How else can we truly believe that we’ll ‘get back to normal’?

In an era of politics as transgression, of elbows akimbo, of ugliness, excuse-making, replaceability, and AI-slop replicability, do we not want fighters for Good? Do we expect the inches given—which quickly turned into miles, oceans, and Arctic archipelagos—to just be given back? Do we expect the anti-Western, anti-civilisational forces, rendered bereft of joie de vivre by an anaesthetising cocktail of subsidies and the perverse incentive to slander the past and loot the future for the sake of their present, to simply detox willingly?

We were in sweltering London last week, with a Canadian contingent of colleagues and friends of Without Diminishment, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI), the Free Speech Union of Canada, and Cardus, to ruminate on these very questions, but, more importantly, to work on their solutions.

The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), co-founded by Dr Jordan Peterson, has quickly become a kind of counter-Davos for the intellectual but not elitist, and for the heterodox by the standards of warped modernity. Flanked by partners Kate Marland and Geoff Russ, we were met by soaring convention halls (with intermittent air conditioning), an army of hundreds of volunteers, art displays and classical music, and salon-style dinners under stained glass.

No one had to say the word ‘conservative’. It was redundant—largely a given. It was also entirely unnecessary. Whether you were seated next to a sculptor, poet, astronaut, soldier, pastor, politician, musician, actor, educator, or writer, attendance was predicated on believing in civilisation and wanting to take part in its reconstruction following decades of managed decline.

For all the incongruity of being fêted with high-minded ideals and treated as members of a kind of counter-elite while being unassailably downwardly mobile in an era of replacement, declining birth rates, and the soaring social costs of ‘GDP barely inches up’ politics, it was an honour to have been invited as guest delegates and to have been joined by thousands viewed as men and women ‘in the arena’.

It is in that arena—civil society, the court of public opinion, and the Overton windows we seek to expand and replace with stained glass, giving life, beauty, and the permission structure for the anything-but-ordinary citizen to join in saying and doing what is true, and no longer to live by lies—that we and the others in attendance understand that the key to that work lies in being radical but not extreme. We have enough darkness; enough Machiavellian climbers and borderline personality disorder (BPD) types; enough engagement farmers.

‘Slopulism’ may trick the heart, but it poisons the mind. It’s a spent persuasive force. It is, ultimately, a lie. And human beings, for all their fallibility, are inherently oriented towards the truth.

For civilisations now to be rebuilt, defended, and advanced, we must offer young men and women more than economic outcomes. This has been a central thesis of our work at W.D., sometimes drawing the ire of certain Harper-era success stories who would rather stick to the safety of pretending the key issues at the doors relate solely to the bad news that greets many when they open their banking apps, or that any small-c conservative rebuke of that formula is socialistic in nature. And yet, that is a straw-man excuse. There are ways to communicate being pro-growth, pro-worker, and pro-family all at the same time; ways to make your case for reconstruction and renewal that are coded for your audience and won’t scare the normies.

Because our problems run much, much deeper. We see the inherent social costs of GDP-maxxing through thoughtless, low-skilled, poorly integrated immigration. We see the perils of having torn up the social contract, offering instead a simulation of, and poor substitute for, a life. Young men are meant to be ‘boisterous and tactile’; young women are meant to be attachment-driven and nurturing. Neither group is served by broader market disloyalty, and a secondary me-first, feelings-driven attention economy, which seeks to devour one’s frontal lobe, like the tamping iron that was driven through Phineas Gage’s skull, leaving him profoundly changed.

There is, indeed, more to life; our march back through institutions and halls of power is essential, and the best preparation for a future in need of change—an inherently alienating and digital one—is an analogue, hyper-focused present. Canadian conservatism, in its present form, offers no answer to this—just a vague tapestry of free market slogans, while being too frightened to take on actual free market issues such as supply management. A column penned by A.I. slop, for which any human should feel ashamed to attach their name to, would surmise ‘those aren’t principles; they’re excuses to avoid meaningful change’.

American author and conservative columnist Ross Douthat told the audience at the soaring Olympia cultural hub: ‘Substitutes for real life are always inferior and distracting. Conditions of agency and conditionality, and the basic continuity of human existence, won’t happen under digital conditions; they’re driven by faith that human life is worth living and that we have a destiny to fulfil.’

For all the challenges of the day, this should be viewed as fundamentally good news for people of faith, whose beliefs, Douthat believes, are ‘selected for the challenges of the era’ and for the ‘evolutionary bottleneck’ of the age.

