An enduring rite of passage for any young Canadian conservative is the discovery of ‘Red Toryism’. Many embrace it wholeheartedly for its nominal elegance and claims of grand continuity with the past.

Earlier this month, a 19-year-old attending Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie announced that he would be running for city council as a ‘Red Tory’. First of all, the other editors at Without Diminishment and I wish the candidate well, for it is good to see young Canadians get involved in politics so directly.

Secondly, and with the same sincerity, may the candidate abandon Red Toryism sooner rather than later and never claim the label again. Red Toryism is a bad name for two primary reasons, along with many smaller ones.

It misportrays the conservatism of prime ministers such as Sir John A. Macdonald, Sir George Étienne Cartier, Sir Robert Laird Borden, and R. B. Bennett, as well as that of the author Stephen Leacock and premiers in British Columbia such as Richard McBride and W. A. C. Bennett. (The Bennetts mentioned here were New Brunswick natives of old Loyalist stock and distant cousins.)

Another important reason why notions of Red Toryism must be stamped out is that they serve as a gateway for smuggling progressive and left-wing assumptions into the conservative tent, all while pretending to honour the legacy of Confederation.

Admittedly, Red Toryism sounds attractive on the surface to curious minds, like discovering a sleek coat at an estate sale. However, when worn, it is riddled with stains and holes.

The stubborn presence of Red Toryism can be attributed to a man named Gad Horowitz. He is a highly respected professor of political science at the University of Toronto. Horowitz’s career is genuinely impressive, with extensive scholarship. He made many accurate observations, such as referring to Canadian multiculturalism as an exercise in ‘the masochistic celebration of Canadian nothingness’.

Horowitz also argued that Canada’s Tory instincts furnished it with the ‘seeds of a socialist future’. The Tory preference for order, authority, community, hierarchy, and state action supposedly made socialism more natural in Canada than in the United States. The term ‘Red Tory’ was chosen because of the colour red’s association with leftist international causes and socialism. The British Labour Party, the French Socialists, the German Social Democrats, and the Chinese Communist Party all wave the red flag.

Gad Horowitz, a Marxist, also co-founded the publication Canadian Dimension, which routinely publishes apologia for communism and endorses the anti-Canadian line of the ‘decolonisers’ and similar elements.

Admirers of Horowitz have linked this so-called ‘Tory touch’ to Canada’s greater willingness to use the levers of the state to develop and control the economy, putting the country on a natural pathway to anti-liberal socialism. It is a crude, subversive trick to insist that classic Tory conservatism and socialism are part of the same family because they dislike ‘Anglo-Saxon ultraliberalism’, to borrow a phrase from the French.

Sharing a dislike of the same party crasher does not a marriage make. Had somebody approached Sir John A. Macdonald and Sir George Étienne Cartier and praised them as proponents of a socialist future, they might have deported that person to Australia.

There was no desire at Confederation to build upon a blank ideological slate or to dream up some innovative new society.

The point of Confederation was to preserve British North America. Yes, that meant conserving the presence and power of the Crown, Parliament, the French-Catholic fact, and Protestant liberty within the British Empire. It also meant preserving the British and French-Canadian people, their culture, and their languages.

Read more

Elbridge Colby’s announcement that the Pentagon is pausing American participation in the Permanent Joint Board on Defence should not be dismissed as a symbolic rebuke or another passing irritant in Canada-United States relations. It is a warning that, in the new era of hard power politics, rhetoric must be matched by action and a clear sense of who Canada’s allies and adversaries are. For decades, Canada has presumed that geography, goodwill and historical partnership would guarantee American patience. This thinking prevailed despite Ottawa failing to make the investments required to defend Canada and to contribute credibly to continental security, while allowing Chinese influence to grow within Canada.

It is notable that this announcement came from Elbridge Colby, who is one of the intellectual architects of the American New Right’s foreign policy over the past decade and one of the few holdovers from the first Trump administration. Mr. Colby’s 2021 book, The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict, argues that U.S. foreign and defence policy should be focused on the challenge to American interests posed by China, especially the risk that China could dominate the Indo-Pacific region. His book sets out a strategic framework for a multipolar world and the return of great-power politics, where control over the Indo-Pacific region by China could threaten American power globally. Given Mr. Colby’s focus on China and his explicit reference in his social-media post to Prime Minister Carney’s Davos speech, he has taken note of Carney’s renewed relationship with China and is concerned about Carney’s analysis of how Canada ought to behave in this post-international world order.

Canadians need clarity about how to navigate this post-liberal international order and combat what Carney himself identified, when asked to name Canada’s biggest security threat, as ‘China’. That clarity is not to be found in Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos speech or his desire that ‘international order will be rebuilt, but it will be rebuilt out of Europe’. It can be found in an unlikely and controversial source: Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s address to the Munich Security Forum.

Canada must understand that the Americans view our foreign policy and defence strategy as misaligned with our own national interest and the greater North American security and defence interests. We must push aside our emotional and reflexive anti-Americanism and look at whether our American friends might provide a better framework for how Canada ought to act in the world.

Read more

In the world of sport, it is usually referred to as an ‘own goal’. In that context, it is usually seen as an unfortunate and highly embarrassing error that sometimes entirely changes the outcome of a match.

In British Columbia, the BC NDP has managed to score an existential ‘own goal’ on its own ‘team’ of some 5.7 million British Columbians. Unlike in sport, however, this one was effectively intentional, and its repercussions are seriously degrading both the province’s democratic governance and its economy.

It all went sideways in 2015 when the Trudeau government indicated its unconditional international support for the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or UNDRIP. Previously, Canada had put important conditions on its backing of UNDRIP, but those were all dropped in favour of unconditional support.

Also in 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission produced its Calls to Action — many of which were arguably outside its mandate. Call to Action 43 says:

43. We call upon federal, provincial, territorial, and municipal governments to fully adopt and implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as the framework for reconciliation.

In November 2019, the BC NDP government, led by John Horgan, introduced legislation that had as its goal implementing UNDRIP as the framework for reconciliation. That legislation was DRIPA — the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act.

Clearly, DRIPA was devised to respond to Call to Action 43. Under DRIPA, two things took place.

First, the legislation itself had at its core a completely undemocratic and very likely unconstitutional bilateral process involving the First Nations Leadership Council (FNLC) and the government jointly deciding on what BC laws must be amended to align with UNDRIP.

The legislation also contained two sections (sections 6 and 7) that were added to enable similarly undemocratic agreements to be entered into with ‘Indigenous governing bodies’, under which they would be accorded ‘joint’ or ‘consent-based’ decision-making authority over Crown lands.

Second, the NDP government of the day chose to deliberately begin largely secretly implementing UNDRIP throughout BC in policy form — something even the legislation did not envision.

The legislature was told during the debate on DRIPA in 2019 that it ‘created no new rights’ and would be implemented in a manner consistent with Canada’s constitutional recognition and affirmation of Aboriginal rights (section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982).

Neither of those promises turned out to be true. In fact, UNDRIP itself does contain rights that are significantly different from those recognised under section 35 — both procedurally and substantively.

The government’s ‘own goal’ became startlingly apparent in December 2025, when the BC Court of Appeal (BCCA) determined that the real effect of DRIPA, coupled with section 8.1 of the Interpretation Act, introduced in 2021 by David Eby when he was Attorney General, was that UNDRIP could be enforced by BC courts as ‘the law’ in the province, with immediate effect.

The initial response from the Eby government was shock and outrage, with the Premier commenting negatively about the judgment and insisting that urgent’ changes would be made to DRIPA to undo the conclusions of the court about the legal enforceability of UNDRIP.

The First Nations Leadership Council (FNLC) immediately pounced on the Premier, letting him know in no uncertain terms that, now that UNDRIP was legally enforceable in BC, they would not countenance any attempt by the government to undo the legal outcome of Gitxaala, citing the requirement for their consent for that to occur (see Article 19 of UNDRIP) which they clearly indicated would not be forthcoming.

What happened next was a journalist’s dream come true, as the Premier flip-flopped no less than six times in trying to convince his ‘co-governing’ FNLC ‘partners’ and his own caucus to accept that legislative changes were necessary and urgent to deal with the potentially huge ramifications created by Gitxaala.

In his latest flip-flop, the Premier accepted the highly questionable advice of his Attorney General to forgo any legislative changes until some form of agreement was reached with the FNLC. They gave themselves six months (or possibly longer) to accomplish what is likely to be an impossible task.

Meanwhile, the slate of litigation against the government that now cites UNDRIP grows daily, including challenges by American tribes. There is nothing legislatively in place to prevent courts from invalidating any BC laws they consider to be incompatible with UNDRIP.

While the BC government has sought leave to appeal that decision to the Supreme Court of Canada, that is a time-consuming and legally uncertain process, as is the subsequent appeal if the Court decides to grant leave — which it may well decline to do.

As of today, the economy and legislative authority of the BC government appear to be rapidly deteriorating as the full ramifications of UNDRIP being positive law in BC unfold.

Clearly, this whole sorry mess needs to be dealt with in the legislature prior to the end of the current session and dealt with conclusively.

Unfortunately, the activist FNLC, now effectively co-governing the province while purporting to represent just 2 percent of the population, is apparently not prepared to allow that to occur. As a result, the political and economic disaster that is unfolding in British Columbia worsens by the day.

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.

Subscribe now

Share

Queen Victoria, Canada’s first queen and second-longest-reigning monarch, was known affectionately as the Mother of Confederation, the namesake of two provincial capitals, and the monarch whose name is used to bestow the highest military honour in Canada and the United Kingdom.

Despite being the reason for the May long weekend in most provinces across Canada, none of the aforementioned traits or recognitions now appears to be synonymous with what has become colloquially known as ‘May Two-Four’ or ‘the May long’.

