Shelby Steele and his son Eli are releasing a new documentary, White Guilt, that should be compulsory viewing for anyone interested in Canada’s cultural malaise.

Steele’s thesis, which originally grew out of the post-civil rights American context, has become increasingly relevant for understanding how English Canada went off the rails culturally, beginning in the 1960s and accelerating with the Great Awokening after 2015.

Shelby Steele is a black American who grew up in the segregated South and lived through the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s. That era upended the American moral order, marking one of the country’s most profound cultural developments since the founding of the United States. Where black people once kowtowed to white people, the situation completely reversed itself after white people admitted that they had oppressed black people in the past.

As Steele observed in 1990:

‘The lines of moral power, like plates in the earth, had shifted. White guilt became so palpable you could see it on people. At the time what it looked like to my eyes was a remarkable loss of authority. And what whites lost in authority, blacks gained. You cannot feel guilty about anyone without giving away power to them.’

For Steele, the desire of white Americans for redemption drove them to adopt policies that signalled virtue, but were highly destructive for black Americans. Rather than treat black people as equals, and hold them to the same standards, guilty whites chose to infantilise them with special treatment. This devalued the real record of black resilience and achievement in favour of focusing on victimhood, which sapped agency.

Steele called this a form of ‘moral colonialism’, creating a dependency culture that trapped black people instead of developing their potential.

Guilt, writes Steele, can produce civilising policy change, but only if it is kept in check and motivated by a desire to help the outgroup rather than by a narcissistic fear for one’s own innocence. Unfortunately, once a guilt mindset has been unleashed, it is very difficult to prevent its exploitation.

The reasonable Civil Rights Act of 1964 was swiftly perverted by the black radicalism and rioting of the late 1960s, turning into a demand for reparations and racial preferences. Many whites acceded to these demands in order to secure the redemption they craved.

Likewise, American institutions sought to burnish their anti-racist credentials and legitimacy by giving in to demands for separate black dormitories and segregated graduation ceremonies. Steele dubbed this process ‘dissociation’. We now call it virtue-signalling.

These upheavals also pushed President Lyndon Johnson to empower a crusading civil rights bureaucracy alongside an activist Supreme Court, which Chris Caldwell argues created a second American Constitution that superseded the original of 1787.

These currents spread to Canada as modernising technology made it easier for ideas to spread across national borders, especially on a fairly culturally integrated continent like North America. Canada also became a haven for tens of thousands of American draft dodgers during the Vietnam War, many of whom spread their leftist ideas here. Canada’s Indigenous ‘Red Power’ movement copied the tactics and rhetoric of its ‘Black Power’ counterparts in the U.S.

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Among the many questionable statements made by former prime minister Justin Trudeau, few have drawn more ire from Canadian conservatives than his suggestion that Canada is the world’s first “post-national state”. It therefore came as something of a shock to many Conservative Party supporters when Canadians rallied around the Liberal Party of Canada, and not the Conservative Party, in response to Donald Trump’s tariff drive. From their standpoint, it was simply incomprehensible that a party that had openly promoted the idea of “hotel Canada” would somehow still get to claim the mantle of Canadian patriotism.

Many factors played into this development. One was the concerted effort by the Liberal Party, starting in the 1960s, to construct an expressly left-leaning Canadian identity that persists to this day. But at least equally consequential was the ongoing incapacity of Canadian conservatism to offer an alternative vision of Canadian identity, whether rooted in the past or oriented toward the future. Going back to at least the same period, Canadian conservatism has instead tended to be defined by its own, more honest brand of post-nationalism, one that does not benefit from the new symbology crafted for this purpose by the Liberal Party.

It is tempting to point to those Canadian conservatives who oppose continued attachment to the monarchy as the best embodiment of this post-1960s conservative post-nationalist philosophy. However, the best illustration is provided by Anglo-Canadian conservative attitudes toward the status of the French language. While opposition to official bilingualism undoubtedly exists on the Canadian left, it is, by all appearances, more pronounced on the Canadian right. Indeed, one poll conducted ahead of the 2023 Conservative leadership convention showed that fewer than three in 10 Conservative Party members consider bilingualism to be important to Canadian identity.

Recent events track this perceived hostility towards French among certain segments of the Conservative Party’s base. In the aftermath of the plane crash at LaGuardia Airport last month that claimed two lives, including that of a francophone co-pilot from Quebec, Air Canada’s CEO held an English-only press conference. This decision prompted objections from Quebec’s political class, which in turn prompted counter-objections from Anglo-Canadians, and especially from Anglo-Canadian conservatives. Although they began by focusing on Quebec’s perceived overreaction to the Air Canada press conference, these counter-objections soon devolved into attacks on official bilingualism and the continued relevance of the French language in Canada as a whole.

These objections to bilingualism, and to the status of French in Canada, are nothing new, of course. Nor have the arguments against official bilingualism changed all that much since the Official Languages Act and related federal legislation were adopted in the 1970s. As it turns out, these arguments are rooted in entirely post-nationalist premises. They differ from the assumptions undergirding Justin Trudeau’s infamous statement only in that Trudeau likely intended to direct them at English Canada alone, and to spare any direct confrontation with francophones in Quebec. In contrast, the Anglo-Canadian conservatives advancing these arguments would extend the post-nationalist vision to Quebec as well.

Consider the interventions of well-known Vancouver-based commentator J.J. McCullough, who weighed in early on the Air Canada controversy with a denunciation that included a rejection of Canada’s continued attachment to the monarchy, a favourite hobby-horse of his. He then followed up on his objections to bilingualism in a full-length post titled “There are no good arguments in favor of official bilingualism”.

In that more fulsome post, McCullough argued that “the two founding nations theory” often used to justify official bilingualism at the federal level in Canada “is so at odds with the realities of both Canadian history and Canada’s modern form that it cannot be used to justify public policy without inflicting enormous undemocratic harms upon the country.” He then continued:

To presume that French Canadians, and for that matter English Canadians, possess inherent rights that derive from their cultural identities rather than their status as free individuals is a profoundly illiberal idea that frames Canada not as an egalitarian democracy, but as a hierarchy of peoples, wherein one’s ancestral identity can override competing interests of Canadians of different backgrounds. Canadians, in fact, explicitly rejected enshrining these values into the Canadian constitution when they voted down the Charlottetown Accord in 1992, a package of amendments the aging Pierre Elliott Trudeau criticized as a project of turning Canada into a nation governed by “a hierarchy of categories of citizens.”

The point here is not so much to single out McCullough for attack, as it is to focus on his arguments as a particularly developed example of a more widespread post-nationalist attitude that the Air Canada controversy brought to the fore on the Anglo-Canadian political right.

The question raised by McCullough’s arguments against the status of French in Canada, which should be evident from his citing Trudeau the elder to support them, is whether their underlying assumptions differ substantially from the “post-national” premises of Trudeau the younger that Canadian conservatives so often claim to despise.

The answer, simply put, is that they do not. In fact, these arguments go further in the direction of post-nationalism than either Trudeau ever advocated openly. While Quebec nationalists have long criticised Trudeau père’s vision for Canada as entailing the reduction of Quebec francophones to the status of one minority among others, he and the Liberal Party were never so crass as to advocate openly for this outcome. The post-nationalisms of both the elder and younger Trudeau were confined, in word, though perhaps not in deed, to marginalising the distinctively English collective identity of Anglo-Canada. When Trudeau affirmed that “[t]here is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada,” he did not explicitly mean to include Quebec.

In contrast, Anglo-Canadian conservatives in the mould of J.J. McCullough have no such scruples. They believe that Trudeau-style post-nationalism is just fine, but that it should not be limited in its application to Anglo-Canada. It should instead be extended to Canada as a whole. They would go so far as to outright reject Canada’s founding compact, entered into between the French Canadians and the British Crown with the aim of preserving the French language, culture, law, and religion against a common American threat. In its place, they would erect a form of individualism reminiscent of that espoused by the Trudeaus, but without exceptions conceded on the basis of political expediency. They would also erect a “collective identity” synonymous with the premises of philosophical liberalism, under which individuals are free to define themselves however they want. To borrow McCullough’s formulation, “their status as free individuals” demands it.

In case the parallels between these two competing post-nationalisms, distinguished primarily by the former’s more tactful approach towards the management of Quebec, are not yet sufficiently compelling, consider also the role that appeals to “diversity” play in both arguments. When Trudeau the younger claimed that “a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian,” he meant to say that supporters of the Islamic terrorist group ISIS were no less entitled to Canadian citizenship than anyone else. That is, he invoked the notion of diversity against suggestions that Canadian identity should be tied to specific beliefs or political commitments.

Those on the Anglo-Canadian right who oppose the recognition of French make a similar appeal to diversity as part of their argument. In their view, Canadian diversity is such that granting preferential treatment to any particular language would simply be unjust, and indeed discriminatory. To quote McCullough at length once more:

It is difficult to justify nationalizing “official” status for the French language purely on the basis of an appeal to the inherent rights of a linguistic minority, given that linguistic minorities have long comprised a broad and diverse community of Canadians who exist in different proportions in different provinces, for example, only 57,420 British Columbians claim French as their “mother tongue,” whereas over 417,000 claim Chinese. Yet that is what Canada did.

In McCullough’s estimation, and in the estimation of the many who agree with him, French is simply one of many minority languages in Canada. It still happens to be spoken by a larger minority than any other minority language. But this may change. Canada’s diversity, present since the beginning and growing since that time, means that it is unjust and undemocratic to accord any special status to the French language in Canada.

Put differently, as against the Quebec nationalist suggestion that Trudeau the elder’s post-nationalist vision would eventually relegate francophones to the status of one minority among many, the brand of post-nationalism embraced by Anglo-Canadian conservatives in the McCullough mould is one that already recognises them as such. Having rejected completely the idea that language, culture, history, and tradition can serve as legitimate touchstones for defining Canadian identity, all they are left with is an idea of Canada based purely on voluntary association. Quebec, in their view, has to abide by these rules just as much as anyone else, and it is unfair that it does not.

Anglo-Canadian conservatism now stands at a crossroads. One path involves the pursuit of post-nationalism, as suggested by those among its number who oppose federal bilingualism and the recognition of Quebec’s distinctive linguistic and cultural inheritance. It means abandoning all references to the ideas that have historically defined Canada as Canada, and moving forward with a post-nationalist vision of the kind expressed by both Trudeaus, but one that expressly subjects Quebec to this vision as well.