In essence—and I say this as an imperfect Anglican who often struggles to find a service not adorned with Current Thing memorabilia, nor presided over by pastors who view their pulpit as personal and not liturgical—at a time when not enough churches are houses of prayer, gatherings like ARC read as an attempt to reclaim God and first principles in the aggregate. It’s macro work that’s ultimately about the micro, about what is most meaningful: family, faith, freedom; acts of personal ownership that, when shared writ large, make up what we call a life, and that put the civil in civilisation.

To move any further away from that essential relationship and those essential guardrails is, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali also shared from stage, to ‘stamp misery on ages yet unborn’.

To continue to cut ourselves loose from all restraint is not true freedom. Infinite migration; the rule of law as a suggestion rather than a rule; the devolution of expectation in the public square; mothballing symbols of meaning, the finer things, and the finer details in favour of the antiseptic and monolithic—there is no future there worth living in.

Grateful we should be, then, that we have fighters in the present: the kind who cross oceans to learn and plan, or even drive across countries in the dead of our COVID-response winters to lean on their horns, dance, provide for homeless people, shovel snowy sidewalks, and make merry while all around them is drab and grey.

An astronaut without a tether can only tumble hopelessly into the full dark. To believe in—to work in, and on—that which is Good, True, and Beautiful, is the only solution to that endless, aimless spiral.

Leaving ARC and leaving London—which is far less depressing than posts from Visegrád 24 would have you believe—I was struck by an assembly of thousands who were left with the assignment to give back and not take: an assignment antithetical to the anti-civilisational homework one would normally associate with opulent European conferences that seek to influence the politics and culture of the day.

The bad news: events like ARC and publications like this have to exist in the first place. But here’s the good news: we have our fighters. We’re not alone in knowing this isn’t good enough. If you’re here, chances are you were never any good at living by lies, either.

And if you’re here, chances are you understand that to return to the ‘politics of normalcy’, first, there are battles to win; battles that were lost, for decades, on ground ceded to, then fortified by, those with a vested interest in anything but normal.

To care only about the pocketbook, to pretend the 2015 playbook still works, when it lost to begin with, is a luxury most of us can no longer afford to believe in.

We tend to live in the spaces those unaffected travel through. Our parks, festooned with fentanyl-made schizophrenics, the shoebox apartments where we struggle to convert the energy from our hamster wheels into professional and personal inertia, they are but specks through a passing windshield for the ‘my politics are leave me alone’ jet-set.

I challenge anyone to fully engage with Zohran Mamdani’s embittered, resentful, Third-Worldist July 4th remarks, and to come away with anything but the understanding the wolf is at the door, and will not leave willingly. And why won’t it leave willingly? Because nature abhors a vacuum. Mamdani was created by the Big Sleep, our ‘culture war’ slumber, where too many played nice with that which is inherently anti-Western Civilisational, to squeak out lesser governments, and to cling to pieces of what once was, in the hopes that this was all just a fad. It wasn’t. It isn’t.

Transgression is here, whether we like it or not—born of bad leaders, non-participants, failed liberals and conservatives alike. This time, surely, it’s better to fight. This time, surely, it’s better to win.

Only then can we embrace, fully, a return to the ‘politics of normalcy’—with trench lines dug and sentries placed in high towers, having learned, hopefully, that all wins are temporary; even our civilisation, if we’re again so careless.

Alexander Brown is the co-founder and Managing Editor of Without Diminishment, Director of the National Citizens Coalition, a contributor to Project Ontario, and a former host on Juno News. His writing has appeared in publications such as The Hub and the Toronto Sun.

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Morocco’s national football team, one of the best teams in the world, has once again beaten Canada’s plucky underdogs at the FIFA World Cup. As in 2022, when Canada last lost to that same side last Saturday, many Moroccan nationals and Canadians of Moroccan descent celebrated Canada’s defeat in the streets of Montreal and elsewhere.

Those jubilant fans may hold a Canadian passport, speak one of Canada’s official languages at work or at school, and enjoy the expansive Canadian welfare state. When it came to choosing where to give their hearts, their most heartfelt loyalties were on display for all to see.

Norman Tebbit, the late British Conservative politician who served as a Cabinet minister in Margaret Thatcher’s government, once posed a question that Britain has never been able to lay to rest. It became known as the ‘cricket test’.

When England’s cricket team played India or Pakistan, Tebbit’s cricket test asked which side Britain’s South Asian population would back. Were those citizens still more attached to their ancestral homeland, or to the country they had immigrated to?

