measures are still thought of as reasonable and necessary, even in retrospect. I think (and last year’s “drought lockdown” in Nova Scotia proves my point) that the government remains very comfortable infringing our civil liberties, and the majority of the electorate will be on board with draconian measures again next time .

Honest, open-eyed physicians noticed the disconnect between reality and the mainstream news early in the COVID saga. Far from overflowing with COVID victims, hospital wards and ER’s were emptier than at any other time during the 33 years since I started medical school. I recall thumbwrestling my colleague for the privilege of seeing the next patient in ER, because we had both been sitting for an hour with nothing to do. (I won).

So, unable to terrify us with video of people gasping their last breaths on COVID wards or photos of young, healthy people who had dropped dead in the middle of the street, what was a poor government to do? It turns out that motivated parties can always find ways to lie with statistics.

I’ve written about this before but statistically, deaths from conditions like cancer, dementia, and heart failure actually FELL after COVID arrived. How? Did COVID cure cancer?

Not at all. Rather, what was happening was that we were re-defining “cause of death,” taking people from other statistical buckets and using them to fill the COVID bucket. It didn’t matter if “having” COVID (in some cases this meant just a positive test, not the disease) had shortened a life by a month, a week, a day, or not at all. A person right at the end of life, literally even someone on the palliative care ward (yes I saw this happen), who died after a positive COVID test had died “of” COVID. They were entered in the stats as such, stats which the obedient media and medical officer of health could then use to terrify us.

The most egregious case I know of was a patient in their late 80’s. (My use of the indefinite, plural pronoun is to avoid identifying the person’s sex, not because they had pronouns in their bio.) They had severe, end-stage dementia and were at most a few weeks from end-of-life. Their quality of life was so poor that their family wanted no further treatment for any diseases. Because the patient’s brain was so damaged they couldn’t swallow reliably, and they aspirated food on a Wednesday. By the next day it was clear they had developed aspiration pneumonia. The family was informed and re-stated they wanted only comfort care. The patient became very unwell and stopped eating altogether.

Because the patient had “respiratory symptoms”, the nurses (against my recommendation—they were “following protocol”) swabbed the patient for COVID every 48 hours. The test was negative on Friday, Sunday, and again Tuesday. Wednesday morning the patient died. Shortly after death, a report came back from the lab saying that the Tuesday swab had been “reprocessed” and was now positive for COVID. (I assume “reprocessed” meant re-running the test at a higher cycle threshold, which is more likely to give false positive results—read “The King’s Chessboard” to understand this issue). The death was reported as being from COVID, even though it doesn’t take any medical training to understand that the patient died of dementia and ultimately aspiration pneumonia. The patient at best died “with COVID” (or more likely with a positive COVID test), not “of COVID”.

Even for those on death’s door with one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, if they happened to test positive for COVID at any point near their death, there was strong pressure and intellectual momentum to report this as a “COVID death”.

Considering all of that, the great irony and contradiction of a recent new guideline from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario struck me full force when a colleague shared it.

Unlike a COVID death, where the actual cause of death is to be ignored and COVID is to be substituted as cause of death—whether or not it was 11th hour, or contributory in any way, with MAiD we are being instructed to do the opposite: even though it is ABSOLUTELY the cause of death, we cannot list it as such.

Keep in mind that MAiD is not palliative sedation, when we give a comatose patient gurgling and struggling for breath at the very end of life enough medication to be comfortable, even if it might hasten his death. MAiD can only legally be done to lucid, competent individuals—by definition, those who are not in their final throes.

Achy knees, a weak heart, an early cancer—any condition can qualify a Canadian to apply for euthanasia, as long as he feels his suffering is “intolerable”— even if the condition might be compatible with years more of life (“Track 2 MAiD”). If we euthanize a 65 year old with mild COPD and arthritic knees, it takes no medical training to see that the cause of death is clearly “euthanasia”, not “achy knees and COPD”.

In the same way that the Venezuelan government pressured doctors not to write “starvation” as a cause of death there, soon we will not be allowed to write “Euthanasia”, “Suicide” or even “MAiD” on a death certificate here in Canada.

And so the statistics will lie to suit government purposes and agendas. Of course we’re not euthanizing thousands of people per year! Of course there weren’t thousands of people starving in Venezuela! Where did you right-wing conspiracy theorists ever get such a crazy, crazy idea!!? After all, just look at the statistics!

The best we can hope for is that ethical physicians will not knuckle under, and will refuse to sign false death certificates. But given that the type of physicians who are involved in MAiD are not necessarily the most ethical (Ellen Wiebe, anyone?), I despair somewhat that this will be the case. So be prepared for future headlines like “MAiD deaths peaked in 2025 and are falling”. Worried about MAiD? Fuggedaboudit! Fudged statistics will provide convenient, constructed cover for a practice that cannot be defended ethically.