The other path means choosing to resile from the post-nationalist temptation that has existed as at least a latent subcurrent of Anglo-Canadian conservatism since the 1960s, and consciously attempting to forge a new conservative Canadian national identity. Such an identity might be grounded in the twin ideas of the founding compact, namely the monarchy and the French language. To be clear, these touchstones are not enough to sustain Canada in the future, at least without an active commitment to preserve and foster the principles that underlie them. But they at least provide a place from which to build a common identity for all Canadians that is more profound than post-nationalism and the sterile symbols imposed by the Liberal Party under Pearson and Trudeau.

Undergirding these two alternative paths are two different understandings of diversity and of the best way to manage it. The first path, the post-nationalist path, is the one we know, and the one that has led Canada to its current, less than satisfactory state. This path rests on the contention that the fact of diversity implies the impossibility of any truly shared identity. The best we can hope to say is that “a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian,” or, to borrow language from the CBC, “It’s not how Canadian you are. It’s who you are in Canada.”

The second path rejects these claimed implications of diversity. Indeed, it recognises that the fact of diversity makes the construction of a collective identity more important, not less. But taking this path also means favouring some reference points over others, and seeing these choices as positive. At minimum, it should mean that a convicted ISIS terrorist is not simply “a Canadian” like any other. But it also likely means that the languages that are constitutive of distinctive political communities within Canada, such as French, are given higher recognition than languages that people in certain Canadian cities happen to speak.

There is a difference between a place like Toronto, where many, if not a majority of children, now grow up in households where another language happens to be spoken, and a place like Quebec, where that language is constitutive of a political community with a distinctive past, present, and future.

Regardless of the path chosen, Canadian conservatism must be conscious of the nature and implications of that choice. From a partisan political standpoint, choosing the first path is likely an electoral loser for the Conservative Party. These pragmatic considerations probably explain why the Liberal Party has never expressly applied its own post-nationalist commitments to Quebec. To the extent that these premises have been applied to Quebec by supporters of the Conservative Party, it is likely that they have had a negative impact on the Conservatives’ electoral fortunes, and conversely this explains much of the Liberal Party’s overall dominance at the federal level.

Now, it may be too late for the Conservative Party to change the minds of francophones in Quebec. Perhaps Quebec should be regarded as a write-off. Even then, the path chosen has other implications.

At minimum, there remains a choice of what Anglo-Canadian conservatism more broadly represents. If it wishes to follow Canadian liberalism down the path of post-nationalism, then it needs to be aware that this means playing into the vision of Canada consciously created by the Liberal Party.

It means that Anglo-Canadian conservatives can no longer complain when Canada is called the first “post-national state”, or when a Liberal Party led by Mark Carney draws on this imagery to position Canada as a “progressive” alternative to a Trump-led United States.

It means that Anglo-Canadian conservatism will have chosen to play within the Liberal Party’s post-national sandbox, and will continue to be bound by the Liberal Party’s vision of what Canada is and should be.

Andrew Averay is a social studies teacher and writer with interests in politics, current affairs and public education.

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Join members of the Without Diminishment masthead for a Good Friday roundtable, as we break down a whirlwind week in Canadian politics and culture. From French language controversy, to the arguable need to better communicate a 'no' to high-speed rail, to a radical shift for the NDP, the team dives deep into the stories shaping the national conversation.

In this episode:

• The Air Canada CEO ousting

• Train-timid Toryism

• The craziness that was the NDP Leadership Convention

• The latest on upcoming appearances, and opportunities to join the team from W.D.

For tickets to the Bennett Bash, RSVP via Luma.

And to join us at Canada Strong and Free Vancouver, and Canada Strong and Free Ottawa.

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The B.C. NDP’s planned “land back” and massive wealth transfer “reconciliation” revolution for British Columbia carries on undiminished in fervour and intent, no matter what Premier David Eby says about suspending parts of DRIPA, as he mused about yesterday.

As if that continuing secret assault by the provincial government were not enough for B.C. private landowners to have to contend with, one Canadian court has decided that a proper interpretation of section 35 of the Constitution leads to Aboriginal title being a “senior” interest in land that can trump, and even displace, privately held fee simple titles.

British Columbians, and other Canadians, have been stunned to learn, as a result of the B.C. Supreme Court decision in Cowichan Tribes v. British Columbia, that historical claims of exclusive rights to the ownership of land by Aboriginal communities can now effectively undermine any private land interest created by the province that is found to exist over those same lands.

This is not “made up” law, and it is not a result of DRIPA, the province’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, which has been receiving a great deal of warranted negative attention in the press and soon will be receiving attention in the B.C. legislature.

Rather, the decision in Cowichan Tribes is the latest outcome of a logical progression of legal precedents stemming from the interpretations of section 35 of Canada’s Constitution Act, 1982, by the Supreme Court of Canada as far back as 1997.

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Kieran Wilson is an author based on Gabriola Island.

Is there a consensus among our two main political parties on revitalising our long-neglected national infrastructure, or is there not?

The collectively defiant response from Canada’s political class to Donald Trump’s aspirations to make our country the 51st state was a welcome reprieve after a decade of shamefaced Trudeauian waffle. Now, at last, there seemed to be agreement that our Canadian institutions, our way of life, our military, our history, and more were worth celebrating. It seemed that Canada was waking from its post-national stupor, as if from a bad dream.

During the last election, it was especially encouraging to see both the Liberals and Conservatives promise to invest in infrastructure and resource projects of generational importance. It was therefore disappointing to hear Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre come out against the Alto project, a proposed high-speed rail network that would link Canada’s most populous region from Toronto to Quebec City.

Setting aside the question of this specific project’s merits, for the Conservative Party to be seen as the party of “no” at a moment when the Canadian people are hungry for growth and development will be electorally disastrous in the short term. However, the fortunes of a political party are less important than the welfare of my country. That one of Canada’s two governing parties should embrace a short-sighted, and frankly defeatist, approach to infrastructure development is bad for the country. It augurs ill for growth and investment in nation-building projects under a future Conservative government.

Mr. Poilievre’s opposition to the Alto proposal is all the more baffling when seen in the light of the Conservative Party’s historic championing of nation-building infrastructure projects. Sir John A. Macdonald’s vision of a Canada that stretched from the Grand Banks to Nootka Sound, and was knit together by a great continent-spanning railway, is the stuff of legend. As our first prime minister recognised the young Dominion could not be viable without access to the Pacific coast, and a political union with the colony of British Columbia would be meaningless without a transportation link to give it practical effect. And so the “national dream” of the Canadian Pacific Railway was born.

Yet there were strong arguments against a transcontinental railway. When it was first proposed, it was by no means clear that the engineering expertise and construction technology of the mid-19th century would be up to the task of “cracking the mountain ramparts” that separated the B.C. coast from the rest of Canada. If the line was to be built, it would only be built by creative thinking and innovative techniques. The builders of the Canadian Pacific Railway proved equal to the challenge: by clarity of vision and strength of will, they overcame the practical obstacles to the railway’s construction and accomplished feats of engineering prowess that still dazzle the eye and awe the mind a century and a half later.

Besides practical considerations, there was also the perennial question of financing. How would a young country with a small tax base meet the cost of this colossal undertaking? The imperial government in London, increasingly wary of incurring financial obligations in its former Canadian colonies, was unlikely to be of much help. In those days, it was the role of the Liberal Party under Alexander Mackenzie to raise the spectres of cost overruns and mounting national debt, and to invoke the principles of sobriety and financial restraint as reasons why the railway should not be built, at least not on the scale proposed by the Tories. In Mackenzie’s view, Canada could not afford to build a transcontinental railway. Macdonald, more clear-sighted than his fellow Scot, knew that Canada could not afford not to build it. Financial propriety came second to national preservation.

It is unfortunate that today’s Conservative Party has chosen to take up the cause of Mackenzie’s Liberals rather than embrace the bold vision of its founder. Much as there might be to criticise in the Alto proposal, much there was to criticise in the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Yet then as now, the response to deficiencies, real or perceived, must not be the abandonment of the project, but its improvement. Canada deserves an ambitious opposition, one that pledges to outdo the government in infrastructure investment, and that commits to revitalising Canada’s rail system, from restoring efficient commuter service to Vancouver Island’s rail corridor, to establishing a high-speed rail link between Calgary and Edmonton. Canada’s future belongs not to the penny-pinching and the cautious, but to the visionary and the daring.

Sir John A. Macdonald set out to build a nation and a railway. He did both despite the naysayers, and for his achievement he is rightly honoured with the foremost place in the pantheon of Canada’s founders. If today’s Conservative Party is to be worthy of its heritage as the party of Confederation and the party of the Canadian Pacific Railway, then it must return to its mountain-cleaving, track-laying roots and advance a bold plan for Canadian infrastructure development. Now is not the time for train-timid Toryism.

Kieran Wilson is a public servant, editor, and author based on Gabriola Island, B.C. He is currently undertaking graduate work on the early colonial history of British Columbia and Vancouver Island.

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Kelden Formosa is an elementary school teacher in Calgary.

The French are basically right about this one, folks. They’re not wrong to be upset that the CEO of Air Canada recorded his condolence video in English only, and they’re certainly not wrong to insist that the rest of us take bilingualism seriously.

The controversy hits at two levels. The first is tonal. A common view goes like this: the fate of the two pilots is horrific, so how could you be going on about the language in a video at a time like this?

There’s something to this, in the sense that few arguments about how we live have much to say in the face of a seemingly senseless death. When something like this happens, in a foreign country, tied up in things we can’t control, like how well an airport was run, it’s natural to reach for the things we can argue about, even if they’re smaller. We should at least know the names of the two young pilots: Mackenzie Gunther of Peterborough, Ontario, 24, and Antoine Forest of Couteau-du-Lac, Quebec, 30. Caelum serenum tibi sit et requiescas in pace, gentlemen. Reading about you, it seems like you were among the best of us.

But the tonal point goes both ways. When we were all still checking our phones anxiously to see if the accident might have affected our loved ones, Air Canada brass were putting out an update and condolence video that featured only two words in the primary language of the city to which the flight was going: Montreal.

How would Vancouverites have felt had the shoe been on the other foot, and, God forbid, a San Francisco-Vancouver flight had been involved in a deadly accident, and then the CEO had delivered a whole video with only two words in English? This isn’t just about an insult to language rights; it’s also about how we would want to be spoken to when we’re scared for our loved ones.