To this day, many British Asians — though hardly all — are still ‘happy’ to fail that cricket test. How any one person feels about the cricket test speaks volumes about how people view nationhood and identity, neither of which is insignificant in our globalised world.

When it really matters, who are you?

Despite the vast numbers of cricket aficionados who have arrived from the Indian subcontinent over the past five years, Canada is better suited to a ‘football test’. Four years ago, Morocco defeated Canada at the last World Cup. It was reported that Montreal’s Moroccan community, which numbers about 37,000 people, gathered to watch ‘their team’.

Crowds of Moroccan supporters on the city’s Jean-Talon Street, the hub of so-called ‘Little Maghreb’, cheered wildly as the team representing the country in which they lived fell. The scenes were repeated on 4 July, when Canada was eliminated from this year’s World Cup by Morocco yet again.

If Canada’s elimination from a prestigious sporting tournament is the source of somebody’s joy, what exactly is Canada to them?

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Last March, President Donald Trump signed an executive order, ‘Designating English as the Official Language of The United States’. Not many years ago, such an executive order would likely have seemed unneeded, even bizarre. It would be like Mexico declaring Spanish its official language — something Mexico has never actually done. Yet, such a measure was necessary in America — especially as we prepare to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence this summer — as a rebuttal to the Left’s idea that language is merely an exercise of power.

According to the President’s executive order, the goal of declaring English as the official language of the USA is to ‘promote unity, cultivate a shared American culture for all citizens, ensure consistency in government operations, and create a pathway to civic engagement’. These reasons are both practical and philosophic.

The practical reasons are obvious. Attempting to administer government services in dozens of languages is a logistical nightmare, and accordingly President Trump’s executive order revoked a Clinton-era order that required agencies to do just that. The millions of illegal immigrants that the Biden administration allowed to flood our country revealed to many Americans that cultural assimilation is not optional to have a functioning society. Putting a dozen languages on street signs is obviously not realistic, but more importantly, doing so would undermine national unity.

The most important part of this order — and the most politically relevant part as we prepare to celebrate 250 years of American independence — is more philosophic than practical. Because America is the flagship of the West — the steward of the Western tradition that began back in Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome, and was baptised by Christianity — speech is central to our broader civilisational order. In the West, we believe in the consent of the governed, which requires the people to actually give their consent, and consent requires speech. Because we are rational creatures, we have free speech so that we can ascertain the truth.

In this view, speech and language are not merely tools that enable us to more efficiently communicate our base desires. Language is not just a way of explaining what we want instead of physically beating each other. Instead, language is an expression of the imago Dei — it is how we participate in the highest elements of human existence: the spiritual, the political, the artistic, and so on.

Yet, in the modern world, we often treat language as a merely technical, almost animalistic, exercise. The basic layman’s view of the history of language is that a long time ago, brutish, proto-human creatures drew symbols on cave walls and then finally, some two hundred thousand years ago or so, we humans evolved and developed the larynx that allowed us to vocalise symbols for ideas and objects. Over time, through a process I am far from qualified to explain, languages evolved and multiplied until we reached a point where I am invited to press a number for which language I would like when I call an automated customer service line.

If language is only the fruit of a godless, secular, evolutionary system, then language is subject to either mere power (i.e. the most evolved and powerful cavemen set the terms on which the others communicate) or mere social convention (i.e. terms can mean whatever the people want them to mean at any given time). This is, of course, how the Left views language. Powerful institutions or public opinion radically redefine the most basic terms of society: man, woman, marriage, and so on.

Yet, this is antithetical to the Christian, and, therefore, Western tradition. In the West, our Christian heritage teaches that we speak because we were spoken into existence by the God of Genesis, and we talk with each other because we were made in the image of a communion of persons. In the Christian narrative, the origin of language is not a kind of social contract or a strong-man theory. The origin of our faculty of speech is our very creation — God Himself speaks, and thus we speak, and, as Aristotle observed, this is where politics begins: speaking together about the highest things. Language is not the handmaiden of power, but real and legitimate power comes from the ability to lead our friends and neighbours to the happiness that comes from a life well lived.

There is this idea out there that America is unlike every other political system — that our ideas are so unique and exceptional that America will just go on regardless of what people inhabit our land or what language we speak. Yet, this is not true. America and the English language are deeply connected, not just at a practical level, but at a metaphysical one. Our Declaration of Independence and Constitution are in English. The Federalist Papers, where our Founders persuaded the people to ratify the Constitution, were published in English, and the epitaphs on the tombstones of our revolutionary heroes are in English.