Rather, this yearly holiday, which often falls midway between Easter and Canada Day, has become associated with the more mundane — the unofficial opening of summer, the cottage-opening weekend, fireworks, and beer. All enjoyable, no doubt, but rather sterile stand-ins for the true rationale of a holiday that pre-dates Confederation and is uniquely Canadian.

The Sovereign’s birthday has been celebrated in Canada since the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901). 24 May, Queen Victoria’s birthday, was initially declared a holiday by the Legislature of the Province of Canada in 1845.

The holiday continued uninterrupted after Confederation in 1867. Upon the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, Parliament recognised the holiday through legislation and gave it its name. Further legislation in 1952 standardised the holiday to the Monday preceding 25 May.

The Queen’s 63-year reign, now appreciated as the Victorian era, undergirded Canada’s evolution from colony to nation while also backstopping Britain’s imperial hegemony and transformation through the Industrial Revolution.

Fittingly, Queen Victoria has more places and features named after her in Canada than any other historical figure — Victoria, British Columbia; Regina, Saskatchewan; Victoria Island in the Canadian Arctic, Canada’s second-largest island; Queen Street in Toronto; Victoria College at the University of Toronto. The Royal Canadian Regiment still wears Queen Victoria’s royal cypher (VRI, Victoria Regina Imperatrix), to name but a few.

The symbols and namesakes are not the product of an unwarranted mythology. Queen Victoria played a pivotal role in the foundation of Canada and in shaping the domestic institutions and traditions we now take for granted.

Not only did Queen Victoria assent to Confederation and designate Ottawa as the capital, but she also helped to unite the colonial factions that would emerge as Canada. Upon Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne in 1837, revolts broke out in the colonies of Upper and Lower Canada, and civilian militias formed against the local administrative elites.

In response, and in a spirit of reconciliation, Queen Victoria granted amnesties to the rebels in both colonies and then tasked the Governor General of the day, John Lambton, 1st Earl of Durham, with investigating the rebellion.

John Lambton produced what became known as the Durham Report, which most prominently recommended the unification of Upper and Lower Canada into the Province of Canada and the introduction of responsible government. While the unification of Upper and Lower Canada promptly occurred in 1841, responsible government was only later adopted through Confederation in 1867.

It was also Queen Victoria who was the signing monarch for most of the Numbered Treaties, which recognised the Indigenous nations of what is now northern Ontario and the Prairies. These treaties established nation-to-nation relations, provided constitutional guarantees, and facilitated the mostly bloodless westward expansion of Canadian sovereignty.

It is no wonder that the central tower of Canada’s first Parliament building was named the Victoria Tower, in a town which a British MP referred sarcastically to as ‘Westminster in the wilderness.’

While Queen Victoria may not have been involved in the day-to-day affairs that forged Canada in the manner of the Fathers of Confederation, she nonetheless carried the weight of the Crown and stewarded the Empire that ultimately bequeathed what we know today as Canada.

The Canada which Queen Victoria set in motion has drifted from its roots and waned in its pride, but such cultural decline is a choice. Our heritage, traditions, and shared identity need not be subjugated to a pseudo-culture that produces atomisation and social lethargy in the name of liberty and consumption.

Edmund Burke is often called upon by those on the right in the name of generational fairness, to lower debt levels, and to enhance responsible and sober policy-making. However, Burke’s ‘Primeval Contract of the eternal society’, which emphasises the inherent linkage between the dead, the living, and those yet to be born, is of greatest importance when it comes to our cultural inheritance.

As we collectively become more detached from our history, we adopt a position of cultural rent-seeking in which we only draw down on the riches of our inheritance, leaving less and less to be passed on.

A country that does not know itself cannot celebrate itself. The shift from celebrating Victoria Day to May Two-Four is emblematic of a nation that has become collectively deracinated. We have gone from celebrating the grandeur of the Empire that bequeathed this country to us to an individuated, consumer-driven ritual devoid of any meaning. Rather than giving honour and praise, we now just take a moment’s reprieve from the doldrums of modern life, with no reference to what Canada was or what it has become.

If Queen Victoria is the Mother of Confederation, then we are collectively her children, estranged or otherwise. True matriarchs deserve their due honour and praise; Queen Victoria is no exception.

Alex MacDonald works for Counsel Public Affairs. He formerly worked in the United Nations, the Government of Alberta, on Parliament Hill in Ottawa and in private industry.

Subscribe now

Share

As the Canadian government continues to accomplish nothing slowly, the Canadian economy is faltering under the weight of a decade of abysmal Liberal management and renewed trade pressure from the United States of America.

The promise of a deal with the Americans has transformed into a vague whisper of an aspiration as it becomes increasingly clear that no such resolution is in the offing. A deal by Canada Day, a deal by August, close to a deal in October, and now a year has passed and nothing has changed, aside from the tariffs worsening.

A more passive solution has presented itself to some Canadians: wait for the midterm elections and Donald Trump’s inevitable implosion to resolve our predicament. Do not hold out hope on that front.

This strategy is doomed to failure for two reasons. First, the Republicans are well-positioned to defy expectations. Second, even if the Republicans get trounced, they are unlikely to lose badly enough to help Canadians.

The party in power almost always suffers significant losses in the midterm elections, and this rule applies no matter which party one supports. Barack Obama was historically rebuked in the 2010 elections, Trump lost the House in 2018, Biden lost the House in 2022, and, going back farther, Bill Clinton lost both the House and the Senate in 1994, ushering in the ‘Gingrich Revolution’. Given this consistent pattern, it seems obvious that Trump will lose ground in the upcoming elections.

A number of trends, however, suggest Trump’s prophesied and long-expected defeat is not inevitable. This is a lesson that should already have been learned after ten years of his defying expectations. A recent Harris poll showed the generic congressional ballot at a dead heat, with 50 per cent for Democrats and 50 per cent for Republicans.

The polling comes despite Trump’s lower approval ratings. While Americans are frustrated with Trump on a number of issues, that frustration has not translated into enormous support for Democrats whose policies continue to be viewed as out of touch and excessively focused on divisive identity issues.

Trump’s low approval may signal frustration that he has not delivered on his promises quickly enough rather than an overall opposition to his agenda. It is important to note that throughout Donald Trump’s political career, his personal approval has consistently trailed the popularity of individual policies.

Read more

Leduc County, just south of Edmonton, is today best known as the place where Alberta’s vast oil deposits were discovered in 1947. It also happens to bear the conspicuously French name of Father Hippolyte Leduc. He was a Roman Catholic priest and missionary with the Order of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate who came to the area with other French-Canadian settlers in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Many other places across Alberta, and indeed across the Prairies, bear names attesting to a similar historical French-speaking presence. St. Albert, St. Paul and Vegreville, not to mention Grande Prairie, are just some of the communities with such names in Alberta. Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, speaks to a similar history. Manitoba has communities with names like Dauphin, Portage la Prairie, and St. Boniface. The latter, which is now part of Winnipeg, is the birthplace of Gabrielle Roy, one of the most important French-Canadian literary figures of the twentieth century.

The historical presence of francophones across the Prairies is ironic, given that many Western Canadians, and especially Western Canadian conservatives, now complain of French-English bilingualism as a central Canadian imposition at odds with the realities west of Ontario. They also tend to conflate this policy, first implemented by Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal government in 1969, with the Quebec government’s own policies designed to protect and promote the French language within that province.

As the argument goes, Quebec has been given special treatment by Ottawa, which has allowed it to discriminate against the use of English, and by extension against Quebec anglophones, even as official federal bilingualism imposes the use of French elsewhere.

John Weissenberger has recently advanced a version of this argument in this very publication. In his telling, the central Canadian elite’s tolerance for Quebec’s language policies from the 1960s onwards was a manifestation of the same attitude that has more recently led to its capitulation to the “woke” ideology. As Weissenberger puts it:

“What we also didn’t know was that the failure of Quebec’s Anglo leadership was actually a dress rehearsal for the cultural capitulation of the entire Laurentian Elite in the face of 21st-century wokeism. What began with the repudiation of the English Quebecers who built the province and the country ended with the toppling of statues and renaming of places and institutions. The performative self-hatred of our ostensible elite culminated in Justin Trudeau declaring Canada a systemically racist country with no “core identity”.

There is certainly some truth to the argument that the mostly Liberal Party-affiliated “Laurentian” elites based in Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto capitulated to Quebec nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. However, the argument misses the mark insofar as it imputes a common cause between these elites and Quebec nationalists, on the one hand, and suggests shared assumptions underlying Quebec nationalism and contemporary “woke” causes, on the other.

Indeed, while central Canadian elites have allowed limited forms of Quebec nationalism to assert themselves from the 1960s onwards, they have done so for reasons that are entirely their own, and which are ultimately incompatible with the aims of the Quebec nationalists themselves. If anything, the approach taken by post-war central Canadian elites towards the management of Quebec nationalism has instead been consistent with a broader divide-and-conquer strategy aimed at undermining Canada’s attachment to both its English and French founding cultures, and to substitute a more Americanised, diverse-yet-homogeneous culture in their stead.

Anglo-Canadian conservatives, including conservatives based in Western Canada, have mostly noticed the impact of this strategy on their own cultural heritage. It is therefore not entirely surprising that they have wrongly understood it to rest on an alliance between central Canadian, “Laurentian” elites and Quebec nationalists.

Read more

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has confirmed its involvement in what can only be described as a taxpayer-funded deception operation targeting Frances Widdowson and Lindsay Shepherd. It involved months of building rapport under false pretences, fake production companies, and staged interviews, all to produce some glorified “gotcha” moments, in a style similar to Borat.

The CBC operation reportedly ran through sham entities including “Forge Media” and, in Shepherd’s account, “Heritage Figures Canada”, with targets drawn through meetings, paperwork, and studio bookings under the guise of a documentary project.