Air Canada executives should have known better. If the CEO can’t speak French, get someone else on staff to record a similar video in French for the francophone audience. It wasn’t hard. It was a stupid oversight. The CEO’s resignation seems like an overreaction, as this would likely have just blown over in a week or two, but the initial mistake was just that: a mistake.

But the second level of the controversy is the broader, policy-oriented one. Our country isn’t as French as it used to be, especially in the West, and there’s an assorted pile of resentments among both our major linguistic communities. Here, the picture is more complex.

I’m an anglophone, but I had the chance to enroll in “middle immersion” starting in Grade Five at my school in Toronto. Everyone knows this is a version of private school on the public dime, and a form of streaming for stronger students. Not terrible, as the evidence on streaming is mixed, though largely positive on some metrics, but it’s open to some criticism from the more egalitarian among us. And that chance, a stroke of luck, opened a world of new opportunities, notably my first real introduction to politics as the least bilingual of the 40 House of Commons pages in my first year of university.

That’s where my French really took off. The House of Commons is a genuinely bilingual working environment, with a large overrepresentation of Franco-Ontarian and Quebec staff, so there were all sorts of chances to practise French, to actually speak the language. It was great for me, but I can see why it bothers so many people who’ve never been given opportunities like that.

Growing up in Toronto and now living out west for more than a decade, it’s pretty rare for an anglophone to have the chance to pick up French without a lengthy, dedicated effort, usually in school and then through immersion elsewhere. It’s just not the language of everyday life out here for the vast majority of people.

So it’s no wonder that many anglophones looked at Air Canada CEO Michael Rousseau and saw something of themselves in his plaintive apology: “Despite many lessons over several years, unfortunately, I am still unable to express myself adequately in French”. Though this excuse is tempered by his 20-year stint in Montreal. Former Conservative Party interim leader Candice Bergen gave voice to a similar frustration, tweeting that she was “tired that a few elites (in Ontario, primarily) get to tell the 80% of Canadians who don’t speak French fluently that we need to sit on the sidelines”.

It’s reasonable to feel annoyed that your career prospects are capped by your language skills, especially when there are so few ways to improve them naturally in your everyday life. But even here, the point is overstated. The vast majority of federal government jobs in anglophone regions do not require French fluency. Jobs that do are typically Ottawa-based, where learning serviceable French is indeed possible. While the Trudeau-era move to appoint only bilingual Supreme Court justices was a step too far, that’s not really in the cards for most of us, and it’s perhaps the 34th most objectionable thing about that increasingly activist court. Plus, the unilingual anglophone has a heck of an advantage in the private economy compared to the unilingual francophone, which offsets his slight disadvantage in getting jobs in the upper floors of Gatineau’s Portage buildings. The views from the top of Bay Street and the Bow Tower more than make up for it.

To Bergen’s broader point, that Ontario elites are rude to most Canadians: Yes, they are, and it’s bad. When they demean or disempower people outside their narrow class, we should criticize them, even when they use French-language concerns as a smokescreen, as in the new Supreme Court appointment rules. But in this case, just wanting a French condolence video, and in most cases where bilingualism is part of life, there’s very little practical harm done to anglophones.

I’ve given the upset Anglo much of his due above. The remaining objections to bilingualism are familiar: it costs too much, it’s irrelevant in a multicultural country, and, if we’re honest, we’re just annoyed with Quebec for making bad choices.

But believing in this country, wanting it to exist long into the future, is worth a bit of translation cost. Loving Canada is meaningless unless it means loving the Canada that was actually handed down to us: a fascinating British-French hybrid with a complex history of encounter and integration with other peoples, Indigenous and immigrant, in the context of our bicultural founding — in canoes, cattle drives, and committee rooms from sea to sea. You don’t have to love Canada, but if you do, you have to love what it is and has been, including its foundational languages and cultures. That doesn’t mean you must learn French, but it does mean you have to take the rights and feelings of French speakers seriously, especially when what they’re asking for comes at no great cost.

Ultimately, for most western conservatives, I suspect the political choices of Quebec are the real issue. If Quebec was bleu, we’d have fewer issues. Fair enough.

From the outside, much of French Canada’s modern history seems like a story of replacing the tried and true things that got it through two-hundred years of Anglo domination, notably large families and a strong Catholic devotional life, with a fixation on enforcing an imported secularism and maintaining a visage linguistique (“a linguistic surface”), if only that. Poor, or, in some cases, bespoke management of Quebec’s natural resources has left the province less wealthy, so it draws heavily on equalization, and there’s nothing that gets a prairie conservative more annoyed than having to pay the bills of people who vote Liberal, even if he himself lives in a town named, say, Lacombe, after one of the great French founders of modern Alberta.

But in a country we love, the bonds we have with one another should go deeper and last longer than our most recent economic or cultural annoyances. I don’t mean to pick on Lacombe, a town I really like, but it would be odd to live there and not respect the French Catholic missionary priest for whom it is named, a man so revered as a mediator that his body was buried in Cree territory north of Edmonton while his heart was buried in Blackfoot territory south of Calgary. The same goes for many of the good, rock-ribbed conservative parts of the Canadian West, whose heritage is far more French than we might remember today. Bilingualism doesn’t just honour our cousins back east, it honours where we come from, who we are, and it points us towards where we ought to be going, a country that says, “I remember, je me souviens,” even as it moves forward.

Kelden Formosa is an elementary school teacher in Calgary. He has an M.Ed. from the University of Notre Dame. His writing has appeared in The Hub.

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John Stuart Mill was an exceptionally gifted child. According to his own autobiography, he started learning Greek at the age of three and Latin at the age of eight. By the time he turned twelve, he was steeped in the classics and had grasped both arithmetic and algebra.

There is no doubting it, Mill was a brilliant student who grew into an intelligent man. Yet even the brightest minds are apt to get some things wrong.

Later in life, John became famous as a prolific writer and pamphleteer, as well as a Member of Parliament. His work had an enormous impact on Victorian Britain, and his ideas have echoed down the decades to influence our own day. He is best known for the short tract On Liberty, published in 1859, yet On Liberty hardly encompasses the breadth of Mill’s views. Over a long career, he tackled nearly every subject and firmly established his reputation as a philosopher.

Interestingly, despite being radically anti-establishment, Mill gets a warm reception in conservative circles today. Yet there is little of the Burkean conservative in John Stuart Mill. Conservatism, to Mill, appeared irrational because it preferred tradition over experimentation. He didn’t buy the idea that governments grew ‘organically’ into functional systems, but believed that the best way to get good government was by applying human will and ingenuity to ‘creating’ it.

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Carson Binda is the B.C. director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

British Columbia’s government isn’t just spending too much money. It’s creating a bureaucratic class that is smothering taxpayers.

And that bloated bureaucracy has a voracious appetite for your tax dollars. It’s a system where incentives are turned upside down and failure is rewarded.

The state, and by extension its bureaucracy, is “parasitic, for instead of adding to production, it subtracts from it,” wrote economist Murray Rothbard in Anatomy of the State.

The bureaucracy has a parasitic relationship with the private sector in that the private sector creates wealth and the bureaucracy taxes it. The bureaucracy cannot exist without the private sector and its economy.

As the bureaucracy grows, so does its appetite for private sector dollars.

“In the long run, the robber destroys his own subsistence by dwindling or eliminating the source of his own supply,” Rothbard wrote.

That’s the core of the problem we’re facing in B.C. That’s because every extra bureaucrat moving money around means one less wealth creator in the province.

You don’t have to be a libertarian to see that the bureaucratic class has grown faster than taxpayers can sustain. Even the provincial government admits that bureaucratic bloat has “significantly outpaced economic growth and general population growth.”

Nowhere is that more obvious than in the core government ministries. Ministerial staff numbered 27,000 bureaucrats in 2016-17. That number has now ballooned to 37,500 — a 39 per cent increase. This is the bureaucratic class: Victoria paper pushers, not firefighters, teachers or nurses.

A big bureaucracy with an even bigger appetite for taxpayer dollars is eating away at the private sector. The government has increased costs for families and businesses to pay for a bureaucracy that’s bigger than we need and bigger than we can afford.

Just take a look at the province’s latest budget.

Compensation for all provincial government employees will cost taxpayers $55.7 billion in 2026-27. For context, the province plans on spending $98.8 billion this year, meaning compensation for government employees makes up about 56 per cent of the provincial budget.

Every one per cent pay raise across the government sector costs taxpayers $557 million, about $98 per British Columbian. And Premier David Eby has been handing out big pay raises.

The B.C. General Employees Union, the largest union for B.C. government employees, is taking three per cent pay raises every year until at least 2028.

Eby plans to pay for those raises by shackling the productive sector of the economy with an even more unsustainable tax burden.

A clear example is his provincial sales tax expansion.

The Premier is expanding the seven per cent PST to a range of traditionally exempt services. Accountants, architects, engineers and security guards will all be slapped with the PST moving forward. That change will see bureaucrats take $261 million from the productive sector of the economy this year. Next year it will remove $530 million from the productive sector.

One reason businesses have to invest in security is because the government has failed in one of its core functions — protecting businesses from criminals and shoplifters. A recent survey found that 90 per cent of B.C. businesses believe that repeated, non-violent crime (theft, vandalism and break-ins) has a moderate to very significant impact locally. Some businesses and the jobs they bring have left altogether, explicitly citing “unsustainable” theft and violence against staff.

The provincial bureaucracy and politicians have allowed criminals to rob stores and now they are taxing businesses forced to protect themselves. Businesses already pay taxes so the state can protect them from bad actors. The province has abandoned that mission and then adds insult to injury by taxing businesses who hire outside help.

In the productive sector of the economy, failure is punished with layoffs, pay cuts and closed factory floors. Millions of choices and financial transactions by consumers punish bad businesses and reward productive ones.

But B.C.’s government has inverted that incentive structure and instead of punishing bad bureaucracies, our politicians reward them with taxpayer bailouts.

PavCo, a provincial Crown corporation that owns and operates B.C. Place stadium and the Vancouver Convention Centre, illustrates this point.

Despite holding some of the biggest sporting and cultural events in the world, the bureaucrats who run B.C. Place are reliant on multi-million dollar taxpayer handouts to keep the doors open. PavCo receives millions in bailouts from taxpayers to cover operational expenses every year, on top of tens of millions worth of annual infrastructure costs.

The anchor tenant of the stadium, the Vancouver Whitecaps soccer club, has repeatedly sounded the alarm about “challenges,” in dealing with the bureaucratic managers of the stadium. Now that anchor tenant has entered negotiations to leave B.C. Place altogether.