As we celebrate 250 years of America, in spite of the Left’s radical immigration policy and assault on our common heritage, America is still an English-speaking country. English is part of our national identity, not because it is the most efficient mode of communication, but because America is the standard-bearer of the West, and in the West, we believe that talking together about the highest goods — about God, family, and nation — is how we build a political order that will endure for 500, or even 1,000 years.

Bradley Haley is a George Washington Fellow at Hillsdale College where he studies English, and he is the Founder of New Guard Press, an online magazine dedicated to charting a course for American renewal.

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Western civilisation is dead, to begin with. And if you’ve any doubts whatever about that, allow me promptly to disabuse you of them.

Most Western countries spent the 1990s and early noughts celebrating the supreme triumph of our ideas over those of the former Eastern Bloc. The West was richer, freer and better educated, and the proof of the pudding was in the eating: our ideas had made it possible for Boris Yeltsin to be astonished by an ordinary supermarket aisle.

Thus, the end of the twentieth century was marked by optimism. Racial tensions were low. Communities were safe. Houses were affordable. And a century-long experiment in state education had proved a remarkable success. The West was happy, healthy and wealthy — but we were not wise. We traded wisdom for hubris and allowed self-conceit to drive us towards increasingly insensible policies that have eroded our civilisational wealth and well-being. Instead of looking to the past with humility to see what worked, we looked to the future with fatuous idealism, trading our inheritance for a mess of pottage that might be variously described as an enormous experiment in living or, in less oblique terms, as liberalism unleashed.

Today, inter-ethnic strife is unsettling our societies, heinous crimes are commonplace, and cities across the West have become global villages, while housing has become increasingly unaffordable. Our education system is largely an indoctrination factory for insensible ideas and incorrigible self-hatred.

Our downfall was set in train well before the 1990s. Indeed, for this period to have appeared as the apogee of Western life, there had to be some residual glue holding everything together. But as the following paragraphs should make clear, a return to those halcyon days — for some, at least — is now impossible. The residual glue is gone.

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The first day of July can be an odd birthday for some, though it does not need to be.

For some, the sorry state of the economy is a mental and economic burden that is often too great to set aside for unadulterated celebration. Partisans also consider it rude, or even actively disloyal, to point out that Canada’s economy is brutalising its younger generations, which can make the day all the more alienating.

Even worse for many, the Liberal Party’s favourite symbols and the ‘values’ of Official Canada are paraded through the sanctioned celebrations. Much of it is geared towards how the rest of the world has apparently made Canada better, rather than what sets Canadians apart within that world.

To celebrate all the societal and cultural differences that have come to redefine Canada over the past four decades is allegedly Canadian in the most profound way. We already celebrate those variations with countless ethnic heritage months, but apparently Canada Day has to be the showreel for them all.

Perhaps it was a miracle that the ruling progressives celebrated Canada’s 150th birthday in 2017, given their preference for behaving as if Canada had existed for less than a third of that time.

Nevertheless, to sulk on 1 July this time round is bad form of the worst kind. The Liberal state is not Canada, nor is the economy, and neither has to be worshipped today. Instead, this is an occasion to celebrate the Canadian people.

Canadians make this country. Some politicians and cultural figures like to nitpick and say that there can be no single ‘all-Canadian type’, and this is true in a sense. We have a rich tapestry of regional and provincial cultures, some more distinct than others. Still, most people know what a Canadian is when they see or hear one.

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There are too many aspects of being Canadian to include in such a short piece, but here are a few.

Having a father, grandfather or great-grandfather who fought in one of the world wars of the twentieth century is a common denominator among millions who live here. Perhaps those same people have, or once had, a holiday home in the Gulf Islands or in Muskoka. Those in the West call them cabins, while those in the East call them cottages. Others of more modest means might take great pleasure in returning to the summer campsites to which their parents once took them, this time with their own children.

Countless Canadians have ancestors who first arrived in Ontario or the Maritimes before heading west, leaving relatives behind with whom many still remain in touch. Others have cousins or other relatives in Britain or the United States.

Looking out at the foothills from Calgary, sailing along the coast of Nova Scotia or climbing a mountain in British Columbia are all time-honoured things to do on Canada Day and have been for more than a century and a half. You cannot experience any of this anywhere else in the world, nor will you be the first Canadian to have done so.