In Widdowson’s case, the process reportedly ended in a Vancouver CBC studio, where what was presented as a serious interview gave way to a theatrical confrontation built around children’s shoes.

It could not, under any scenario, be described as ‘journalism’. Rather, it is best characterised as left-wing activist theatre being subsidised by the Canadian public.

In this country, our national broadcaster is funded by taking money from every taxpayer. Some within it have decided certain interpretations of residential school history and Sir John A. Macdonald’s legacy are not to be debated, as though its members were high priests of the federation.

People are allowed to ask questions, and that does not merit public humiliation, nor do Shepherd and Widdowson’s inquiries provide any basis for a full-scale documentary in pursuit of those ends. Shepherd has further alleged that, while signing a release form, one of the producers tried to distract her from reading it closely. This only makes the entire affair look more like a premeditated trap than legitimate broadcasting.

Public institutions in Canada are supposed to serve serious, pluralistic debate. When elements of the public broadcaster treat dissenting citizens as subjects of an ambush “comedy” troupe, it has failed in its mandate.

One of the great justifications laid out for the CBC’s existence is that we need a Canada-wide broadcaster to support national unity. This is at odds with the denigration and mockery of the Fathers of Confederation that are often present on the network.

Furthermore, who signed up to fund the attempted humiliation of Shepherd and others? Public funds should not extend to such chicanery, intended to narrow the range of acceptable thought.

It does not help Canada’s long-running struggles with institutional trust. Whether it is vaccine mandates or politicised human rights tribunals, public institutions have not served as a tool of the common good.

In the enlightened view of media gatekeepers, some questions are too dangerous to be asked openly. Among the questions asked by the two women, so far as we are presently aware, are these: how many children died and were buried at the Kamloops residential school? How should we tell the story of Sir John A. Macdonald?

Canada’s integrity as a nation relies on handling these conversations honestly. We cannot afford to allow thinly veiled blood libels to be hurled at the Canadian people, and then have the parameters of their own rebuttals constrained. Shepherd, Widdowson, and others deserve a fair hearing.

Normal Canadians, who pay the bills and expect their institutions to serve the country rather than anti-Canadian ideological factions, are, at the very least, entitled by now to feel a quiet civic disgust.

This is not a partisan issue, or at least it should not be. The fake documentary team is treating scepticism, as is normal in a liberal society, as a disruption to its narrative script.

Most egregiously, it is doing so with money extracted from the very people whose views it seeks to marginalise.

What are normal people prepared to tolerate any more? How many staged ambushes, how much ideological capture disguised as edgy content, and to what degree will the public square be dissolved before we demand that institutions fulfil their proper role?

Institutions die when the people who depend on them allow them to decay. Right now, the CBC is testing exactly how much erosion the Canadian public is willing to underwrite.

The ball is in our court, not theirs.

Margareta Dovgal is a public policy commentator specializing in energy, climate, and economic development. She holds a Master’s of Public Administration in Energy, Technology and Climate Policy from University College London, as well as a Bachelor of Arts in Asian Area Studies from the University of British Columbia, where she also studied Sanskrit, archaeology, and philosophy.

Subscribe now

The metropolis vibrates and shudders from the veiled flashes of the world’s problems and passions, but few say anything about how it is altering the politics of Toronto. Elected politicians have turned a blind eye to it for years. They are content to talk of the housing market as it goes up and down, or of investment that rises or falls.

A section of the Metrolinx was recently completed, connecting Mount Dennis and Kennedy station. On February 8, the Eglinton Crosstown was officially opened to the public.

Hundreds of thousands of new and long-standing voters ride it daily. Meanwhile, the essential gate separating the affairs of Canada from the world slackens and cracks. The growing clamour of the Global Village marches closer with the ever-louder boom of the storm above Lake Ontario.

Nathaniel Erskine-Smith’s defeat in the Ontario Liberal nomination contest for Scarborough Southwest is not, by itself, the end of Canada. It is far worse than that. It is a useful, thundering demonstration of how Toronto’s politics are now won and lost.

Erskine-Smith, the sitting federal MP for neighbouring Beaches—East York, adjacent to Scarborough, is a former cabinet minister and former leadership contender for the provincial Liberals. He lost by 19 votes to Ahsanul Hafiz, a businessman and vice-chair of the federal party.

After the votes were counted, Erskine-Smith said that scrutineers told him they had “never seen anything like it”, and raised concerns about identification fraud and other unethical practices. By contrast, the victorious Hafiz, a man who immigrated to Canada from Bangladesh many years ago, said the process was entirely free and fair. This comes despite the documented presence of instructional sample flyers written in Bengali, urging voters to choose the Bangladeshi candidates on the ballot over their rivals.

The public record may remain tidy when this nomination is fully analysed, but most people who pay attention can guess the political reality of Scarborough. The nomination was a competition between two men who had never represented the riding before. Erskine-Smith has been the MP for tony Beaches—East York in Ottawa since 2015, while Hafiz spent most of his career in London, Ontario, before reinventing himself as the quintessential local man for political gain.

The question of who was more local turned out to be an argument over who could win over Scarborough’s networks and turnout machines, where Hafiz had an unassailable advantage.

In-group preference has proven, again, that it can be far more powerful than policy and philosophy. Erskine-Smith was known as an ideas guy with supposedly bold proposals on housing and other files. None of it mattered to a local electorate and party machine that wanted its own man to represent it.

Just over a year ago in the federal election, Erskine-Smith retained his seat in Beaches—East York, smashing his Conservative challenger with almost 70 per cent of the vote, the largest margin in the riding’s history. Beaches—East York is also one of the whitest and least diverse parts of Toronto’s political map.

Erskine-Smith may have been invincible where traditional Canadian brokerage politics still exist, but he stood little chance in the nomination next door, where instant signup drives, diaspora networks, language-specific mobilisations, and loose rules on party membership are the gatekeepers of power.

The “ethnic vote” is not a myth, as some people would have us believe. In 2020, The Walrus ran an article declaring that people are divided by age, education, class, and experience, meaning that ethnic minorities cannot possibly be reduced to a single bloc. There is some truth to that, but it only goes so far.

In reality, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of ethnic votes that can be activated in any election at any time, and by any power broker. These votes may be motivated by pocketbook issues, but also by grievances, fears, and ambitions that most Canadians will find strange and unfamiliar.

Read more

Nathaniel Erskine-Smith’s defeat in the Ontario Liberal Party’s nomination contest in Scarborough Southwest is a warning sign for both the Canadian state and the health of our democracy in the face of diaspora politics.

The long-time federal Liberal MP’s failed bid was marked by reports of unethical practices, such as sample ballots being distributed in Bengali, instructing voters to vote for Ahsanul Hafiz, a candidate of Bangladeshi origin who ultimately won the nomination contest.

It is worth noting that neither Canadian citizenship nor fluency in English or French is legally required to participate in internal party elections. This is not the first time that party elections in the Greater Toronto Area have been marred by non-citizen voters being effectively whipped up to vote for a specific candidate.

Erskine-Smith himself appeared incredulous after the results were announced, stating that he was embarking on a ‘full debrief’ with his team about the voting process. He went on to say that he had ‘never seen anything like it’. After a decade serving as a Toronto-area MP, Erskine-Smith was defeated by a man who had only moved to Scarborough Southwest the previous year and had no previous experience in elected politics.

More questions are now being raised about possible voter identity fraud.

A high-profile, sitting Member of Parliament lost in his own backyard after a blitz of mass, instant signups that are unencumbered by any meaningful price for membership, whether civic or financial. Diaspora-led activism is eroding Canadian sovereignty at its most fundamental level: namely, the ballot box.

For those of us who believe in a strong, sovereign Canada and a well-governed Ontario, this is about the integrity of our institutions themselves.

The displacement of an established Canadian legislator, as disagreeable as his beliefs may be to those on the right, by a candidate buoyed by concentrated, ethnic, community-specific mobilisation highlights a sovereignty gap. That gap is often tied to foreign political interests and, as many other instances have shown, foreign actors are all too happy to exploit it.

For full disclosure, I got my start in the political world volunteering for Mr Erskine-Smith back in 2015. I respected his honesty and consistency, and I still do, even though I despise a growing list of his views now.

But back then, 11 years ago, you could still trust our representatives to present themselves honestly and to earn the support of a broad constituency on the basis of national and local policy, no matter how disagreeable their views might have been. Canadians could operate under the assumption that the ‘grassroots’ were Canadian citizens concerned with Canadian outcomes.

Today, that model is being ruthlessly supplanted, not with grassroots activism, but with guided activism. The Scarborough Southwest nomination included thousands of memberships that were reportedly created, free of charge, in a matter of weeks. It suggests that our political parties have become open-source platforms for anyone to hack, including foreign proxies.

In Canada, the nomination process remains a glaring national security loophole. These contests are treated as private club matters rather than public democratic exercises. They lack the oversight of a neutral authority. This creates a low-cost, and at times entirely cost-free, environment providing a high-reward entry point for foreign interference.

All you need to do is speak sweet lies to members and constituents. In doing so, you create a motivated interest group that can effectively hand-pick a representative in a safe seat, bypassing the general electorate entirely.

When 3,580 memberships appear overnight in a single riding, we must ask: whose interests are being served? Are they Canadian interests, or diaspora interests?

The primary duty of an elected official, after all, is to the national and public interest. But when a candidate’s mandate is derived from a narrow, diaspora-specific recruitment drive, often centred on grievances or political movements from the old country, that candidate becomes a delegate for a foreign interest rather than a representative of Ontario and the Ontarians in that riding.

The result illustrates the danger of fragmented national and local loyalties.

Multiculturalism, when left without a strong framework of national identity, allows for the importation of foreign conflicts into our legislative halls. We are seeing the rise of a political class that views a seat in a Canadian legislature as a platform for foreign advocacy, rather than a tool for national or provincial governance.