The Medical Society of Nova Scotia has a long and proud history. Founded in 1854, it existed as the MSNS until 2012 when it was “rebranded” as Doctors NS. The MSNS was small, had few permanent staff, and was primarily led and run by volunteers. Membership was voluntary. Its role was narrow and confined to representing the interests of physicians.

At the time of the rebrand, membership became mandatory by government fiat. MSNS membership was $450 in 2010 and is now $1950 (not including CMA membership if one chooses that). The organization became more bloated, hiring numerous permanent staff including public relations professionals and a permanent, well-compensated CEO. They now make regular statements about political matters, immediately jumping on board with support for BLM after the George Floyd moral panic and immediately sending a supportive statement about “reconciliation” after the Kamloops mass grave deception as just two examples.

Engagement with DoctorsNS has fallen dramatically. I was once a proud and involved member of the Medical Society of Nova Scotia and then DoctorsNS. But like any physician with centrist or — God forbid! — conservative views I have been systematically excluded and driven from the organization. Just one example is that, as then chair of the Public Health Issues Committee I was asked (required) to sign a commitment to diversity and inclusion. My refusal culminated in a meeting with the board chairman and other staff - a story for another time.

How hollowed out is the organization? A few years ago, an “engagement tour” of the province attracted a handful of physicians at each site, with a total of perhaps 2 or 3% of the membership actually attending a meeting. One can guess the prevailing political views of the members who chose to attend. DoctorsNS called the tour “successful” and their write-up summary of the tour (undoubtedly crafted by their PR experts) concluded with something like “we listened carefully to our members’ concerns”.

Like some deranged serial killer, medical organizations like DoctorsNS have become evil imposters, wearing the skins of the organism they have killed. With every physician (mandatorily) a member, they claim to “speak for physicians”. They retain the imprimatur and therefore residual legitimacy of the once-noble bodies that they now inhabit. It is no surprise that respect and trust in physicians has fallen greatly in the last number of years (their enthusiastic support of draconian COVID policies accelerated this fall), and sadly they just keep doubling down on the opinions that have alienated the public and much of their membership.

Recently physicians in Nova Scotia received one of our regular email newsletters from DoctorsNS. One of the items shocked a number of us, as you’ll read below. In response, a group of NS physicians crafted this letter and sent it to DoctorsNS. I’ve requested a response, which I’ll post here as a separate Substack if and when it arrives.

To Whom it May Concern

DoctorsNS membership is not voluntary. We are forced to pay for membership, and thus 100% of practicing physicians in NS are members and DNS can claim to “speak for physicians”. As such it behooves you to be VERY careful when taking strong political stances, when some of these may not only be unrepresentative of the membership but in some cases anathema to a significant minority.

A perfect example of this came to us in a recent email update which included this:

Not only are such pregnancy care centres not “fake”, but in fact there are DNS members who help organize, volunteer at, and financially support them.

Many women who find themselves unexpectedly pregnant or who suffer a change in circumstances after a planned pregnancy desire options other than abortion. Many want to keep their baby but need financial, social, or emotional support to feel comfortable doing so. This is what these centres provide.

The tone of this missive from DNS is one of shock and surprise that such centres exist. That DNS would not be aware of them, and furthermore that they would describe them as “fake”, shows a blindness and a shallow understanding of the issue amongst those at DNS. This statement makes it clear that DNS believes the only “support” necessary and acceptable for pregnant women is to provide rapid and easy access to abortion, a view that many Nova Scotian physicians disagree with.

At best, abortion should be an option that is looked at as unfortunate. Instead it is lauded as the sine-qua-non of pregnancy care by organizations such as DNS, who valourize and deify the physicians who practice abortion and denigrate those who provide other options.

Physicians and others advocating for or directly supporting pregnancy support centres do so based on care, compassion, and a deep abiding morality. They do so not out of a desire to limit women’s choices, but to expand the array of options available for a pregnant woman in distress. Some pregnancy support centre supporters (who are more fairly referred to as “pro-life” rather than “anti-abortion”) indeed do not agree with abortion as an option. Other similar centres may agree with abortion being an option for pregnant women, but consider it the least preferable course. Women who choose an abortion should not do so out of a sense of distress, isolation, or a feeling that it is the only option.

Staff and management of DNS are welcome to their opinion that the best approach to a pregnant woman in distress is to immediately refer her to an abortion provider. But denigrating those who have a different view with adjectives such as “fake” and “anti-abortion” is unnecessary, nasty and divisive.