Those three activities alone are possible because of what Canadians have achieved through building and securing our country and making it into a worthy home for the nation. Canadians’ enjoyment of the outdoors is one part of the national character that Official Canada is willing to recognise and commemorate.

However, Ottawa has no use for the family tales of adventure or of volunteering to fight honourably in overseas wars, nor for the old photographs of ancestors who may have worked on a railway or cleared a field on the Prairies.

Not once have Canadians been asked whether their inherited, centuries-old ancestral culture should be demoted to just one more lifestyle option in Ottawa’s multicultural mosaic. This is not genuine nationhood. Canadians were never honestly asked to cede the primacy of their national lineage, languages and expectations.

Being fully Canadian is not a matter of signing a form, any more than buying a golden passport in Montenegro would have made a Haligonian a Montenegrin. When Canada play Morocco in the FIFA World Cup on Saturday 4 July, observe who celebrates if Morocco win. It will be a strong indicator of the value that many people living here place upon Canadian citizenship — a devaluation often encouraged by those with some of the deepest roots in the country who seem uniquely eager to rip them up for one reason or another.

Yet resentment is a poor anthem and the wrong one to sing on this date. Canada Day, or Dominion Day, as many still stoutly call it, will never belong to the golem that is Official Canada in 2026, and neither will Canadians.

Fortunately, there remain millions of people in this country whose family stories and histories were made in Canada alone or in its service. All their memories of the Old World have long since faded, surviving only in diaries and archival documents. They have a magnificent history of daring, loyalty, enterprise and decency.

Those qualities are often scorned by the Canadian state as ‘outdated’ or ‘expired’, except when the country needs them for military recruitment or Remembrance Day speeches. A great number of those who arrived more recently embrace this Canadian character and do not want to see the country’s traditions and sense of self destroyed. Canada’s long story is compelling enough to make one want to be part of the people it created. There is more than enough to be proud of and fascinated by on this national holiday. Ottawa may treat the Canadian character as disposable, but it cannot be taken away from Canadians so long as they remember who they are.

Nor are Canadians merely 159 years old this year. The date 1 July 1867 merely created the Dominion. Canadians did not come into being through a procedural conjuring trick at Westminster. Their story goes back much further, perhaps to 1608, when Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec City, or even further, depending on whom you ask. In a similar vein, Italian lineage goes back to ancient Rome and did not suddenly emerge with the unification of Italy in 1861. Those who made their lives here were called Canadians long before 1867.

Nations are akin to families; they do not begin with signatures on a marriage licence.

Canada Day need not be a celebration of the state. We are older and better than Official Canada, and 1 July is for those who carry their inheritance and want to save it.

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 Spectator Australia.

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Without Diminishment is a project of the Without Diminishment Foundation, a registered non-profit in British Columbia. If you value the unique perspective we bring to Canada’s political and cultural landscape, consider supporting our work with a generous donation.

The official residence of the prime minister of Canada has, for more than a decade, remained in a ruinous state. It still bears a sturdy foundation and façade, rooted in the traditions of our past, which have now been largely forgotten. Yet its interior has been gutted and left to fall apart. Fortunately, this need not be a permanent state of affairs.

The prime minister, Mark Carney, has indicated that he expects to be the last prime minister to live at Rideau Cottage, the small two-storey building on the grounds of Rideau Hall, the official residence of Canada’s governor general. It originally served as the residence of the Secretary to the Governor General and later came to house visiting foreign dignitaries. Understandably, any residence ending in the word ‘cottage’ does not have the space or facilities needed to house the operations of the prime minister, and it has become clear that it is not a suitable official residence for the long term.

There is something characteristically humbling about our constitutional arrangement — in which the head of government resides in a small cottage on the grounds of the representative of the Sovereign, rather than occupying pride of place himself. Yet that is a digression for another time.

The good

Mr Carney can and should be applauded for taking the initiative to effect change with regard to 24 Sussex. He has done so by having the Rideau Hall Foundation embark on a national campaign to raise funds from private donors and philanthropic organisations.

This approach is not without its critics. Some have questioned whether a heritage building of this national significance should depend on philanthropic goodwill rather than straightforward public investment. That is not an unreasonable objection. Yet at least Mr Carney is acting. There would be controversy over any approach taken. Spend public money, and you will be accused of extravagance; seek private funds, and you will be accused of abdicating responsibility. The important thing is that, after decades of paralysis, someone has finally made a decision.