This capture of our nomination process by diaspora activism is the ultimate sign of a hollowed-out democracy. If the gates to our legislatures are guarded by whoever can mobilise the largest bloc of unintegrated interests, then the concept of a Canadian mandate becomes meaningless.

We are effectively outsourcing our leadership selection to the highest bidder, or to the most aggressive foreign-aligned organiser. The decision by the Ontario Liberal Party to allow this surge, and the subsequent defeat of one of the more prominent politicians in the province, shows a party that has lost its way.

By prioritising raw numbers over the quality and loyalty of its candidates, the Ontario Liberals have signalled that they are comfortable being a vessel for proxies acting on behalf of foreign interests, despite the hardships facing so many Ontarians.

The fall of Nate Erskine-Smith is a wake-up call for every Canadian who believes that Canada’s future should be decided by Canadians, for Canadians. Our sovereignty is being auctioned off in community halls and pizza parlours. It is time to close the loophole before our legislatures become more of a collection of foreign outposts than they already are.

Dakota Jeffery-Petts is a former Conservative Party activist and lifelong resident of Toronto.

Subscribe now

Mardi dernier, le premier ministre Mark Carney a choisi Louise Arbour comme prochaine gouverneure générale du Canada. Après le passage de Mary Simon, qui n’a jamais parlé correctement le français pendant ses cinq années de mandat, certains verront la nomination de la juriste montréalaise comme un geste d’apaisement envers les francophones du pays. Parions qu’à l’Ouest de l’Ontario, on verra ce choix comme une autre victoire de « l’élite laurentienne » de Montréal et Toronto.

En vérité, la nomination de Louise Arbour représente la confirmation du pouvoir qui est déjà suprême dans ce pays depuis 1982, le « parti de la cour » (Court Party), selon l’expression de F. L. Morton et Rainer Knopff. Le changement de régime initié par Pierre Trudeau avec la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés a en effet retiré le pouvoir suprême aux élus pour le confier à un appareil de juristes, de militants, d’universitaires et de juges qui s’emploient à interpréter la Charte pour imposer d’en haut des politiques aux citoyens, en inventant de nouveaux « droits » à partir de son verbiage flou. Madame Arbour en est le pur produit.

De juge à la Cour suprême à militante postnationale

Après une carrière juridique remarquable comme procureure en chef des tribunaux pénaux internationaux pour l’ex-Yougoslavie et le Rwanda, puis comme juge à la Cour suprême du Canada, Louise Arbour s’est recyclée en militante postnationale à l’ONU, à titre de haut-commissaire aux droits de l’homme, puis de représentante spéciale pour les migrations internationales. Depuis plusieurs années déjà, elle prend la parole dans les médias pour répéter le même message : l’heure des nations serait terminée.

Après la crise des migrants en Europe, dans les années 2010, Louise Arbour décrivait la volonté des peuples occidentaux de réduire l’immigration comme le produit de « peurs hystériques », et militait pour le Pacte de Marrakech, qui incitait justement les États signataires à cesser de financer les médias qui ne décrivaient pas l’immigration selon l’angle privilégié par l’ONU. Lors du débat sur la Charte des valeurs québécoises, elle a dénoncé « un certain nationalisme rétrograde » qui aurait inspiré ce projet de loi « odieux ». En 2023, la nouvelle gouverneure générale affirmait qu’« on n’a plus le choix d’être des citoyens du monde » et qu’« il faut faire de la place » pour bien plus de migrants que les pays occidentaux n’en accueillent présentement.

On aurait tort de personnaliser indûment ce débat, dans la mesure où Madame Arbour est davantage une représentante typique des opinions admises par le « parti de la cour » qu’une anomalie. Notons néanmoins que ces idées radicales, souvent ouvertement méprisantes à l’égard de l’opinion des gens ordinaires, sont celles qui permettent d’occuper les plus hautes fonctions dans le système canadien et onusien.

Qu’est-ce que l’élite canadienne?

La forte symbolique de cette nomination pose également la question de la nature réelle de l’élite canadienne. Particulièrement dans l’Ouest du pays, on entend souvent le vocable « élite laurentienne » pour désigner le pouvoir ontarien et québécois qui dirigerait le pays. S’il y a une part de vrai dans cette thèse, particulièrement au sein du Parti libéral, est-ce vraiment un critère géographique qui détermine l’accès au pouvoir dans ce pays? Le nouvel enfant chéri du Canada libéral, Mark Carney, n’a-t-il pas grandi en Alberta?

La thèse de Morton et Knopff sur le « parti de la cour », qui impose d’en haut sa réécriture progressiste du monde, est certainement plus précise et plus juste, car elle se concentre avant tout sur la dimension idéologique de cette élite, qui pèse bien plus lourd que sa composante géographique. Les nationalistes québécois, bêtes noires de Pierre Elliott Trudeau, n’en font certainement pas partie, bien qu’ils soient concentrés le long du fleuve Saint-Laurent. Au contraire, le multiculturalisme constitue le crédo du Canada libéral depuis plus de cinquante ans et s’érige explicitement contre l’appartenance nationale.

C’est bien l’ironie du mouvement « elbows up », qui drape le postnationalisme dans le drapeau canadien pour jouer la carte du patriotisme face à Donald Trump. Nommer une « citoyenne du monde » autoproclamée comme gouverneure générale illustre l’absurdité de cette « fierté » creuse, construite sur la négation de sa propre identité.

Étienne-Alexandre Beauregard est auteur et chercheur à l’Institut Cardus. Son dernier livre, Anti-Civilisation : Pourquoi nos sociétés s’effondrent de l’intérieur, est paru en septembre 2025 aux Presses de la Cité. Il a travaillé comme rédacteur de discours et conseiller à la planification stratégique au cabinet du premier ministre du Québec.

Subscribe now

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Mark Carney selected Louise Arbour as Canada’s next Governor General. Following Mary Simon’s tenure, who never spoke French properly during her five-year term, some will view her appointment as a conciliatory gesture towards the country’s Francophones. We can bet that in Western Canada, this choice will be seen as yet another victory for the “Laurentian elite” of Montreal and Toronto.

In truth, the appointment of Louise Arbour represents the confirmation of the power that has already been supreme in this country since 1982, the “Court Party”, to use the term coined by F. L. Morton and Rainer Knopff. The regime change initiated by Pierre Trudeau with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms effectively stripped elected officials of supreme power and entrusted it to the apparatus of lawyers, activists, academics, and judges who work to interpret the Charter in order to impose policies on citizens from above, inventing new “rights” from its vague language. Ms. Arbour is a true product of this system.

From Supreme Court justice to post-national activist

After a remarkable legal career as Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, then as a Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, Louise Arbour reinvented herself as a post-national activist at the United Nations (UN), serving as High Commissioner for Human Rights and then as Special Representative for International Migration. For several years now, she has been speaking out in the media to repeat the same message: the era of nations is over.

Following the migrant crisis in Europe in the 2010s, Louise Arbour described Western peoples’ desire to reduce immigration as the product of “hysterical fears”, and advocated for the Marrakesh Pact, which specifically urged signatory states to stop funding media outlets that did not portray immigration from the perspective favoured by the UN. During the debate on the Quebec Charter of Values, she denounced “a certain backwards nationalism” that she claimed had inspired this “odious” bill. In 2023, the future Governor General asserted that “we no longer have the choice but to be global citizens,” and that “we must make room” for far more migrants than Western countries currently welcome.

It would be wrong to unduly personalise this debate, insofar as Ms. Arbour is more of a typical representative of the views accepted by the “Court Party” than an anomaly. It should be noted, however, that these radical ideas, often openly dismissive of the views of ordinary people, are the very ones that enable one to hold the highest offices in Canada and at the UN, as her own résumé shows.

Who are the Canadian elite?

The strong symbolism of this appointment also raises the question of the true nature of the Canadian elite. Particularly in Western Canada, one often hears the term “Laurentian elite” used to refer to the Ontario and Quebec power structure that is said to run the country. While there is some truth to this theory, particularly within the Liberal Party, is geography really the criterion that determines access to power in Canada? Let us not forget that Liberal Canada’s new darling, Mark Carney, grew up in Alberta, after all.

Morton and Knopff’s thesis on the “Court Party,” which imposes its progressive rewriting of the world from above, is certainly more precise and accurate, as it focuses primarily on the ideological dimension of this elite, which carries far more weight than its geographical component. Quebec nationalists, Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s bête noire, certainly do not belong to it, although they are concentrated around the St Lawrence River. Quite the contrary: multiculturalism has been the creed of Liberal Canada for over fifty years, and explicitly opposes nationalism.

Such is the irony of the “elbows up” movement, which drapes post-nationalism in the Canadian flag to play the patriotism card in the face of Donald Trump. Appointing a self-proclaimed “citizen of the world” as Governor General illustrates the absurdity of this hollow “pride”, built on the negation of its own identity.

Étienne-Alexandre Beauregard is an author and researcher at Cardus. His latest book, Anti-Civilization: Why Our Societies Are Collapsing from Within, was published in September 2025 by Presses de la Cité. He was formerly a speechwriter and strategic planning advisor in the office of the Premier of Québec.

Subscribe now

The “Golden Square Mile”. It’s a name that conjures up images of a lost Homeric age. And so it was during Canada’s formative years.

The Mile housed the architects of our nation, from Sir Hugh Allan, George Stephen and Cornelius Van Horne, the builders of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), to sugar magnate John Redpath and utilities tycoon Sir Herbert Holt. These grandees of Anglo-Quebec, after long days managing the nation’s business on St. James Street, Canada’s financial hub, would retire to their mansions on the leafy slopes of Mount Royal. These silent monuments, many of them stylistic wonders, can still be seen when exploring the downtown streets north of Dorchester Boulevard (now René Levesque Blvd.), either well maintained or in various stages of disrepair.