DNS already has a massive engagement problem. Many members with centrist or conservative views have felt increasingly alienated by the political stances of DNS. Those DNS members who do not agree with DNS’s progressive political stances are not misguided, uninformed, or immoral, and their views should be respected.

Providing options and support for women who would rather keep their baby is not mutually exclusive with providing abortions. Should easy access to abortion be the only “support” allowed to be given to pregnant women? Research shows that many (perhaps a majority) of women who have chosen abortion come to regret that they did so. On the other hand, it is very rare to find a woman who has regretted carrying her pregnancy to term. Most of us have never met one. As such, it behooves physicians and others who counsel pregnant women in difficult circumstances to make sure they know that true pregnancy support – literally the antithesis of facilitating abortion – is available as an option. DNS has done a disservice in so flippantly denigrating that significant portion of its membership who strive to support women who want to carry their babies to term. DNS owes these physicians an apology, and should learn from this mistake.

Sincerely yours,

Dr. Chris Milburn

Dr. Julie Curwin

(etc)

Since my first piece on euthanasia (“MAiD”), and then again since Julie’s more recent piece about extending it to the mentally ill, several interesting issues have bubbled up through comments and discussion. I thought these were worth fleshing out.

Did someone order MAiD service?

What’s in a name? A lot. MAiD used to be a name for someone who cleans your house. And in the same way that a maid can sanitize your bathroom, the term “MAiD” sanitizes suicide. By coining such a clean and optimistic term, euthanasia proponents seized the linguistic high ground. But despite the obfuscatory name, “MAiD” actually means a person committing suicide (or being suicided). This was until very recently considered an extreme act. Perhaps the single most extreme act there is. At worst, suicide is a mortal sin that prevents that individual from being buried on hallowed ground and leaves his soul in purgatory. Now it’s just a medical procedure.

Euthanasia is not assisted suicide

There is an important distinction between euthanasia and assisted suicide. These terms are often used interchangeably, but are in fact distinct. Euthanasia is passive on behalf of the party being euthanized (with the exception in humans of taking part in the decision to be put down). The hamster that was gasping and suffering was euthanized by a whack from my dad’s shovel before we buried it in our backyard. It wasn’t a case of assisted suicide.

Assisted suicide is a human-specific way to end a life, as lesser life forms can’t ask to be killed. Jack Kevorkian never “killed” anyone, he just set it up so the patient could easily kill himself. With assisted suicide, the doctor or nurse might put in an IV and get the meds ready, or provide the pills in a cup by the bedside, but in the end the patient has to push the plunger or swallow the tablets. Assisted suicide, unlike euthanasia, is an active act.

Far from being a distinction without a difference, assisted suicide is very different philosophically and practically from euthanasia. A very interesting natural experiment has been underway since California legalized assisted suicide at almost the same time that Canada legalized euthanasia. In California, the doctor puts the suicide meds out for you but you have to take them. In Canada, you just lie there and let the doctor perform a “medical procedure”.

And what a difference it makes. Being euthanized in Canada is about 19 times more common than committing assisted suicide in California.

The euthanasia slope is more slippery than assisted suicide

It’s hard to kill yourself. Atheists might recognize this difficulty as the strong evolutionary urge to live. The religious among us might see it more as a recognition that our life is a gift, and ending it by our own hand is a sin against God. Either way, I can’t tell you the number of people I’ve seen in the ER through the years who had stood on the edge of a cliff, stared down the barrel of a gun, tied a rope in a tree, or looked at the cup full of pills and then changed their mind. They deeply felt that suicide was the wrong choice. But when the patient is a passive recipient of “medical care” as with MAiD, this epiphany cannot happen. It’s easy for “MAiD recipients” to think of themselves as having a medical procedure, whereas it is more clear to the person who is required to swallow a lethal overdose – even if it was put on the nightstand by a doctor – that he is committing suicide.

Your right to die is not the same as the state’s obligation to kill you

Another distinction that is important, and that was a source of controversy and misunderstanding amongst commenters on various forums, is the difference between arguing to have the “right to die” versus the need to have a program run by the state and funded by the taxpayer that approves, facilitates, and even performs the killing. There is actually a wide difference between these two arguments. The libertarian dream is freedom of choice, not state-administered and funded programs to control and provide those choices.