Because of the bureaucrats at PavCo, the Whitecaps have faced the worst revenue in their league, despite having among the best attendance at games.

In the productive sector of the economy, managers and bosses would be punished for overseeing a failing enterprise like B.C. Place. But the opposite is true with the bureaucracy.

PavCo President and CEO Ken Cretney made $431,000 in 2025. He’s taken a nearly 10 per cent pay raise in the past two years, up from $394,000 in 2023, according to proactive disclosures. Christopher May, the stadium’s general manager, took an even grander 27 per cent pay raise.

When bureaucrats chase away the anchor tenant and rely on millions of dollars of taxpayer bailouts, executives shouldn’t be taking home massive pay raises. British Columbia shouldn’t be rewarding bureaucratic failures.

A system where failure is rewarded with money made by taxing job creators and the productive class is a system that chases away investment.

Our provincial population shrunk by 51,000 British Columbians last year, according to population estimates in the provincial budget. More than 20,000 jobs were lost in B.C. in February alone.

The forestry sector, once the crown jewel of British Columbia’s economy, has seen 21 mill closures since 2023 and 15,000 forestry sector job losses since 2022. Industry experts cite “structural, made-in-B.C. problems,” leading to the job losses and mill closures.

That means there are fewer productive British Columbians paying for a bigger and more expensive government sector.

And make no mistake that the government sector has grown overall — not just with ministerial staffers. B.C. taxpayers employed 593,500 staff in the overall government sector as of April 1, 2025. One year later in the 2026 budget, the government claimed there are now “more than 598,000,” government workers. That’s an increase of 4,500 in just one year.

Eby promises his government working towards “right sizing,” the provincial bureaucracy but when you look at the numbers, that claim crumbles quicker than a sandcastle in the surf.

In total, the B.C. government committed to reducing the overall government sector by 15,000 jobs over the next three years, which “represents 3.4 per cent of the public sector workforce,” according to budget 2026. For context, the cost of the bureaucracy has increased by about five per cent in the past year alone, from $53.2 billion in 2025 to $55.7 billion this year.

Cutting only three per cent of government employees is not a solution to fix the bloated monster that has become B.C.’s bureaucracy. Rothbard warned that such a vast public service would acquire more instincts than simply running essential services.

“Government suffers no worries about losses or bankruptcy; it need serve no one except itself,” he wrote.

As the productive economy faces job losses and investment flight, taxpayers will be forced to cough up more and more money.

That’s money that the government is taking from families and businesses. It has real consequences.

About 113,000 British Columbians rely on food banks to put food on their table.

Meanwhile, B.C. bureaucrats received authorization to bill taxpayers for a $35,000 open bar reception in Victoria, 150 people attended including bureaucrats and their guests. Invoices included 46 glasses of sparkling wine, 10 shots of whisky, six shots of tequila and dozens of other beers, wines, spirits and cocktails.

Taxpayers are struggling. The bureaucratic class is billing us for champagne and tequila shots.

British Columbians need a real cut to the size of the bureaucracy. Every additional paper pusher in Victoria is one less worker in the productive economy.

And taxpayers can’t afford it any longer.

Carson Binda is the B.C. director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

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In the neighbourhood of Dundarave in West Vancouver, there is a gutted single-storey building that once housed a Shoppers Drug Mart. It will soon be torn down for new developments. On the outside wall facing the intersection of Marine Drive and 25th Street, there is a mural of tall, wooden ships sailing into Burrard Inlet during the 18th century.

I have no idea how old it is, but it might have been painted in the 1980s, when performers at Vancouver’s Pacific National Exhibition dressed up as Captain James Cook.

Two hundred and forty-eight years ago, Cook dropped anchor at Nootka Sound on March 29, 1778.

Cook opened the coastline to the world. At the time, his voyage from England was as bold as travelling through space to a barely known planet, at great risk to the lives of Cook and his crew.

A confident and properly functioning province would honour Cook. As British Columbia is currently neither, the failure of nerve to protect and restore his name is not a surprise.

On Canada Day, 2021, a statue of Cook in Victoria’s Inner Harbour was torn down by a mob. The perpetrators celebrated it as a demonstration against “genocide” and “colonialism”, and whooped loudly as if they had just killed an enemy.

The unwillingness to confront those criminals is insulting to B.C., as is the refusal to confront the lies upon which they justified their actions.

James Cook was no genocidal villain.

When his ship arrived at today’s Vancouver Island, which was named for the young midshipman George Vancouver who served under Cook, he and his men began repairing and refitting their vessels, the Resolution and the Discovery. They also replenished their food stores, took on water and other provisions, and traded for pelts with the Mowachaht people at their village of Yuquot.

By all accounts, the linguistically fraught encounters between Cook’s men and the Mowachaht were productive and amicable, if not overly friendly. No blood was shed.

In late April, Cook and his two ships departed Nootka Sound to search for the Northwest Passage, which proved unsuccessful, like so many other such attempts during the Age of Discovery. While he may have failed to find an Arctic outlet to the Pacific, he did provide the first charted and detailed description of Vancouver Island.

That voyage alone makes James Cook an essential, and admirable, figure for British Columbians, and his connection to Canada is deeper still. Nineteen years prior, he was on the St. Lawrence River beneath Quebec in 1759, watching General James Wolfe fight Montcalm at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham.

Then a young naval surveyor, Cook had helped to chart the approaches to the St. Lawrence for General Wolfe’s invasion fleet. He also charted part of Gaspé, before going on to chart the coast of Newfoundland with a remarkable skill and precision that stood above that of his peers.

Undoubtedly, Cook was a brave man, who sailed through waters like Cape Horn, off the tip of South America, one of the most vicious ocean passages in the world to this day.

Those same misty coastlines of B.C. are home to countless people today. When did obvious, productive endeavours become such a rarely celebrated quality?

Our leaders honour divisive politicians, activists, pseudo-academics, and corporate suits with the Order of Canada, but are reluctant to lift a finger to defend those who made Canada possible.

Exploration is central to the history of our province and country.

In 1808, Simon Fraser paddled across the continent through treacherous canyons to reach the same Pacific coast that Cook sailed past decades before. In the 17th and 16th centuries, Jacques Cartier and Samuel de Champlain plied the St. Lawrence. The pair are treated properly in Quebec, as founders and progenitors of the province and its people.

Quebec understands commemoration better than we do on the West Coast. Montreal has the Jacques Cartier Bridge, among other honours. It is matched by the Samuel-de Champlain Bridge at Brossard, in addition to statues and monuments in the provincial capital of Quebec City. British Columbians should take inspiration from that, and not be intimidated by noisy, bullying activists who want to make us apologise for who and what made us.

Our treatment of Cook says much about ourselves. We cannot only uphold the safest possible figures from the past as our role models and national heroes, for that is a cowardly course of action.

We have no issues commemorating great sporting men like Pat Quinn, the former Canucks coach who has a street named for him in Vancouver. Terry Fox is as unimpeachable a figure as can be found, and a genuinely great Canadian who should always be upheld as an inspiration.

But was Terry Fox the only hero that B.C.’s history ever produced? Are those who inspire charity runs the only ones deemed acceptable to rally people around today?

We should not shirk our duty to those who helped build our home, like Cook, Matthew Begbie, and Sir John A. Macdonald, to name only three. Their reputations have been slandered without a real public argument, debate, or even the discourse that set civilised societies apart from the rest.

Here I must make a confession from my lean times as a freelancer barely out of university. On July 1, 2021, The Tyee published a piece of mine, written before the events of that day. Shamefully caught up in the unthinking, immediate aftermath of the Kamloops residential school reports, I gave credence to a mass panic.

The very day that article appeared, Canada Day, a crowd ripped down the statue of James Cook in Victoria, decapitated it, and tossed it into the water. In Winnipeg, another mass of rioters pulled down the statues of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II at Manitoba’s legislature. Then churches started to be torched across Canada, with the rate of arson surging after the breaking of the Kamloops story. Most of those incidents have gone unsolved, and have not abated.

By September 1, I was deeply ashamed to ever have lent even indirect support to that mood, which can charitably be described as hysterical or barbaric.

There was no justice in the vandalism, moral blackmail, barely concealed mental illness, and racialised hatred. That derangement infected the public sector and even federal and provincial governments. City governments used it as a pretext to scale back celebrations of the national holiday, likely to save money in the budget. All of it was prompted by dubious accusations against Canadian icons, and enabled by frightened authorities.

The philosopher Roger Scruton had a similar reaction to the May 1968 riots in Paris. (The comparison stops here, for I am not vain or stupid enough to compare myself intellectually to Scruton, one of the more influential thinkers of the modern age.)

In 1968 in Paris, where Scruton was visiting, radical students and their fellow ideologues ran rampant around the French capital, smashing and burning buildings en masse in an attempt to spark a social revolution against the Fifth Republic. In an instant, Scruton turned forever against that side of politics and that way of thinking. Millions of Americans had a similar reaction after the George Floyd riots of 2020.

Many ordinary Canadians reached a conclusion vaguely resembling that in 2021, either gradually or all at once. Normal, patriotic people began to understand that they had been misled and manipulated by bad actors in the name of “reconciliation” or “decolonisation”. Elected leaders licensed the desecration by standing by and watching as mobs hunted down any statues they could find for months afterwards.

This all happened during the worst years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Intermittent lockdowns and social distancing were rigidly imposed for most people, but rabbles carrying signs reading “KKKanada” or worse were permitted to attack public property without consequence.

That energy did not disappear. Rather, it began to be institutionalised by the young zealots, who are now the people graduating from law school or taking positions in public education, school boards, museums, and the public service. The rioters have joined the ranks of the bureaucrats, arming them with real procedural and political power.

Ageing moderate politicians cannot contain them by pretending it is 1998, or even 2014. Those earnest managers and policy wonks do not understand the power of symbolism, for it is not peripheral to politics.

In the future, people will not remember briefing notes and fiscal tables, but they will recall memories and visible signs of the time when others held power. Governments can be competent, but if left symbolically vacant, they help leave the door open to the ill-informed or the ill-intentioned.

For these reasons, British Columbians who love their province and who made it must restore the statues of Cook, and others like Begbie and Macdonald when they gain power. Then they should go further. Landmarks, roads, and pieces of grand and mundane infrastructure should be named for the real builders of B.C.

Doing so would be to assert that British Columbia will remain British Columbia, and not be hollowed out and rewritten by vandals in suits and the functionaries who take orders from them. Far more has to be done about slashing the ideologically captured public service and turning out the museums and institutions, but public monuments are a good start.