Most notoriously, the Van Horne mansion at the corner of Sherbrooke and Stanley Streets was demolished by the City of Montreal in 1973. It could not be preserved for its “cultural value”, said then mayor Jean Drapeau, because it was “not part of Quebec culture”. Drapeau was stating “his truth”, as one would say today, essentially the Québécois historical narrative rather than the truth.

The Anglos and their business leaders, despite their foundational contributions to Quebec and Canada, were just in Quebec, not of Quebec. This business elite was the chief initial target of Québécois vitriol during the province’s Quiet Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. Quebec intellectuals invented a narrative inspired by Marxism and post-war decolonisation, wherein the English were the colonial oppressors and French-Canadians were a subjugated underclass. It is, after all, easier to blame others for one’s situation than to look in the mirror. In reality, French Quebecers had long-standing political control of the province and an outsized role in Confederation, plus a hammerlock on the bureaucracy. But seeking work at English businesses, particularly in Montreal, which was then 40 percent English-speaking, was too much for fragile nationalist egos.

Separatist leader René Lévesque channelled the post-colonial narrative, calling Anglo businessmen “Westmount Rhodesians”, in reference to the Europeans who governed what became Zimbabwe. “We can’t be an inner colony any longer,” he said in 1968. “You know, quaint old Quebec — a sort of nice reservation inside the country.” Despite railing against the business elite, Lévesque’s movement ultimately targeted all English Quebecers, with increasing restrictions on English education, arcane signage laws and so on.

For us Anglos on the lower rungs, as the linguistic conflict was heating up, we waited. Waited for our community leaders to stand up, step up and speak up. Crickets.

Of course, Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal government was nominally committed to minority language rights and included several prominent Quebec Anglos, like Michael Pitfield (Clerk of the Privy Council) and Solicitor General Francis Fox. In practice, however, Trudeau’s bilingualism project was asymmetrical: bilingualism everywhere except Quebec, which itself became unilingual French. No help there.

Then, as the nationalist noose tightened, business leaders fled. Montreal, which had been the country’s business capital, bled head offices — Sun Life, Royal Bank and many more. The community’s ostensible leadership went “down the road”, the 401, to be precise, and settled comfortably in Toronto. The rest of us managed as best we could, but political turmoil and discrimination ultimately drove out almost 700,000 Anglos (1966–2021). Interestingly, Quebec, desiring more French speakers, accepted almost 500,000 Muslim immigrants, mostly from North Africa and the Middle East, and about 140,000 Haitians in recent years.

Ultimately, it was the Jewish community that provided the most articulate critics of Quebec’s nationalist excesses. Famed novelist Mordecai Richler scorched the linguistic Jacobins in “Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!”, detailing the petty stupidities of the nationalist project. Writer and filmmaker William Weintraub poignantly documented the destruction of English Montreal by myth-driven Québécois tribalism.

More shocking still was that many in the province’s Anglo establishment bought into the oppressed-Québécois narrative. When journalist William Johnson, himself bilingual and part Franco-Ontarian, energetically defended the minority’s rights, he was labelled an “angryphone” because he was insufficiently conciliatory towards the Québécois. While criticising the province’s excessive targeting of Anglophones in the Montreal Gazette, he routinely locked horns with his editor, later Liberal senator Joan Fraser. It turned out that our community leaders were disconnected from us, socially detached, with different values and priorities. When push came to shove, they simply left or actively worked against us.

What we also didn’t know was that the failure of Quebec’s Anglo leadership was actually a dress rehearsal for the cultural capitulation of the entire Laurentian Elite in the face of 21st-century wokeism. What began with the repudiation of the English Quebecers who built the province and the country ended with the toppling of statues and renaming of places and institutions. The performative self-hatred of our ostensible elite culminated in Justin Trudeau declaring Canada a systemically racist country with no “core identity”.

English Quebec’s demise also reveals the power of false narratives to drive society and historical outcomes. What Thomas Sowell calls “poetic truth” is often much more personally satisfying and politically useful than the actual truth. In Weintraub’s documentary, a Montrealer recounted how one of his students accused him: “You, you Anglos have been exploiting us for 300 years!” He replied: “I’m 35 years old. Give me a break. Have I personally exploited you for 300 years?”

Fact check: the Québécois were not and are not an “oppressed” or “colonised” people. But because that narrative was believed by the French and Anglo establishments alike, it taints Canadian politics to this day.

One important lesson from this history is that compelling narratives matter in achieving social and political change. Those opposing the failed narratives of the Laurentian Elite must studiously craft their own. And those narratives should be true.

John Weissenberger is a Calgary geologist, originally from Montreal, who speaks English, French and German. He was formerly Chief of Staff to the federal Minister of Citizenship and Immigration. His political writing appears in the National Post and C2C Journal.

Subscribe now

The B.C. First Nations Leadership Council (FNLC) is adamant that it will accept no changes whatsoever to the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA) and insists that the government live with the result of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) effectively being positive law in British Columbia.

In a news release dated April 9th, 2026, the FNLC made it abundantly clear what would happen if the Premier proceeded with an attempt to amend or suspend portions of DRIPA without its consent:

“If the government proceeds without the free, prior and informed consent of First Nations, the FNLC and First Nations will pursue every available avenue, legal, political, and through direct action to defend First Nations’ rights…”

The following then appeared in a letter sent to all MLAs in the House by the FNLC:

“Any attempt…will be met with collective resistance from First Nations and allies across the province.”

These threats, which appear to indicate a willingness to engage in acts of civil disobedience, have paralysed the Eby government and have directly caused the Premier and his Attorney General to back down from making any changes to DRIPA in the legislature, favouring instead a six-month negotiation with the FNLC to attempt to solve what the Premier has described as an “urgent need” to deal with the potentially unlimited legal liability the province faces as a result of the B.C. Court of Appeal judgment in Gitxaala v. British Columbia (Chief Gold Commissioner), 2025 BCCA 430, which made UNDRIP legally enforceable in B.C.

Let us be clear: any such negotiations will have only one of two results:

(1) The FNLC convinces the government to leave DRIPA alone and live with whatever outcomes arise from the application of UNDRIP as the positive law of B.C., with all the legal liability that will entail; or (2) The government convinces the FNLC to agree to some form of amendment or alteration to DRIPA to remove the enormous, “urgent”, and “non-negotiable” legal liability the Premier has clearly admitted the Gitxaala decision creates for the province.

It is clear to those who see what the application of UNDRIP as positive law in B.C. will do to this province: that uncertainty, virtually unlimited litigation liability, and incredible levels of societal division will ensue.

I and other legal commentators have observed that a careful reading of what UNDRIP articles say leads to the inevitable conclusion that it is a UN-created recipe for the co-governance of this province by the FNLC.

Article 19 of UNDRIP says:

“States shall consult and cooperate in good faith with the Indigenous peoples concerned through their own representative institutions in order to obtain their free, prior and informed consent before adopting and implementing legislative or administrative measures that may affect them.”

Imagine a modern, democratically elected Western government being told that it cannot make or repeal any legislation that may affect rights set out in a UN declaration without the free, prior and informed consent of representatives of that jurisdiction’s Aboriginal people. This is beyond ludicrously undemocratic and is completely inconsistent with section 35 of Canada’s Constitution Act, 1982.

Then, further suppose that the level of control and intimidation that is being brought to bear on the current B.C. government by the FNLC literally prevents the government from being able to make amendments to legislation to deal with widespread legal risk to all British Columbians without getting the agreement (consent) of that political entity.

In its decision in Mikisew Cree, the Supreme Court noted:

“Applying the duty to consult during the law-making process would lead to significant judicial incursion into the workings of the legislature, even if such a duty were only enforced post-enactment. The duty to consult jurisprudence has developed a spectrum of consultation requirements that fit in the context of administrative decision-making. Directly transposing such executive requirements into the legislative context would be an inappropriate constraint on the legislatures’ ability to control their own processes.”

To be crystal clear, what the court was dealing with in that case was the proposition that Parliament has a duty to consult Aboriginal people under the Canadian Constitution even in the process of promulgating legislation that may affect them. The court was clear that imposing even that kind of mere consultation duty would be an “inappropriate constraint on the legislature’s ability to control their own processes” — that is, a direct and inappropriate constraint on parliamentary sovereignty.

Yet the B.C. NDP government has accorded co-decision-making authority over the promulgation of, and even the amendment of, legislation by the B.C. Legislature to an unelected Aboriginal leadership group that claims to represent about 2 per cent of B.C.’s population.

From a pure democratic and legal perspective, this cannot end well for British Columbians.

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.

Subscribe now

Hope springs when vanguards of Canada’s failed status quo prove they’re not eternal.

After eight years of disappointment—five of which included a boarded-up Sir John A. Macdonald on the front lawn of the legislature—Ontario’s three-term majority ‘Progressive Conservative’ premier has finally been faced with a reckoning of sorts: his purchase of a ‘gravy plane’ and his fight to protect his cellphone records from the public have proven, so far, to be a bridge too far.

Those two wrongs (and the gravy plane is at least semi-defensible given the premier’s travel schedule) are no worse than the last twenty, but they do point to a dynamic that Ford and his inner circle haven’t had to face during Ontario’s near-decade of managed decline: an opposition with a faint pulse, and the end of a stunt-fuelled ‘Protect Ontario’ honeymoon that has produced seemingly few results.