You absolutely have the right to die. You can stop eating and drinking. You can jump off a cliff, shoot yourself in the head, hang yourself, or take pills. Even though I think it is a sin to commit suicide, I can’t stop you in the end even though as a physician - and a human being - I will certainly try to convince you not to. After 27 years in ER, one of “Milburn’s Laws” is “Patients who really want to kill themselves, kill themselves” despite our best efforts to prevent them from doing so. Despite (and some would argue perhaps because of) a proliferation of therapists and counsellors, self-esteem promotion, suicide prevention, “wellness” initiatives and more, suicide rates have increased.

In practice, choosing euthanasia is about hopelessness and not the medical condition

A number of commenters supported euthanasia in people with terrible physical diseases, but felt that we cross a line when we offer it to depressed patients. But in my experience, people who choose to be euthanized always do so because of hopelessness, whether or not we call that hopelessness “mental illness”. The vast majority of those with cancer, dementia or sore joints want to live their lives out to the fullest. They want to spend time with family and friends, see more sunsets and sunrises, play music, write their life story for their grandkids, clean the junk out of their house, finalize their finances, and more. The ones who want the express checkout lane are the ones who feel they have nothing left to live for. It has been said that “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

So although many commenters on our previous pieces see that euthanizing mentally ill patients has crossed a line, they don’t see that the distinction between hopelessness caused by mental illness and hopelessness caused by physical illness is actually artificial. In my experience, we are already euthanizing depressed people.

And, if one agrees that the criteria for “being approved for MAiD” should be that one’s suffering is intolerable, how can we deny euthanasia to those suffering from mental illness, which in my experience causes suffering at least as severe as those with physical diseases.

Furthermore, in a system where real care is routinely delayed or even unavailable, providing rapid access to suicide services seems doubly immoral. One of my patients with a neurodegenerative disorder faced an 18 month wait to be reassessed by a neurologist, but could talk to a MAiD assessor within 48 hours.

There is no such thing as “necessary suffering” if one believes in suicide

Several commenters said that they supported assisted suicide because it prevented “unnecessary suffering”. But “unnecessary” suffering is a tautology for people who believe in suicide. The Buddhists say it best. “Life is Suffering”. If one lives, one suffers. Life is a sexually transmitted disease with a 100% fatality rate. We all die. And we will all suffer before we do.

If we believe in preventing unnecessary suffering, the solution to any physical or emotional pain is always clear. Girlfriend breaks up with you? Kill yourself. Wife sleeps around and then leaves you? Kill yourself. Your knees ache every morning for hours? Kill yourself. Every patient I’ve seen choose to be euthanized chose it because of hopelessness, not because of the disease. Well-adjusted people with good relationships, even when they have terrible cancers, ALS or other conditions that cause suffering, want to squeeze every drop out of this precious, short existence that they can.

If you have a painful, progressive cancer but could live another 6 months or year with it, why put up with the pain? Why not end it now? That is what MAiD enthusiasts suggest is most rational. And in a strictly rational sense, it is true: why suffer? It is part of the same rationalism that led the Nazi regime to feel virtuous when euthanizing “useless eaters” such as the disabled. They only suffer anyway, and who would want to live like that, after all?

Overcoming challenge, pain, and grief makes us who we are

We can and do learn to deal with pain. Many people, for instance, will say that they would rather die than be paraplegic or quadriplegic. But it turns out that most paralyzed people learn to live with their injury and find joys in their new life. I have known many people who died of cancer who told me near the end of their life that their time of dying was incredibly meaningful and beautiful. Facing mortality and pain is frightening, but seems to bring appreciation for the beauty and joy in life.

How can we objectively regulate something that is inherently subjective?

The careful attempts to formulate logical and sensible MAiD regulations resulted in gobbledegook. The original legislation demanded that death be “reasonably foreseeable”, but of course death is not just “reasonably foreseeable”, but inevitable for us all – even a healthy newborn baby. The updated wording only demands that the person have a “grievous and irremediable” medical condition. But any medical condition could be considered “grievous and irremediable” as this is subjective.

Most diseases that I deal with in family practice are “irremediable” - Crohn’s disease, emphysema, and arthritis are just 3 examples. Nobody can cure them, so most people will die with them if not of them. “Grievous” is not an objective word, but rather depends on the person’s subjective view of the severity and tolerability of his symptoms. Uncle Joe might weep bitterly over his sore knees while Aunt Mary goes golfing with worse. One can’t make an objective standard for suffering and grief, which are inherently subjective and personal.

Once the obfuscatory language is boiled off, what our regulations actually say is: if you don’t want to live, we’ll help you die. When someone is “approved for MAiD”, it means that they did not want to live with their symptoms, not that they couldn’t.