In 1976, Premier Bill Bennett himself unveiled the Cook statue in Victoria.

The statue itself was not perfect, being a cheap fibreglass copy of one standing in England, at Yorkshire where Cook was born. A new one should be seven or eight feet tall, cast in 3,000 pounds of near-immovable bronze, if only to frustrate the statue raiders.

Until very recently, there was a public culture in B.C. that had celebrated Cook’s bicentennial at Vancouver’s Sea Festival in 1978, and even handed out commemorative coins for the occasion. Our province needs that spirit for the 250th anniversary of Cook’s arrival in 2028. Today, however, it will do to toast Cook’s name with a glass of beer, wine, or even Canada Dry Ginger Ale.

Restoring Cook’s rightful place in the province’s capital would show something to those who hate Canada, resent British Columbia, and sneer at the existence of Canadians and British Columbians. It would show them that they did not win. Ground should never be ceded to them, whether in argument, memory, or culture. When they appeal to “complicated history” and make a show of performative nuance, they are usually using smokescreens for an agenda that only moves toward attrition, humiliation, and erasure.

James Cook’s legacy is not complicated. He was a heroic explorer who helped make B.C. possible, and ranks among the greatest navigators to ever sail the high seas. It is an honour that the history of our home contains him. It connects us to countries like Australia, where his legacy still looms large, despite attempts to erase him there too. Perhaps the good people advocating for CANZUK should take note of this connection.

The exploration of unfamiliar coasts, rivers, and mountains is deeply Canadian, especially in a mountainous, rugged province like B.C., where Cook came ashore 248 years ago.

Greatness is not guilt, and by all measures, the Age of Discovery was an age of heroes. We do not honour it nearly enough, for we are not good at remembering things in Canada. A new government can change that.

This country and province do not exist by accident, and if their existence is considered to be good, then Cook shared in that. Let us restore our pantheon, fully and with great enthusiasm.

Geoff Russ is the Editor-at-Large of Without Diminishment. He is a contributor to a number of publications, including the National Post, Modern Age, and The Australian Financial Review.

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We must not miss the revolutionary nature of the Supreme Court’s hearings on Quebec’s Bill 21. The hearings touch far more than whether Quebec has the constitutional right to use the notwithstanding clause, or whether its use should be limited.

The Supreme Court of Canada hearings on Bill 21 are about who defines Canada and who gets to change it. Does the Supreme Court have the power to bypass the Constitution’s amending formula? Can the Supreme Court overturn Section 33 of the Charter? Furthermore, does Quebec have the right to pass legislation like Bill 21, which essentially legislates against multiculturalism?

The Mark Carney Liberals are one of 51 interveners in the Supreme Court of Canada hearings on Bill 21. Carney wants the Supreme Court to alter the Constitution by judicial fiat, bypassing the amending formula. He opposes Quebec for ruling against multiculturalism and will find any way he can to oppose it.

Revolution has been thrust upon us.

The Charter would have never come into existence without Section 33. The notwithstanding clause was literally the only reason provinces agreed to the Charter in the first place.

And now the Supreme Court has not only assumed it has the legitimacy to hear such a case, but also that it has the power to rule on it, potentially changing the Constitution itself.

Those who love peace and order sometimes have to take up intellectual arms, at great personal cost. They must storm the castle. Rotten ideas promoted by ignorant or unsavoury people can turn any institution into its opposite.

Historian Robert Conquest described a law of politics: “Any institution not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.”

Institutions end up adrift and in crisis, not because we cannot see it happening, but because most of us avoid the cost of winning them back. Institutional rescue always disrupts the dysfunctional status quo, which risks injury for the rescuers.

The mandate to rescue, at its core, is simply the revolutionary imperative by another name. Some are born revolutionaries, some become revolutionary, and others have revolution thrust upon them.

In January, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s remarks at Davos captured global headlines. “We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.”

Carney put words to feelings. The world is different. It does not just contain new and different things, it has a new operating system.

The scope and speed of change have created a crisis in political thought — a period of upheaval. Legacy political ideologies lack the intellectual heft required to address current issues. For example, what can liberalism offer in response to two years of Intifada protests? Calling for the ‘rule of law’ only denounces illegal protests. What can liberalism say about legal, public celebrations of civilian massacre?

The traditional right fares no better.

Reaganism and neoconservatism, which embodied the right-wing consensus between 1980 and 2015, no longer offer the resources needed for our crisis. Given the return of nationalism and the end of Pax Americana, tax cutters and war hawks sound hollow. No doubt, we can still study those ideas, but their salience has waned.

Many younger people have barely heard of Reagan and couldn’t care less about neoconservatism. “The old order is not coming back.”

Fighting is ego-dystonic for most people. Even in professional hockey, only a few players truly love to punch.

Fixing an organisational crisis requires heroism and valour. It requires a willingness to do what we must do, but cannot avoid.

We fight to rescue institutions we care about.

No matter how you spin it, attempts to rescue an institution in crisis will appear revolutionary. People who benefit from the status quo will call them coups or hostile takeovers. Administrators will be sacked, policies will be changed, and governance will be restructured.

Only by examining the nature and outcome of the revolution will we be able to tell whether it is glorious or a reign of terror.

Glorious revolutions seek change that removes rot and replaces it with known, healthy habits and renewed culture. Reigns of terror demolish everything they cannot understand and replace it with innovative geometric rigidity.

Progressive intentions justify the cause regardless of outcome. Conservative intentions are proven by outcomes. The promise of outcomes must temper enthusiasm before we see results. Rescue as revolution must be labelled as the old maps once were: Hic sunt dracones, here be dragons.

The Revolutionary Imperative

It’s a twist of fate that Carney said, “The old order is gone.” With respect to the Supreme Court of Canada hearings on Bill 21, the Carney Liberals are leading the revolution.

Canadians on the non-Left must respond. We cannot take a conservative, cautious stance. We have been thrust into a revolution and must respond with the urgency the situation requires.

Liberal democracies are ailing and in need of rescue. Fortunately, help is near, only forgotten. Scruton said, “Conservatism is a work of rescue.” We just need to rediscover it. Rescue will require sacrifice, and it will feel like revolution.

Will we embrace the revolutionary imperative?

Shawn Whatley is a past president of Civitas Canada and of the Ontario Medical Association. He is a Senior Fellow for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and author of When Politics Comes Before Patients: Why and How Canadian Medicare is Failing. Listen to his podcast on Substack, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts.

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In Western Canada there is to be seen to-day that most fascinating of all human phenomena, the making of a nation. Out of breeds diverse in traditions, in ideals, in speech, and in manner of life, Saxon and Slav, Teuton, Celt and Gaul, one people is being made. The blood strains of great races will mingle in the blood of a race greater than the greatest of them all.

It would be our wisdom to grip these peoples to us with living hooks of justice and charity till all lines of national cleavage disappear, and in the Entity of our Canadian national life, and in the Unity of our world-wide Empire, we fuse into a people whose strength will endure the slow shock of time for the honour of our name, for the good of mankind, and for the glory of Almighty God.

That is the preface to The Foreigner, a 1909 novel by the Rev. Charles William Gordon (1860–1937), who wrote under the pen name Ralph Connor. He was a prominent Canadian Presbyterian minister, missionary, and one of the country’s most successful novelists in the early twentieth century.

The story of The Foreigner revolves round the figure of Kalman Kalmar, a Ruthenian immigrant from Galicia, a semi-autonomous province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Kalman was what we would now call a Ukrainian and, as a newcomer to Canada, he was the ‘stalwart peasant in a sheepskin coat’ that Interior Minister Sir Clifford Sifton was so eager to recruit for the settlement of the West.

The novel’s vision of the integration of foreigners and its focus on the immigrant experience were progressive for their day. But that vision is scarcely recognisable in the contemporary era of ‘diversity’. No one talks of ‘blood strains’, ‘great races’, or ‘breeds’ anymore, let alone ‘Saxon and Slav, Teuton, Celt and Gaul’. Nor can one imagine contemporary progressives embracing muscular Christianity as a force for nation-building, as the novel does.

Hard work, which is likewise a source of bonding and cohesion invoked by the Rev. Gordon, is now the object of progressive disdain. And the vision of Canada as part of a Greater Britain, uniting people of diverse habits, beliefs, and languages, evokes embarrassment, or would, if progressives could recollect it at all. The old flag, the Red Ensign, is gone, and crowns, heraldry, crosses, fleur-de-lys, and other such symbols have vanished from passports, government documents, and public buildings. Even the name of our country, the Dominion of Canada, has disappeared.

The result, as at least one author has noted, is that Canadians are like ‘Andean peasants’ dwelling ‘amid the ruins of a civilisation of which they have lost all memory’. This is an exaggeration.

The British Empire is no more, and memories of the Greater Britain have faded, but there are no ruins, yet. In fact, the most obvious evidence of the old Canada is the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century architecture that still stands in the city centres from Halifax to Vancouver.

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To get from one end of the GTA to the other, as I had to do earlier this month, one must pass through what my husband uncharitably likes to call “Sloptario”. The stream of suburban roadside shopping malls sprawled beneath elevated highways that bleed from one exit to the next, each indistinguishable from the last, paints a bleak picture of our province.

The story inside these towns isn’t much sunnier. Many of these places are in their infancy, at least compared to other parts of the country, and especially at the population levels they now boast. What negligible regional character existed at all in these areas has been largely ironed out in favour of clear-cut, cookie-cutter suburbs. They are indistinguishable, visually and culturally, from any other bit of suburban sprawl in North America. There’s nothing ‘local’ about them. They are places with no history, no memory. They are the ‘Anywhere’ places in Ontario, where Anywhere people live.

Half of Ontario lives here. It is easy, therefore, to assume, as many do, that these places represent all there is of Ontario. It is a province often cast, including sometimes by its own inhabitants, as having no provincial pride or unique culture or traditions.

While I understand this impulse, and even used to feel this way myself, I no longer believe this to be the whole picture of our province. Those of us who have managed to escape the grips of the GTA suburbs know that the other half of Ontario is living a very different story.

In this other half, there exists some memory of older, regional cultural identities. From Northern Ontario to the Ottawa Valley, and from the St. Lawrence lowlands to the south-west, there are millions of Ontarians keeping these local cultures alive.

These are Ontario’s ‘Somewheres’, and the identity of these places is etched into every corner of their existence, from their vernacular architecture, to their local museums, to street names, to regional dialects.