According to some pollsters, Ford is now in a statistical tie with the leaderless Ontario Liberals, who have been aided by the presence of Eric Lombardi, a thoughtful Build Canada and Hub contributor, who has been a vocal critic of Ontario’s backslide into the “sick man of Canada”, and who codes as a Liberal or a moderate Conservative depending on the topic. For Ford—who has deliberately bear-hugged two consecutive Liberal prime ministers, and who has played a key role in the unfortunate (and ongoing) Machiavellian infighting between consultant camps from Queen’s Park and those friendlier to the Office of the Leader of the Opposition (OLO)—the ‘Diet Carney’ act was only going to work for so long. Even in Canada, apathy has its limits, and premiers tend to wear failures on the ground before their prime ministers, and Ontario premiers in general tend to suffer if one’s mimetic desire also holds power in Ontario.

The federal Liberals under Mark Carney may differ from Ford in perceived temperament, but when it comes to saying and doing whatever it takes to win, staffing up a barrier of yes men and a “circular economy” of conflicts meant to insulate the leader from criticism, the two stand alone, without equal.

It should be of little surprise that ‘Carney-lite’ would eventually start to suffer that problem of incumbency before the genuine article, and it’s not as if that tenure was going well to begin with.

Everything in Ontario has gotten materially worse.

The province’s unemployment rate has increased for the fourth straight year. Record-low family housing starts are setting off alarm bells. Ontario’s housing market is expected to get worse for both buyers and sellers for the foreseeable future, as sellers hold as prices dip from artificial highs, and buyers and renters are choked off by a limited supply of anything beyond a glut of dog-crate condos, with limited to no condo starts scheduled for the years ahead.

“The one thing for sure is that it’s going to get worse in Ontario. There is no possibility of better,” Ron Butler, the Ontario-based mortgage broker and popular, pugilistic political commentator, told CTV News Toronto. “Thinking otherwise, it’s entirely based on hopium.”

Almost all of this was exacerbated by the province’s worst-in-the-West participation in a mass immigration moonshot during the Covid years that rapidly transformed Ontario’s towns, led to the rise and fall of a notorious ‘diploma mill’ industry that sought both willing participants and wilful dupes looking for a shortcut to PR, in which Premier Ford and his government participated.

Building the fake schools was bad. Looking the other way as millions of temporary labourers flooded the marketplace, radically transforming formerly diverse but cohesive suburbs, upending the launching-pad prospects, rent costs, and general morale of a generation of working Ontarians, was worse. Keeping up this act in 2026 is downright unforgivable.

Confronted by unruly and entitled temporary residents demanding extensions to their permits last week, Ford knelt before the braying mob, saying, “I wish I could snap my fingers and say okay, you can stay.”

Read more

Most Canadians do not need a Statistics Canada study to know that family life is being pushed later or deprioritised altogether. You can see it in the lives of people in their twenties and thirties. They move out later, date less, marry later or not at all, buy homes later, and have children later if they have them at all. Each delay has its own explanation, and most are reasonable enough. Housing is expensive, education takes longer than it used to, stable work can be harder to find, and many young adults have absorbed the message that they should become fully independent before they make any permanent commitment to someone else.

The trouble is that, when all of these delays are added together, they amount to something more serious than a series of individual life choices.

The fertility numbers are stark. In 2024, Canada’s fertility rate fell to 1.25 children per woman, the lowest ever recorded in this country and well below the replacement level of roughly 2.1. Statistics Canada now puts Canada in the category of “ultra-low fertility”, generally used for countries below 1.30 children per woman.

This is not a universal problem in the same way. Yes, fertility rates are declining in most of the world, with the decline most pronounced in Western countries. But Canada is uniquely challenged on this front. As a close comparison, the U.S. fertility rate is also below replacement, at about 1.6 children per woman in 2024, but that is still materially higher than Canada’s. The point is not that Americans have solved the problem, but that the comparison matters because it suggests that something particular is happening here.

The usual response is to talk about fertility as an economic problem, which is partly true. A country with too few children eventually has too few workers, too few taxpayers, too many ageing dependants, and too much pressure on health care, pensions, and public finances. But a low birth rate should not be seen as simply a fiscal warning light; it is a signal of a deeper cultural challenge. Children are not simply future contributors to GDP; they are evidence that people believe their communities and their country are worth building and carrying forward.

Although this is not typically how it’s framed, Canada’s fertility crisis should be seen as a family formation crisis, and that starts with marriage. That claim has become awkward to make, but it should not be. Marriage matters, both in relation to fertility and more generally. It is not just a ceremony, a legal arrangement, or one lifestyle choice among many. Marriage is the central institution through which two adults turn their private love into a public commitment. It turns romance into responsibility and, most importantly, leads to children. Marriage creates households and gives children a stable place to thrive.

Read more

W.A.C. Bennett is often upheld as the gold standard of governance and political leadership in British Columbia, and with good reason. Few, if any, have matched his record and impact, right down to the electricity that powers the lights in your home.

To rule like Bennett is to use the premier’s office as a true instrument of power and to use it generously and with enthusiasm.

Fundamentally, B.C. is still a frontier of sorts. It is deeply rich in natural resources, but geographically disparate and difficult to traverse. The province is always at risk of interference from outsiders, whether from Ottawa, Alberta, or abroad, to say nothing of its home-grown bureaucrats and administrators.

B.C. is best governed when the premier makes full use of the authority granted to the office to impose order and continue to open up the province so that industry and entrepreneurs can thrive. The idea of “free enterprise” has always been strong in B.C., but it has always been backed up by the security and order provided by the provincial government and its predecessors. As the incumbent in Victoria exemplifies, the worst premiers are desk clerks for the NGO complex, the bureaucracy, and activist networks.

The Socred regime

Bennett came to power in 1952 after the first Liberal-Conservative coalition collapsed and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) seemed poised to seize power. The province’s Social Credit Party, which had never elected an MLA in B.C., became Bennett’s vehicle.

Having started as a Conservative, Bennett joined Social Credit, or the “Socreds”, in 1951. It was a choice he described as potentially “walking into oblivion”, but the risk paid off in spades for both the Bennett and the province.

The base of Bennett’s Socreds became a “ragtag” army of small businessmen, teachers, preachers, garage operators, and housewives. Bennett transformed the party into a nearly unbeatable vessel of the political right and the non-left in B.C., winning a plurality of seats in the 1952 provincial election amid disillusionment with the Liberal-Conservative coalition. He would not leave office until 1972.

With inexperienced MLAs and a relatively loose platform, Bennett used the business community’s fears of CCF socialism and his own legislative prowess to rule the Socreds with an iron fist. According to one account, “there was no question who was the boss”.

In retrospect, Bennett has been described as a “strongman”, but this is no insult in the democratic tradition of the Canadian provinces. Indeed, some of the most reputable and impactful premiers in Canadian history were democratic strongmen who could dominate elections and their caucus, bend cabinet to their will, and stare down Ottawa. This long list includes Quebec’s Maurice Duplessis, Ontario’s Mike Harris, and Bennett himself in B.C. Surely, all three had their own unique temperaments and challenges, but none would stoop to treating their provinces as branches of Ottawa.

One biographer called Bennett “something very close to a head of state in his own right — a kind of provincial warlord” and “the single most powerful figure in his provincial bailiwick”. This did not make him a dictator, but Bennett was certainly a boss, and one who made B.C. into a mighty, autonomous piece of the Canadian federation.

In addition to winning elections, Bennett worked hard to ensure that the Socreds were attached to, and embedded within, business, natural resource firms, governing boards across multiple sectors, Crown corporations, and the civil service. Within a decade, the Socreds had become a ruthless, finely oiled political machine that appeared invincible, and “one great movement under an all-powerful leader”.

Toryism and development on the frontier

Bennett was a sort of frontier Tory who energetically built roads, railways, ferries, and massive hydroelectric dams to make possible enterprise, settlement, and order in the vast wilderness of the province. His actions followed the B.C. tradition of governance that, by necessity, forced the Crown to cut through the mountains and canyons of the rugged province to ensure it had any semblance of unity.

Even during the colonial and Confederation eras, the history of B.C. is marked by the efforts of the Royal Engineers to build crude roads connecting the coast and the hinterland. The promise that brought B.C. into Confederation in 1871 was the pledge to blast a railway across the Rocky Mountains and right through to the Pacific coast.

B.C. also had a noticeably violent past, with pre-modern clashes between gold seekers, settlers, and First Nations groups often settled with public executions. The libertarian tradition in B.C. is not as strong as some might imagine, with Crown authority being critical to the province’s commercial and entrepreneurial successes.

For W.A.C. Bennett, the creation of B.C. Ferries, the building of the great hydro dams on the Peace River, and the construction of vast highway and pipeline networks served dual, connected purposes. One was to make it easier for enterprise and industry to thrive, while the second was to use that economic power to strengthen B.C.’s autonomy and shrink Ottawa’s power. For example, when Bennett ordered the building of new rail networks in the north, it was to ward off outside interests who might have built them instead.

Bennett’s vast infrastructure programme was always intended to ensure the arteries of the province were controlled by the provincial government, which he ruled like a Caesar from the premier’s office. Remarkably, Bennett was able to do it while balancing twenty consecutive budgets. All his grand projects were built on a pay-as-you-go basis, which resulted in low debt.

When Bennett left office in 1972, the province had large fiscal reserves and sound investments and was unencumbered by direct provincial borrowing or debt. Rather than only judging whether a government should “spend less” or “spend more”, the next conservative premier of B.C. should think about whether his or her spending grows or shrinks the autonomy and power of the province.

Bennett’s vision was development, fiscal responsibility, and the concentration of power in his office at the expense of Ottawa and others. Those who profess their admiration for Bennett, particularly those running for the leadership of the B.C. Conservative Party, should understand the need to use their authority to the fullest.

Reviving the autonomy and power of the premier

Since forming government in 2017, the NDP have doubled the size of the public service. Almost 600,000 people work for the provincial government, at a cost of $53 billion. These are not only largely unnecessary white-collar welfare hires, but an army of more than half a million unionised voters, most of whom are loyal to their NDP paymasters.