Wanting to live forever is the flip side of euthanasia

“A man’s days are numbered. You know the number of his months. He cannot live longer than the time You have set.” (Job 14:5)

After writing my first article on euthanasia, an astute friend talked about the apparent contradiction between our zeal for euthanizing people in the same system that sees ancient demented people receiving aggressive medical interventions and even life support. As my dad said about a friend who lingered in a nursing home for 10 years with slowly progressive dementia, and finally bed sores and other horrors, “if he was a dog they would have put him down”. But instead he was tube fed, treated for every infection, and even had surgery for impacted gallstones that prolonged his life.

Just as we now see suffering as the result of a failure of the medical system (and something that we can “cure” with euthanasia), our medical system sees death not as a natural ending to every life, but as a failure. There is a joke amongst family doctors:

Q: Why do they nail coffins shut?

A: So that the oncologist can’t give any more chemo.

But it’s not fair to single out oncologists. ICU physicians keep people on life support in many cases where it seems like a cruelty. Family doctors treat nursing home patients (with life expectancies of a few months at most) with things like cholesterol-lowering drugs or bone-builders that are at best only useful in patients over several years. We don’t like to admit that someone’s time has come. Nobody dies of old age anymore. Instead, they die of a disease that – perhaps – the doctor didn’t treat aggressively enough.

Even more extreme and overt versions of wanting to cheat death have arrived. Biohacking or uploading your consciousness to the cloud. Maybe we can all live to 100, or 150, or forever? If only we can find the tech. If only we do enough research.

Mitch Albom in The Time Keeper wrote: “Soon man will count all his days, and then smaller segments of the day, and then smaller still—until the counting consumes him, and the wonder of the world he has been given is lost.“

In the end the desire to either live longer than was your fate or to end your life before your time are attempts to control life and death. We desire to become Gods, and be the unchallenged masters of our own destiny. But perhaps rather than spending so much time trying to control our lives, we should be living them to the fullest. That means taking what comes and making the most of it, rather than trying to control it.

Euthanasia and overly-aggressive treatment of clearly-dying patients are both about control. They are 2 sides of the same transhumanist coin.

Sunsets are beautiful

Some of the most beautiful and memorable times of our lives – the times that we will most cherish, and the times where our relationships are tested and deepened – happen around deathbeds.

Psalm 139:16 “All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be”

For instance, one of my cancer patients died slowly. We kept him as comfortable as possible at home for months where he had a succession of visitors. He grew closer to his children and their families. He passed on stories, gave away precious keepsakes, answered questions about his parents and grandparents and family history. He brought to mind that saying “Whenever an old person dies, a library burns down”. My patient made sure to give away as many books as he could before the fire.

When he finally was too weak to manage at home, we brought him into hospital. His siblings were scattered around numerous provinces. They all came back home, together for the first time in many years. Two asked about euthanasia and I explained that it was not an option as he was now incompetent, and that it had not been his wish. I let them know that we could treat his pain and discomforts, and that this was their chance to say their good-byes.

They said their goodbyes and told him they loved him. They held his hand and moistened his lips. They told stories in his ear and for the first few days watched as he would break into a barely perceptible smile. Eventually he stopped eating and drinking altogether. Even when he didn’t react anymore they still talked to him. Only God knows how much he heard. They brought in photo albums and reminisced, told old stories and hugged and laughed and cried. They took turns going home and cooking group meals to bring to the hospital.

I thought he would last a handful of days at most. He set my record for such a patient by living for well over a week after his last drop of water. There were several times when he looked uncomfortable but they were rare and quickly cured with medication.

After he finally passed, one of his siblings said to me, even though she felt uncomfortable saying it, that the last week had been one of the most beautiful times of life for her and her siblings and family. It had brought them together and reconnected them. It made them realize how much they meant to each other. She said “I think he held on that long to keep us all here. He knew somehow.” God knows if she was right.

I have often thought about what would have been missed if that patient had chosen to be euthanized.

A sunset is often the most beautiful time of the day. My work has shown me that there is a beauty in dying just like there is a beauty in living. Euthanizing patients destroys that beauty.

Suicide is not the natural order of things

As Kevin Hines (see Julie’s Substack) discusses, suicide has “ripples”. It disturbs the natural order. Its consequences are like a shock wave that strikes wives, husbands, children, parents, friends, and the community. It is stigmatized for good reason: it is one of the worst things you could do to someone else. I’ve told patients considering suicide that it would be much less traumatic and destructive for their loved ones to hit them over the head with a baseball bat than to commit suicide.

Life is not easy and it shouldn’t be. And choosing death over life should be even harder. But since the advent of MAiD, more and more are doing so as state-sanctioned suicide has sanitized, legitimized, and facilitated the process. The rise of MAiD is not a “success”. It is a tragedy.