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Geoffrey Moyse, KC, is a lawyer who specialises in Canadian Aboriginal law, constitutional law, and public law.

“Toxic” and “overreaching” were some of the words used by B.C. Premier David Eby in reaction to the B.C. Court of Appeal decision in Gitxaala v. British Columbia, a judgment that affirms that a proper interpretation of the province’s DRIPA legislation and section 8.1 of the B.C. Interpretation Act, advanced by David Eby himself when he was the province’s Attorney General, renders UNDRIP justiciable and enforceable as the law in British Columbia.

(UNDRIP is the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, while DRIPA is British Columbia’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, the specific provincial legislation passed to implement UNDRIP’s international standards into B.C. law.)

So outraged is the Premier that he is seeking both to appeal the Gitxaala decision to the Supreme Court of Canada, which is a very unwise legal strategy, and to introduce amendments to the legislature to try to “court-proof” DRIPA from any further judicial interpretation, thereby seeking to undo the legal effect of the judgment in Gitxaala.

We need to be very clear as to what is happening here.

During the debate on DRIPA in the legislature in late 2019, government ministers of the day waxed lyrical that DRIPA and UNDRIP created no new rights, had no legal force, did not apply to private land, and did not provide a veto. Those assurances were used to justify passing DRIPA, which resulted in the B.C. Opposition unanimously supporting the legislation. It turns out that the government’s assessment and promises were neither correct in substance nor valid legally.

Much has been written lately about DRIPA, some of it wrong. Prior to the B.C. Court of Appeal decision in Gitxaala, some DRIPA defenders insisted it was merely a “process” piece of legislation that bound the government to an arguably undemocratic joint government and Indigenous leadership arrangement, set out in section 3, to evaluate every B.C. statute for conformity with the 46 Articles of UNDRIP and then amend statutes as deemed necessary to create that conformity.

DRIPA itself, though arguably highly undemocratic and perhaps unconstitutional, is not the real problem in this province. The real problem is that DRIPA has been effectively employed as a “smokescreen” by the B.C. NDP and certain of its allies, while the government, secretly and with no explicit public mandate, imposes the Articles of UNDRIP throughout B.C. as a fundamental matter of policy, as though they have the force of law.

Let’s be clear, this is a devious political manoeuvre, much of which is not underpinned in law by DRIPA or, more importantly, by Supreme Court of Canada jurisprudence at all.

Notwithstanding statements made to the legislature in 2019 to get DRIPA passed, the NDP government immediately chose to implement a policy approach to UNDRIP throughout B.C. under which UNDRIP Articles would be applied by the government and the public service as though they were, in fact, the law in this province, notwithstanding the fact that they are inconsistent in many respects with Canadian constitutional law.

In the wake of recent court decisions, there is no indication that the government’s policy approach has changed or that the Premier is thinking about backing away from it, even though there is now much greater public scrutiny of what the government has really been up to since 2019.

The Eby government claims to be upset that UNDRIP is now being applied by the courts as the law in B.C., which it knows will create utter chaos. What has upset it more, however, is that the courts have usurped the NDP government’s desire to quietly and secretly implement UNDRIP everywhere in the province as a matter of policy, a policy that they would like to be viewed as law but without being legally enforceable by judges.

This amounts to a policy of subterfuge by a government that has shown an inclination towards deception on matters concerning First Nations. It appears that a law is not a law unless the B.C. government says it is a law, but some laws, like DRIPA, can be used as a false “front” to allow the covert implementation of a complex UN-based policy that is clearly unfit for the Canadian context, with no one being the wiser.

Under the guise of DRIPA, which, to be clear, does not in most cases authorise this, the current government and its predecessor have systematically sought to apply the principles of UNDRIP in practice and policy throughout B.C. since 2019. Forget whatever former Indigenous Affairs Minister Scott Fraser may have said to the contrary in the legislature, those promises were quickly forgotten.

Egregious examples can now be seen where public servants require Indigenous consent before they will issue permits or make statutory decisions, even in cases where section 7 agreements under DRIPA are not in place. There are also many examples of government insisting that no permits will be issued unless proponents enter into agreements with local First Nations.

Claimed traditional Indigenous territories are being treated by government as if they are entirely owned by Indigenous people, as contemplated in Article 26 of UNDRIP, and subject to the supposed legal jurisdiction of the Indigenous territorial claimants, despite neither of those conceptions being legally valid under Canadian constitutional law as set out in previous Supreme Court of Canada jurisprudence.

This policy approach provides for government to treat Indigenous people, whose on-reserve populations amount to less than 2 per cent of the overall B.C. population, as having equivalent legal and jurisdictional authority to the government itself, which represents 5.7 million B.C. residents, over their entire claimed traditional territories in decision-making contexts and land use planning schemes, thereby subjecting such decisions and processes to the requirement for Indigenous consent, which, for the most part, is not legally required.

Finally, the Eby government’s deceptive plan to behave as though the Articles of UNDRIP are the law across British Columbia, while trying to keep the courts from applying them as such, is now unravelling under the hot lamps of increased public scrutiny.

It is well past time that this duplicity be fully understood by all residents of this province, before the ideology-driven and largely unlawful chaos we are now witnessing across the land base becomes completely untenable and effectively sinks the B.C. economy.

Geoffrey S. Moyse, KC, is a retired senior lawyer who served as legal counsel to the Province of B.C., advising six successive governments on Aboriginal law over more than 30 years. He is principal at Moyse Law and an advisor to the Public Land Use Society.

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In the latest episode from Without Diminishment’s Leadership Series, host Alexander Brown sits down with Iain Black, candidate for the leadership of the B.C. Conservative Party.

Watch the full interview below, and subscribe to Without Diminishment on YouTube.

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Drawing on his background as a former Gordon Campbell-era cabinet minister, his recent column in Without Diminishment, and his time as CEO of the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade, Black discusses the need to restore the “British Columbia Dream” for all generations, but particularly for young British Columbians.

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What is an Albertan?

That is a question as old as the province itself. On a superficial level, Canadians outside Alberta have strong views as to what a stereotypical Albertan is. The myth goes that we are essentially the rootin’ tootin’ Texans of the North, and with recent waves of the province’s separatist movement, that stereotype is proving itself true in the minds of many.

Like most stereotypes, the image contains a kernel of truth. After all, who doesn’t enjoy seeing politicians annually descend on the Calgary Stampede outfitted in cowboy hats and boots? Yet it obscures far more than it reveals.

Alberta is no monolith, and its people cannot be reduced to a caricature. But then, what is it to be Albertan?

Natural resources have undeniably shaped the province’s development. Writing in 1937, the Canadian humourist and political commentator Stephen Leacock observed that “the whole province seems more or less bedded on minerals and oil.” No one yet knew how great Alberta’s latent resources might prove to be, but there was little doubt about the “vastness of its unused heritage.”

Nearly a century later, that prediction has been vindicated. Albertans transformed their natural inheritance into one of the most prosperous economies in the Western world. The province has long stood as a symbol of opportunity within Canada, where ambition and hard work could still produce remarkable results.

Yet resources alone do not sustain the identity of the province. This point has become particularly relevant in the current political moment. As Alberta separatism has been a hot topic of late, many have turned their minds to the home of Canada’s most distinct provincial identity, Quebec.

In a comment that many in Alberta would find highly debatable, the leader of the Bloc Québécois, Yves-François Blanchet, proclaimed that Alberta has no values or real distinct culture. “I am not certain that oil and gas qualifies”, remarked the separatist leader. Many Albertans bristled at the remark. Yet Blanchet’s provocation raises a necessary point. If Alberta’s identity is not to be found solely in oil and gas, how should it be envisaged?

Part of the difficulty lies in a broader Canadian problem. Writ large, Canadians barely know their own history, let alone the histories of the many local areas which together constitute Confederation.

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In the latest episode of Without Diminishment’s B.C. Leadership Series, host Alexander Brown sits down with Abbotsford South MLA Bruce Banman. Bruce shares the full story behind his historic 2023 floor-crossing to the Conservatives — the move that gave John Rustad’s party official status in the Legislature — and discusses his vision for the province.

Editor’s note: Since this interview was recorded, Bruce has withdrawn from the leadership race and thrown his support behind candidate Yuri Fulmer.

Watch the full interview below, and subscribe to Without Diminishment on YouTube.

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Robert Duigan is a political analyst and journalist from South Africa.

South Africa is well known for its decolonisation-based racial ideology, particularly with regard to its impact on property rights.

Canada, I hear, is facing some similar issues too. With Aboriginal title lands being awarded to small communities with a great deal of leverage over property rights, and with limited political accountability to residents on these lands, the expansion of these territories creates some severe legal issues.

In the case of Musqueam’s title recognition in Vancouver by the Canadian federal government, and last summer’s Cowichan decision from British Columbia’s Supreme Court, the final logic of these peculiar arrangements is yet to be decided by events on the ground.

In Vancouver, the recognition of Aboriginal title in territories claimed by multiple First Nations has proven highly controversial.

For example, following the Musqueam title agreement by Ottawa earlier this month, the Squamish Nation has stated that it is “prepared to challenge any agreement between the federal government and other First Nations that could extend into its territory.”

Last summer, after the B.C. Supreme Court recognised Cowichan title to a swathe of Richmond, the Tsawwassen announced that they would appeal the decision in the courts.

In the meantime, one thing must be established in the minds of British Columbians: reality precedes the law. Any sufficiently organised and focused effort can almost certainly create viable conditions for effective resistance.

In this case, organisation is key. Essential principles must include eschewing support from compromised sources and relentlessly pursuing any legal or tactical advantage, even if it requires the difficult task of discovering sympathetic voices within opposing institutions, and must be pursued regardless of the odds. The cost of defeatism is defeat.

And if we here in South Africa are not yet defeated despite being outnumbered, out-budgeted, and outgunned, then you have as good a chance as anyone.

While South Africa is often referenced for its chaotic land grabs, racial legislation, and the threat of land confiscation, the more useful comparison lies in institutions, elites, and the way ambiguous legal arrangements can be turned into political leverage, rather than mere rhetoric.

In many ways, we in South Africa have most of the ingredients required to make thorough systemic comparisons, under much more severe demographic conditions. And yet, we have managed to cling to our rights quite well, all things considered. At times, this can be quite a lot of hard work, and, to be sure, our circumstances are not directly comparable. The devil is in the details, and little differences in laws and legal attitudes can mean the difference between development and destitution.