When and if the NDP government is defeated, firing and replacing vast numbers of these employees will be essential to eliminating the NDP’s residual presence.

Staffing the boards and leadership of institutions and public departments with a mix of party loyalists and trusted, competent professionals would be the next step. That course of action may seem somewhat Byzantine, but the practice of politically dominating institutions is how the Liberal Party of Canada became the country’s “natural governing party”. The B.C. NDP government itself has stuffed the boards of B.C. Ferries, the Royal B.C. Museum with party loyalists, along with PavCo, which manages B.C. Place and the Vancouver Convention Centre. As the saying goes, it is what it is.

While W.A.C. Bennett died in 1979, before the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was introduced, it is easy to imagine him gleefully using the notwithstanding clause, section 33, to effectively nullify activist courts intruding upon the legislative sovereignty of B.C. If one considers Canada’s increasingly centralist, left-wing legal culture to be a threat to provincial autonomy, premiers in B.C. and elsewhere seeking to fight back have few options except for section 33.

In 1950, just two years before Bennett became premier, the B.C. Provincial Police were disbanded, and the lion’s share of police-paramilitary capabilities in the province were handed over to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).

Without impugning the largely honourable record of the RCMP, it is an armed branch of the federal government. A province that seeks autonomy should arm, train, and pay those who enforce the law and carry firearms while doing so. A revived provincial police force could make arrangements with Ottawa to finally implement permanent, thorough inspections at the Port of Vancouver, which is a relatively unguarded gateway for drugs and other contraband entering Canada.

Furthermore, many First Nations in B.C. have criticised the RCMP for failing to enforce bylaws on their reserves, something a provincial police force could readily handle. Moreover, anti-pipeline activists have plagued the expansion of oil and natural gas projects in B.C., including attacking workers at night with hatchets. The lack of large-scale investigations or any sort of heavy-handed deterrence is an indictment of the RCMP’s inability to properly police the B.C. wilderness.

Federal power, whether it be in government, the judiciary, or the police, is holding back B.C. The more that B.C. can enforce the law itself, reject activist courts, and continue to develop its economy unimpeded, the stronger the province will be, and the stronger Canada will be. There is no real separatist movement in B.C., and the province has far more power within Confederation, so long as it increases its autonomy and leverage over Ottawa as the country’s Pacific Gateway. A politically and economically stronger B.C. can squeeze the federal government for more concessions, especially if it coordinates such efforts with the neighbouring provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Ending the NDP insurgency

Autonomy for B.C., power and authority in the premier’s office: this is what it means to rule like Bennett. Bennett governed in a very different time with a dissimilar set of circumstances from those in B.C. today. However, his appetite for using authority and power well, and for entrenching his party in the levers and infrastructure of the province while weeding out any vestiges of NDP influence, remains instructive.

Let it not be forgotten that the NDP have a terrible legacy in B.C. There is a good reason why their governments end with landslide defeats and a sour taste in the mouths of voters. One of the most recurring democratic mandates in the history of B.C. elections is permission to get rid of the NDP. They are not B.C.’s natural governing party for a reason, and every NDP government is a destructive insurgency against the legacy of the Socreds.

In fact, almost every NDP electoral victory in B.C. history has been caused not by their overwhelming popularity, but by vote-splitting in the Socred regime and its successors on the right.

Since 2017, the NDP have misgoverned, if not abused, the province. This impulse became especially apparent after David Eby, a transplanted activist from Ontario, became premier. His attempts to secretly give up power over Crown land and his refusal to repeal DRIPA, which has resulted in co-governance by First Nations authorities who are unaccountable to the wider public, are destroying B.C.’s ability to govern itself from within.

Repealing DRIPA, cutting a few taxes, and leaving all else alone will only legitimise the changes made to B.C. by the NDP.

When and if the NDP fall, the next conservative premier cannot afford to let the legacy of Eby and his government continue to exist in the bureaucracy and public service. Every NDP government in B.C. is nothing less than an attempt at regime change, and crushing it will require a very firm campaign, first democratically at the ballot box, and then at the head of the province.

The best way to accomplish that is to rule like Bennett.

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.

Subscribe now

Depuis qu’il a pris la tête du Parti conservateur du Québec, Éric Duhaime a fait de ce parti jadis marginal un incontournable de la joute politique québécoise, avec un socle solide de plus de 10% du vote. Il incarne une voix avant tout libérale économiquement, critique de la social-démocratie, historiquement moins associée aux thématiques identitaires. Son livre Destination Autonomie, paru ce mois-ci, marque un virage important pour élargir sa tente et y accueillir des nationalistes de centre-droit, préoccupés par l’avenir de la nation québécoise.

Cet essai très fouillé, au point de ressembler parfois à un travail académique, ambitionne de décrire la stratégie autonomiste du PCQ et de le positionner clairement dans le camp nationaliste. S’il s’inscrit clairement dans la « troisième voie » qui rejette à la fois l’indépendance et le fédéralisme centralisateur, il se distingue néanmoins de l’ADQ et de la CAQ en misant sur des alliances revendiquées avec la droite canadienne pour sortir le Québec de l’impasse.

L’interventionnisme fédéral, une menace pour le Québec

Le diagnostic de Duhaime est sans appel : le gouvernement fédéral s’immisce dans les champs de compétence des provinces sans être capable de s’occuper de ses propres responsabilités, et ce, de manière structurelle et continue. Parce qu’il lève plus de revenus qu’il n’en a besoin pour accomplir ses missions, il met en place des initiatives indésirables en éducation, en santé, en culture et dans autant de domaines où il n’a pas de légitimité, pour accumuler des points politiques ou pour feindre une uniformité qui n’existe pas d’un océan à l’autre.

Ces empiètements créent une confusion nuisible à l’autonomie des provinces, en particulier le Québec dont les choix diffèrent souvent de ceux du reste du Canada.

Les inconvénients du déséquilibre fiscal et du pouvoir fédéral de dépenser sont connus depuis longtemps. La perspective conservatrice de Duhaime lui permet pourtant d’affirmer des vérités que le Bloc québécois, marqué à gauche, ose rarement formuler clairement : c’est parce qu’Ottawa agit en social-démocrate, alors que ça n’a jamais été son rôle, que les conflits avec les provinces se multiplient. Les nationalistes de gauche ont historiquement un malaise à dire ce fait pourtant central pour comprendre les tensions entre Québec et Ottawa.

Une affirmation à travers le mouvement conservateur?

Éric Duhaime rompt également avec l’orthodoxie nationaliste en choisissant de faire de l’autonomie non pas un affrontement entre le Québec et le reste du pays, mais un combat partagé de toutes les provinces contre Ottawa. La première partie de l’ouvrage s’emploie justement à retracer les grands efforts autonomistes qui ont eu lieu dans l’ensemble des provinces canadiennes, afin de démontrer clairement que le Québec n’est pas seul dans ses tensions avec le gouvernement central, et qu’il a plus d’alliés qu’il ne le croit.

Le lecteur en apprendra sans doute beaucoup, notamment lorsqu’il est question des mouvements autonomistes de l’Atlantique ou de la Colombie-Britannique, bien moins connus que ceux des Prairies ou du Québec.

On pourrait résumer le pari que propose le chef du PCQ ainsi : plutôt que de faire cavalier seul, le Québec devrait se joindre à ses alliés naturels dans les autres provinces, en particulier les mouvements conservateurs qui s’opposent à l’intervention d’Ottawa. Il se montre ainsi très admiratif des initiatives mises de l’avant par l’Alberta sous Danielle Smith, et promet lui aussi une « loi-bouclier » pour faire en sorte que l’État québécois résiste aux empiètements fédéraux dans ses champs de compétence.

Soutien déclaré du Parti conservateur fédéral, Duhaime s’inscrit explicitement dans cette mouvance à l’échelle canadienne, et la voit comme un levier pour faire entendre le désir québécois d’autonomie. Si François Legault avait implicitement défendu cette stratégie en appuyant les conservateurs d’Erin O’Toole en 2021, Éric Duhaime en fait une doctrine.

Bâtir unilatéralement un Québec plus autonome

Le chef conservateur bâtit également sur l’approche caquiste en assumant une autonomie « unilatéraliste », basée sur des actions immédiates des provinces pour faire bouger Ottawa, plutôt que de favoriser des négociations dépendant sur la bonne foi du fédéral, laquelle n’est pas toujours au rendez-vous. Il propose ainsi d’adopter une loi stipulant que la clause dérogatoire s’applique à toutes les lois du Québec, comme René Lévesque jadis, afin de signifier que le Québec n’a pas à se plier à une constitution qu’il n’a jamais signée.

L’essai évoque également une constitution québécoise, une charte pour l’autonomie des provinces et plus d’ententes bilatérales avec le fédéral, autant de moyens d’obtenir des résultats sans passer par un référendum ou des négociations à onze.

Il y a là un véritable changement de cap pour le Parti conservateur du Québec, qui semblait jusque-là moins intéressé par les enjeux nationalistes. Sans doute conscient que la droite québécoise est aussi culturelle qu’économique, et cherchant à profiter du vide laissé par le départ de François Legault, Éric Duhaime assume pleinement une posture de droite sur l’économie, tout en reconnaissant le rôle de l’État pour préserver l’identité distincte de la nation québécoise.

En critiquant de front l’interventionnisme fédéral, et en mettant de l’avant des alliances avec le mouvement conservateur, il propose ainsi un nationalisme cohérent avec l’ADN de sa famille politique, et une doctrine autonomiste réfléchie qui forcera les acteurs québécois et canadiens à se positionner.

Étienne-Alexandre Beauregard est auteur et chercheur à l’Institut Cardus. Son dernier livre, Anti-Civilisation : Pourquoi nos sociétés s’effondrent de l’intérieur, est paru en septembre 2025 aux Presses de la Cité. Il a travaillé comme rédacteur de discours et conseiller à la planification stratégique au cabinet du premier ministre du Québec.