One lesson from South Africa is that a threat need not arrive all at once. It can emerge through institutions, incentives, and political habits that slowly narrow the room for resistance.

Expropriation without compensation

“Expropriation without compensation” is the main threat being discussed here. This has involved various legal reforms to create a body of special legal instruments which would allow the state to confiscate land, as it says on the tin, without compensation.

Given the strength of case law in South Africa, and a constitution which mixes socialist positive rights with common law and some flexible property rights, it is difficult to know how all of this will shake out by the time all the pieces are in place. The law matters, but so does the balance of forces behind it.

At the moment, the largest farming corporations, having engaged in Black Economic Empowerment schemes — that is, lending money to largely ruling African National Congress (ANC)-aligned partners to buy their shares — are in a common lobbying structure with the main banking cartel, through two main organisations, AgriSA, the biggest agricultural organisation in South Africa, and AgBiz, the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa.

These two are nominally separate but functionally coterminous, and have allegedly struck a backdoor deal with the state so that discounts on farmers’ land will be calibrated to strip them of all their assets while protecting the banks’ mortgage exposure. A member of the ruling ANC is the head of the Banking Association of South Africa.

As a result, these organisations, which are nominally supposed to represent the interests of farmers, have sadistically joked to their constituents that “change is coming”. In recent test cases prosecuted by the government, these organisations refused to offer legal assistance, and fired senior members for objecting to their complicity.

The media are also complicit, consistently punting the opinions of the lead propagandist for big agri, Wandile Sihlobo, as the main expert in all matters agricultural. He is now employed by the Presidency, whose land advisers include Ruth Hall, a former cheerleader for Robert Mugabe’s land seizures in Zimbabwe.

But despite all of this, we still have a relatively accessible legal system, and so much of the process in this direction can still be challenged. In fact, the first tentative example of expropriation without compensation took place in 2018, at the Akkerland farm, which was very soon ordered to receive compensation.

In the second example, a farm in Ekurhuleni, a metropolitan municipality neighbouring Johannesburg, the Metro dragged out the legal case for seven years to avoid compensating the farmer for the land seized in 2019, using increasingly absurd tactics.

The basic point for Canadians is that even where the law remains contestable, organised elites can still work to normalise outcomes that would once have seemed politically impossible.

Organising

Almost any solution to these problems is like sweeping leaves on a windy day if you cannot gain control over your political system. And that, I’m afraid, is the situation in which both of our nations find themselves, and which they must accept for the time being.

We have a great deal of civic organisations whose existence is tied to the success or failure of the efforts to protect property rights, from Sakeliga, a business advocacy group, to the Afrikaner nationalists in Solidariteit and AfriForum, to the small farmers’ representatives at the Southern African Agri Initiative (SAAI), the Free Market Foundation, and so on.

One of the key things about these organisations is that they refuse to be funded by any large corporations. This is not a matter of simple moral principles or some abstract ideological point. Rather, in South Africa, companies with more than 49 employees are required to have black ownership if they wish to contract with the state, or with any company that contracts with the state.

Likewise, in the Western world, state contractors, or even large consumer corporations, are tied into the demands of ESG and the legal risks of America’s post-Civil Rights Act provisions. It gave rise to the programme of private-sector censorship, hiring quotas, and ideological training which is a requirement for access to big capital.

This means that any sufficiently large organisation is inevitably going to have a conflict of interest baked in, and risks financial insecurity for the civic organisation if it challenges a “transformation” policy which a donor likes.

As a result, these South African organisations are funded by smaller companies, individual donors, investment schemes, and creative mutual-aid financing. Together, the Afrikaner nationalist movement known as Solidariteit has over 500,000 members across its dozen or so organisations, effectively drawing direct support from a plurality, if not the majority, of Afrikaner households. The ANC, by contrast, has just 400,000 members.

These organisations have labour unions, work placement schemes, private education initiatives, insurance policies, charities, security operations, publishing houses, cultural institutions, news outlets, business advocacy organisations, legal activist branches, and even a private cooperative bank. This creates the ability to coordinate, to pursue foreign relations, and to challenge any state ordinance with both legal and popular resistance. This does not always work, but the success rate is very high. Should the need arise, the pivot to real territorial power is not as great a leap as it may at first seem.

This is the sort of thinking required when dealing with these circumstances. By all means, push for reform, but in the absence of any easy solutions, every means available must be weaponised to defend your interests. In many cases, this will require negotiation with both sympathetic and hostile political parties, branches of the civil service, and elements of the private sector. Good relations are to be sought out, not approached with fear and paranoia.

And as for the creation of the various organisations and strategies, the general approach has not been to try to create one organisation to do everything alone. The smarter option is mutual assistance between organisations doing their own thing, and gradually drawing them all into greater voluntary cooperation. This allows for flexibility, experimentation, and a sense of security in leadership and autonomy, while driving participation and common purpose.

For British Columbians, this may be the most relevant lesson of all. If property rights are to be defended in a fragmented and ambiguous legal environment, they will not be defended by one heroic organisation acting alone, but by overlapping institutions, independent funding, legal creativity, and disciplined cooperation.

Traditional councils

One of the underappreciated facts about South Africa, though, is that we also have “traditionally governed areas”, analogous to the American Indian reservations, or the Canadian First Nations reserves and title lands.

These territories are derived from traditionally governed areas under the control of chiefs and kings of various kinds in the old Homeland Areas, mostly known as “Bantustans”.

The thing is, these usually function either as big NIMBY zones filled with rural peasants, or as mining sinecures for connected mining companies. Some enterprising groups include the Bafokeng, a Tswana group from the North West Province. They took back their mineral rights from the Bophutatswana state back in the 1980s, and have now become one of the wealthiest tribes in the country.

These people are not by default your enemy, that should always be seen as an empirical and contingent factor.

In our case, there are several cases where popular resistance to mining operations undertaken by chiefs has been curbed by white environmental activists (Xolobeni, for instance). For the Afrikaners, the offer of legal defence against interference by the state has brought about the loyalty of traditional leaders. Another example is the Barolong ba Seleka, who have a history of military and political cooperation with the Trekboers dating back to the 19th century, and who received free legal assistance in winning a succession dispute instigated by the ANC to seize their mineral rights.

These micronations are all potential allies, and potential enemies, and their assistance offers a bulwark against the Kafkaesque world of progressive politics.

Should “Land Back” claims proliferate, ask yourself: is there a competing claim you can back? Is there a partnership that can be struck to guarantee residents their rights? Is there a way of forging a synergy of interests?

In British Columbia, not every Indigenous title holder, claimant, or government will have identical interests. Some may be transactional, some divided, and some open to partnership. Treating all such actors as a single bloc is strategically self-defeating.

A final example

This is the task of generations, not of political cycles. But when a moment of decision presents itself, one must be decisive.

In South Africa in 2010, big business grew wary of the farmers’ movement, which was pushing for a harder line against government land policy and straining relations with the larger commercial chambers. Theo de Jager, who had joined AgriSA’s Limpopo board in 2008, challenged the banks on land reform valuations, but the banks blocked AgriSA from taking a firm stand. Their logic was plain enough: if farms were seized, they stood to lose, but they still preferred an arrangement in which debt was protected while farms remained exposed.

That conflict helped rupture the existing structure. AgriSA’s business chamber drifted away, competition briefly emerged with AgBiz, and the larger corporate players gradually consolidated their policy influence. The final spark for a break came with the Akkerland expropriation case, when farmer Johan Schoeman was given just seven days to clear his property before Easter, an impossible demand in the circumstances.

Agri Limpopo lacked the funds to fight the case and asked AgriSA for help. AgriSA refused. De Jager then turned to Solidariteit and AfriForum, which helped secure financing. The court ultimately allowed Schoeman to remain while the merits were heard, and the state later settled, with punitive costs awarded against the Minister and the Land Claims Commissioner.

But the political meaning of the case mattered as much as the legal outcome. AgriSA responded by expelling allies who had helped Schoeman, and De Jager resigned. Out of that breach came the Southern African Agri Initiative (SAAI), backed by the Solidariteit movement.

Crucially, SAAI did not present itself as an ethnic vehicle, but as a broad representative of individual farmers against corporate cartels and state overreach. That decision gave it legitimacy well beyond a narrower nationalist base, and made it one of the most credible and visible agricultural organisations in the country.

My point here, which is not a sexy one, but is still vital, is that while in-group preference is a vital element of resistance to state domination, realpolitik requires allied strategies and a pragmatic approach to solving tangible problems.

Key to keeping one’s mind clear on such matters is avoiding any sort of idealism, and focusing exclusively on interests and outcomes. One can neither afford cloistered purism, nor liberal universalism. One’s allies must be chosen on the basis of common interest and willingness to act in good faith, and must be dealt with in good faith, with no misunderstanding of intentions.

In my experience working for these organisations and providing them with strategic research, I have come to understand that delicate balance between the need for both an honest confrontation with reality, and an earnest dedication to mutual respect between neighbours.

There is neither room for despair, nor for bravado, just a clear-eyed fixation on the horizon, and one foot placed in front of the other.

Robert Duigan is a political analyst and journalist from South Africa. He does freelance research for various political organisations, and runs half of the local news website, The Cape Independent, where he publishes the specialist monthly publication, PRISM.

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Is it so bad that Canada is a petrostate? After all, the country certainly is one.

Canada’s exports, and the growth and backbone of its economy, depend upon oil from Alberta, and natural resources more broadly.

Many self-hating critics treat this state of being as a danger, as if becoming wealthier from the resources beneath our feet is something to be ashamed of. It is not a credible position, but its proponents have made careers out of doubling down on it. To them, one of the alternatives to a healthy, staples-export economy is dependency on the federal government.

Canada is undergoing a painful era, but it remains relatively rich because of oil. Our most prosperous years have been during resource booms. Boom and bust are not a perfect arrangement, but we have certainly never flourished by lionising administration and state control of the economy.

The federal government under Mark Carney can talk all it likes about dynamism and major projects, but it retains the same bureaucratic ideology that has invigorated the Liberals for over half a century. That ideology consists, in part, of redistributing money levied from taxpayers and debt to expand the bureaucracy. It treats administration as morally superior to productivity.

Canada is better as a petrostate than a welfare state.

Ottawa’s political language deliberately muddles a key distinction. A state with welfare is different from a welfare state.

If welfare is broadly defined as taxpayer-funded provisions delivered by the state, then most modern, Western governments have a form of it. These include healthcare and schooling, which would otherwise be provided at cost and on demand to citizens.

While welfare programs are perfectly reasonable objects of debate, they are not necessarily the problem. The problem is when welfare becomes the ideology and logic of the state, rather than a simple function. In such a welfare state, bureaucratic guardianship becomes a selfish leviathan that sees its own expansion as an absolute good.

Canada has been such a state for as long as most living Canadians can remember. Pierre Trudeau’s ascendancy to the role of prime minister in 1968 is often cited as the beginning of this regime.

While Trudeau Sr. certainly baked progressivism into Canada’s Constitution and the public service, the transformation arguably goes further back, to World War II, when the Liberal government embraced interventionism in the style of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

However, that timeline is another discussion.

What matters here is that Canada was once a simpler parliamentary federation, where the government taxed little and provided little, leaving room for citizens and communities to hold society together through institutions like the Church and voluntary associations.

When Trudeau finally exited Ottawa in 1984, he had led Canada’s transformation into a country that elevated the courts and bureaucracy to the level of Parliament in terms of power. Rights, instead of culture, became the essence of an official, but invented, Canadian identity.

In 2022, over 40 per cent of the Canadian economy was tied to the public service between Ottawa and the provinces. Since 2015, the number of people employed by the federal government has grown by 110,738 people, revealing Mark Carney’s vaunted job cuts of 16,000 positions over three years as minimal.

This army of administrators and officials import nothing, save for fighter jets, export little of note, and sell even less in a competitive marketplace. Corporations in Texas or Japan do not wire money to Ottawa because Crown–Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, or CIRNAC, has called another meeting.

Trading partners want to do business because of the work performed by miners, manufacturers, and oil workers.

This is why Alberta and its oil economy are essential, for both Canada and conservatives across the country. Calls for the Conservatives to cease being an ostensibly Western-centric and pro-Alberta party are profoundly unserious, for the province represents the antithesis of the Canadian welfare state’s ideology.

Countries must produce something that the world actually wants to buy, and the world wants Canadian oil and gas, whether from Alberta or other provinces like British Columbia. Natural resource products make up more than half of Canada’s total exports of goods and services, with oil and gas being by far the largest share.

The demand for Canadian resources is not new, but ongoing conflicts in Russia and the Middle East hammer home the need for a stronger Canadian energy alternative.

It is backward to treat the characterisation of Canadians as “hewers of wood and drawers of water” as an embarrassment. For those who do, the outsized importance of the resource economy is taken as a sign that we are not clever or inventive enough, that we still do not do enough work from computers in a cubicle or a home office.

Respectfully, countless overleveraged AI start-ups are not going to lift Canada out of its cycle of low productivity. What built Canada and made it rich were staple exports, whether fur and timber in the early 1800s, or oil and gas today.

The fact that Alberta is the biggest staple producer in Canada makes it the most Canadian of our provincial economies in many respects, especially if one considers the bureaucratic state in Ottawa to be a perversion. Oil and gas bring more than mere exporting. There is also engineering and technological innovation as the energy industry continues to modernise.

Canada’s own oil and LNG operations are among the world’s most technologically advanced, with LNG operations on the B.C. coast leading the way in innovation, efficiency, and operational emissions reduction. Imagining the oil industry as dirty shovel work is a perception that is several decades out of date, but even if it were the case, it would still not be something to shun.

Recent events have only made the importance of Albertan oil even more apparent. The American strikes on Iran and the consequent closing of the Strait of Hormuz have caused oil and gas prices to spike around the world.

The Western world has always been vulnerable to strategic blackmail from the Middle East because of energy markets. Whether it be the first Oil Shock in 1973, or the impacts we are seeing today, we and our allies depend on the decisions made in Tehran or Riyadh.

If the world “needs more Canada”, as Barack Obama famously said, expanding our capacity to export energy with new pipelines and LNG terminals is the most important way to accomplish that.

Canada is democratic, reliable, and internally stable. The case for Canadian oil has been made for those very reasons many times, even if it has been ignored by the Liberal government.

Alberta has the reserves and the expertise, while the rest of Canada has the geography to turn us into the leading energy supplier to the democratic world. Properly understood, conservatism should include conserving and reinforcing our place as a staple exporter, not managing a Liberal welfare state and its bureaucracy.

We should be seen as free citizens, not clients of a progressive public service, with entry into which is often cut off to Canadians from blue-collar and unilingual backgrounds.

Trudeau-style welfare, even if it is under a new prime minister, treats the bureaucrats as a priesthood, and treats their state as the true shepherd of Canada. The conservative counter to this is to insist that Canada exists to protect Canadians, and to make it possible for them to build, trade, and profit from their property and the land.

If that makes us a petrostate, cheers to that.

Geoff Russ is the Editor-at-Large of Without Diminishment. He is a contributor to a number of publications, including the National Post, Modern Age, and The Australian Financial Review.

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D.C.C. (Danny) Randell is a Canadian writer and a doctoral student at the University of Buckingham.

In the early 20th century, the travel writer H.V. Morton penned a series of articles for the Daily Express chronicling his experiences as a tourist in his own country, later adapted into the bestseller In Search of England. The book is a delight to read and has been described as ‘travel writing at its best’. It is replete with amusing anecdotes and scenes of a bucolic and romantic nature, recording life in a country still unmarked by the Second World War or the technological revolution that would come after it.

England today looks very different from how it did in 1927, yet there are still glimpses of the world Morton captured for his readers, if you know where to look. One of those is the historic village pub.

I’m not talking about the Michelin-starred restaurant hidden under a thatched roof, or the pub-cum-sports bar where men gather for a freezing pint of Foster’s to watch football at the weekend, lovely as both of those things may be. I mean the unassuming, low-ceilinged, lath-and-plaster pub with a pedigree, where bitter is still pumped up from the basement and the only sound to be heard is that of patrons, and usually the publican, in conversation. England still has a few of these. Canada, where I live, has almost none.

I was fortunate enough, however, to find one of these rare birds, a veritable pub in the British tradition here in the Great White North. Panelled from floor to ceiling and beautifully decorated, it is housed in a tall stone building that evokes a distinctive old-world charm. When I first walked in, more than a decade ago now, it was easy to notice that the bar staff were smartly attired, pints were poured with care and, remarkably, there wasn’t a single television screen in sight. Apart from a log fire and Timothy Taylor’s draught ale, it wasn’t missing much.

Here was a place to sit, to sip, to share smiles, meals and laughs. A meeting place for mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, siblings, lovers and bosom friends. Here was a pub that could genuinely claim to be ‘local’, despite being situated nowhere near most of its patrons’ residences.

There are good reasons Canada doesn’t have a pub culture in the way Britain does. For one, pubs simply aren’t a part of our built environment. In place of pubs, there are franchise ‘lounges’ and hotel bars. A place to eat, sure, and to drink, definitely, but as destinations in which to socialise, they are uncompelling. Most of these watering holes are new additions to suburban neighbourhoods, not, as in Britain, centuries-old institutions.

Yet the pub I mentioned above is a testament to what intentionality around a space can achieve. It requires vision as well as commitment, for choosing a higher form of existence over an economically expedient one is not an easy path. As a testament to the difficulty, after decades of determined resistance, my favourite pub has just mounted televisions on its walls.

In the 21st century, a vicious culture of entertainment saturates the very air and, after years of turning away prospective customers ignorant of the telos of the establishment into which they’d wandered, my pub quite reasonably concluded that it had better accommodate the masses or else risk closing its doors.

What’s interesting about my pub’s decision is that the times haven’t changed all that much. The TVs didn’t suddenly arrive because they became current. They were added because somebody just gave in. There might have been a creative way to avoid such a catastrophe, a monthly subscription paid for by regulars, perhaps, or a joint-ownership scheme, as some pubs in Britain have turned to amid sinking profits.

The previous absence of screens certainly marked the establishment out as peculiar. In Canada, where there’s beer, supposedly there ought also to be entertainment, yet the irony is that historically, pubs were places where patrons supplied their own amusement. Singing, music and dancing were a regular feature of public houses well into the 20th century.

Today, pub songs are hardly more than a memory, and the music and dancing have mostly moved to other venues. And yet Canadians regularly flock to coffee shops as a space to relax and converse, demonstrating that it is still possible for meeting places that aren’t based around entertainment to thrive in our communities.

A pub that’s unapologetic about its raison d’être can encourage this appetite by embracing its calling to be an institution rather than just another restaurant. Pubs can just as easily be a ‘third place’ between home and the office as coffee shops are. The decision to become that rests with proprietors, who can choose not to take their cues from pure bar culture and instead curate a unique communal experience for a hungry and thirsty public.

To those who would frequent such institutions, if you can find one, support it and ask friends to join you in supporting it. If there isn’t a pub near you, start one. As the past few years have shown, community-owned pubs aren’t just a pipe dream, they’re a legitimate possibility.

There’s no reason for great pubs not to exist in Canada.

Perhaps we just need to ask ourselves what we really value in the communal spaces where we congregate, or even why we congregate in the first place. Is it to inebriate ourselves to the point of insensibility, in which case attractive surroundings are of no consequence? Is it to listen to music that we might have just as easily played through a set of headphones on the way over? Is it to fix our eyes on a television, taking less notice of those we came in with?

If the point of dining out is to make merry with those we care about, then the answer to all of the above is obviously no. Yet when even the most traditional establishments, like mine, can’t seem to satisfy and retain a loyal clientele, it would appear that most of us are not just missing the point of a pub, we can’t even recognise a good one when we see it in the wild.

D.C.C. (Danny) Randell is a doctoral student at the University of Buckingham. His writing has appeared in National Post, C2C Journal, and at the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy. Find more of his work at anachronicpen.substack.com.

Without Diminishment’s latest pub night is taking place in Calgary on March 20th. For tickets.

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Without Diminishment co-founder Caroline Elliott is running for the B.C. Conservative leadership. And in this exclusive new episode of the Leadership Series, Elliott (on leave from the publication) joins fellow co-founder Alexander Brown for an inside look into her campaign.

Watch the full interview below, and subscribe to Without Diminishment on YouTube.

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From DRIPA and SOGI, to slashing taxes and standing up to Ottawa, Elliott lays out her vision to again put British Columbians first, and to help get Canada back on track.

For more on Caroline’s campaign, visit: https://www.winforbc.ca/

UPDATE: And in related news Monday, previous Without Diminishment leadership guest Harman Bhangu has announced he will be suspending his campaign, and has endorsed Elliott for B.C. Conservative Leader.

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