Subscribe now

Since taking the helm of the Conservative Party of Quebec, Éric Duhaime has transformed this once-marginal party into a key player in Quebec politics, with a solid base of over 10 percent of the vote. He embodies a voice that is, above all, economically liberal, critical of social democracy, and historically less associated with cultural conservatism. His book Destination Autonomy, released this month, marks a significant shift designed to broaden his appeal by including centre-right nationalists concerned about the future of the Quebec nation.

Duhaime’s highly detailed essay, which sometimes resembles an academic paper, aims to describe the PCQ’s autonomist strategy and clearly position it within the nationalist camp. While it aligns with the “third way” that rejects both independence and centralising federalism, it nevertheless distinguishes itself from the ADQ and the CAQ by clearly banking on alliances with the Canadian right to make Quebec more autonomous.

Federal intervention is a threat to Quebec

Duhaime’s diagnosis is unequivocal: the federal government is encroaching on provincial jurisdictions without being able to fulfill its own responsibilities, doing so in a systematic and persistent manner. Because it collects more revenue than it needs to fulfill its mission, it implements unwanted initiatives in education, health, culture, and many other areas where it has no legitimacy, in order to score political points or to simulate a kind of homogeneity that does not exist from coast to coast. These encroachments create confusion that undermines provincial autonomy, particularly in Quebec, whose choices often differ from those of the rest of Canada.

The drawbacks of fiscal imbalance and federal spending power have long been known. Duhaime’s conservative perspective, however, allows him to state truths that the left-leaning Bloc Québécois rarely dares to articulate clearly: it is because Ottawa acts like a social-democratic government, even though that has never been its role, that conflicts with the provinces multiply. Left-wing nationalists have historically been reluctant to acknowledge this fact, which is nonetheless central to understanding the tensions between Quebec and Ottawa.

Can the conservative movement defend Quebec?

Éric Duhaime also breaks with nationalist orthodoxy by choosing to frame autonomy not as a confrontation between Quebec and the rest of the country, but as a shared struggle among all provinces against Ottawa. The first part of the book is dedicated precisely to tracing the major autonomy movements that have taken place across all Canadian provinces, in order to clearly demonstrate that Quebec is not alone in its tensions with the central government, and that it has more allies than it realises. Readers will undoubtedly learn a great deal, particularly regarding the autonomy movements in the Atlantic provinces or British Columbia, which are far less well known than those in the Prairies or Quebec.

One could summarise the strategy proposed by the PCQ leader as follows: rather than fighting alone, Quebec should join forces with its natural allies in other provinces, particularly the conservative movements that oppose Ottawa’s intervention. He thus expresses great admiration for the initiatives put forward by Alberta under Danielle Smith and promises a “sovereignty act” of his own to ensure that the Quebec government resists federal encroachment on its areas of jurisdiction. As a supporter of the federal Conservative Party, Duhaime explicitly aligns himself with the movement at the national level and sees it as a lever to amplify Quebec’s desire for autonomy. While François Legault had implicitly defended this strategy by backing Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives in 2021, Éric Duhaime has now made it a doctrine.

Building a more autonomous Quebec, unilaterally

The Conservative leader also builds on the CAQ approach by embracing a “unilateralist” autonomy, based on immediate provincial actions to pressure Ottawa, rather than favouring negotiations dependent on the federal government’s good faith, which is not always present. He thus proposes a law stipulating that the notwithstanding clause applies to all Quebec laws, as René Lévesque did in the past, to signify that Quebec does not have to comply with a constitution it never signed. The essay also mentions a Quebec constitution, a charter for provincial autonomy, and more bilateral agreements with the federal government as means of achieving results without resorting to a referendum or negotiations involving all ten provinces.

This marks a genuine shift for the Quebec Conservative Party, which until now seemed less interested in nationalism. No doubt aware that the Quebec right is as much cultural as it is economic, and seeking to capitalise on the vacuum left by François Legault’s departure, Éric Duhaime fully embraces a right-wing stance on the economy while acknowledging the state’s role in preserving the distinct identity of the Quebec nation. By openly criticising federal interventionism and promoting alliances with the conservative movement, he is thus proposing a form of nationalism consistent with the DNA of his political family, and a structured autonomist doctrine that will force Quebec and Canadian actors to take a stand.

Étienne-Alexandre Beauregard is an author and researcher at Cardus. His latest book, Anti-Civilization: Why Our Societies Are Collapsing from Within, was published in September 2025 by Presses de la Cité. He was formerly a speechwriter and strategic planning advisor in the office of the Premier of Québec.

Subscribe now

Why does it only count as a “culture war” when conservatives fight back?

In this latest Without Diminishment roundtable, host Alexander Brown, and guests Kate Marland, Cole Hogan, and Margareta Dovgal, dismantle Erin O’Toole’s latest advice that conservatives should moderate their positions, ignore culture war issues, and focus only on the safety of “long-term prosperity” to take on Mark Carney’s supposed centrism.

The panel explains exactly why this strategy is a proven loser, what O’Toole’s own record actually delivered, and where “go along to get along” moderation has already taken Canada — from Ontario’s failing status quo to the latest federal push for a ‘sovereign wealth fund’ built on more debt and greater centralized control over Alberta’s resources.

Now is the worst possible time for conservatives, for any on the non-left, to abandon the cultural battlefield. Abdicating the fight does not make it disappear — it simply hands more ground to the other side.

The culture war matters. Surrendering it has consequences. Watch now.

Share

Missed us in Vancouver? Join the team from WD at Canada Strong and Free Ottawa, May 6-9.

In a judgment issued on 5 December 2025, the British Columbia Court of Appeal (BCCA) majority had this to say about UNDRIP in the British Columbia context:
“Properly interpreted, the Declaration Act incorporates UNDRIP into the positive law of British Columbia with immediate legal effect.”

This judgment was delivered in response to a challenge by the Gitxaala First Nation, seeking a decision from the BCCA on the proper legal interpretation to be given to the B.C. NDP government’s DRIPA legislation — the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, 2019, and section 8.1 of the Interpretation Act.

DRIPA sets out a process under which the B.C. government, acting jointly with representatives of British Columbia’s Aboriginal people (whom the B.C. government takes to be the First Nations Leadership Council — the FNLC), works to amend all B.C. laws to bring them into conformity with UNDRIP — the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Article 19 of UNDRIP, which, according to the BCCA, is part of the positive law of British Columbia, says:

“States shall consult and cooperate in good faith with the Indigenous peoples concerned through their own representative institutions in order to obtain their free, prior and informed consent before adopting and implementing legislative or administrative measures that may affect them.”

This is how DRIPA specifically incorporated Article 19 when it was passed by the B.C. legislature:

“3) In consultation and cooperation with the Indigenous peoples in British Columbia, the government must take all measures necessary to ensure the laws of British Columbia are consistent with the Declaration.”

Note how section 3 of DRIPA incorporates the wording and intent of Article 19 of UNDRIP — “in consultation and cooperation with the Indigenous peoples” — and says that the government, through such consultation and cooperation, must take all measures necessary to ensure that the laws of British Columbia are consistent with UNDRIP.

And so, the argument goes, even attempting to amend DRIPA cannot be undertaken by the B.C. government without the “free, prior and informed consent” of the Indigenous peoples of this province — presumably as represented by the activist FNLC.

At its core, DRIPA creates an arguably undemocratic bilateral process, carried out entirely in secret, involving the FNLC and the government jointly deciding which B.C. laws must be amended to align with UNDRIP. This arrangement, in which the government and the FNLC jointly decide on the content of legislative policy and, in fact, the content of legislation itself, is extremely problematic from a democratic perspective. This problem has finally been brought under public scrutiny because of Premier David Eby’s “flip-flopping” on the question of amending or suspending those sections of DRIPA and the Interpretation Act relied on by the Court of Appeal, and because he was ultimately pressured by the FNLC into doing no such thing.

The FNLC has been adamant that it fundamentally rejects any government attempts to alter DRIPA in any way whatsoever.

And yet the Premier himself has stated that the province faces an urgent need to deal with the potential fallout from the Gitxaala decision, which he has said creates enormous legal liability for the province.

The Premier has now said that the Attorney General has “tapped him on the shoulder” and recommended that he accept her idea of setting aside any further thoughts of amending or suspending any part of DRIPA in favour of sitting down with the FNLC to discuss and negotiate the issues for a period extending until the fall sitting of the legislature in October.

Because the Premier has now essentially caved in to FNLC demands that DRIPA be left alone, he would appear to hold no cards at all in the forthcoming negotiations with the FNLC, aimed at finding a resolution to the Gitxaala legal liability he claims requires urgent attention. This difficulty is exacerbated by the fact that the FNLC has publicly stated, along with the B.C. Green Party, that the province must live with the Gitxaala decision.

Now, as of 24 April, Terry Teegee has stated that this six-month discussion about DRIPA between the FNLC and the government — brokered by the Attorney General — will result in “no changes to DRIPA”.

So, we have a Premier who regards the legal liability created by the Gitxaala decision to be urgently problematic and a threat to the province, yet is being paralysed by his government’s acceptance of the power of the FNLC lobby, and then giving in to another six months of delay in dealing with the substance of that threat on behalf of the 5.7 million other British Columbians. All this, while a member of the FNLC is now publicly saying that these discussions will not lead to any changes to DRIPA.

There can be no clearer example of how democracy is dying in British Columbia as a result of the B.C. NDP’s unwavering fealty to both the FNLC and to UNDRIP itself, ahead of the interests of millions of other British Columbians. The voting public of this province should stand up and demand the return of democratic governance in this province through the institutions our society has created for that purpose.

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.

Subscribe now