The bad

Issues with 24 Sussex have long been apparent, but for more than thirty years, governments of all stripes, facing difficult fiscal decisions, avoided repairs, seeking to avoid a scandal over spending money on what would effectively be their own residence. The easy, politically expedient route was always to do nothing, and, ultimately, one cannot blame any given prime minister too harshly for allowing the residence to fall into further disrepair, as they were simply responding to incentives that did not reward stewardship.

Yet this is more than a question of a building falling into disrepair. It is an embarrassment to Canada. Our head of government has no functioning official residence in which to receive dignitaries, hold private and intimate meetings, host state dinners, or conduct some of the important tasks of the day-to-day work of government.

One can argue that, because 24 Sussex is the official residence of the head of government, there is a duty that goes beyond the purely fiscal — a responsibility to invest in 24 Sussex that transcends what any individual prime minister might gain or lose in the short term. Yes, repairs would cost money. But they would amount to a marginal sum in the grand scheme of government spending, and the cost of continued inaction only grows.

The sad truth is that, for three decades, the question of 24 Sussex was treated not as a matter of national stewardship but as a matter of political survival. No prime minister wanted to be the one caught spending money on what the public might perceive as a personal luxury. And so the building rotted.

That is a failure of vision. A nation ought to be capable of maintaining the home of its head of government without its becoming a political liability. That we could not do so says something uncomfortable about how small our collective Canadian ambition had become.

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What is even more embarrassing is that, by delaying the decision, the condition of the residence has only worsened, while the cost has continued to balloon. This short-term inaction has resulted in long-term pain. As with the enormous renovations required for Centre Block, delaying the decision has solved nothing.

The ugly

And so we arrive at the ugly. Mr Carney has announced a national competition to rehabilitate and modernise 24 Sussex Drive. The winning proposal is to be announced by Canada Day, 1 July 2027.

On the face of it, this sounds admirable: Canadian talent; an independent jury; transparency; and competition. In principle, it is not a bad approach.

But it is here that the concern arises.

24 Sussex Drive was built in 1867–68 for lumber baron and MP Joseph Merrill Currier, and was designed by his brother, J. M. Currier. Its original Gothic Revival design has been substantially altered, but the building remains part of a suite of Gothic Revival structures erected around Confederation, alongside Earnscliffe, home of Sir John A. Macdonald, and the Parliament Buildings themselves. It is, in other words, not merely a house. It is a piece of civic architecture that belongs to the story of this country’s founding.

That heritage must not be surrendered in the design competition.

The residence should remain what it was always meant to be: stately, rooted, and recognisably Canadian in the Confederation tradition. Its defining heritage and vernacular character — its stone construction, its surviving Gothic Revival inheritance, and its connection to Confederation-era architecture — should be restored and celebrated, not swept aside in favour of something that merely gestures at modernity.

A home that has stood since the Confederation era should showcase the story and history of this country. It should not become a monument to post-national abstraction or the design fashions of any particular moment. It must remain rooted.

The competition, if handled well, could produce something excellent. But we must hold the line. Whatever is built — or, ideally, restored — must honour the traditional character of the building and interior, maintain the historic façades where possible, and reflect an understanding that 24 Sussex is not a blank canvas to be remade into a new vision of Canada.

It is the home of the prime minister of Canada. It should look like it.

Something bolder

In the end, the story of 24 Sussex is the story of a nation that allowed short-term political calculation to override its responsibilities to its own institutions.

For thirty years, prime ministers of every political stripe looked at a crumbling landmark and calculated that fixing it would cost them more votes than it was worth. Perhaps they were right, in the narrow sense. But a country cannot be governed, and certainly cannot and will not be great, if its leaders are only willing to take decisions whose benefits will be felt before the next election.

The home of the prime minister should be a functioning centre of government. The residence should also be, in the best sense, a source of national pride — not extravagant, but worthy. In many ways, it should represent the continuity of the nation, be rooted in our traditions, and, in a distinctly Canadian way, be quietly boastful of our first principles as a nation.

Mr Carney has taken a first step: the fundraising campaign, the design competition, and the commitment to act at last. This step forward should be welcomed, even if questions remain about the details.

What is needed now is the will to see it through with the seriousness the project deserves. This should not be a renovation driven by postmodernist trends or political presentation, but one driven by a genuine understanding of what this building is, what it represents, and what it should once again become.

As a nation, we ought to have a bolder vision for ourselves than simply avoiding some minor scandal about taxpayers’ money being used to restore the residence of the prime minister. The home is well worth the investment required to restore it and to make it a dignified and functioning seat of government.

Joshua Hart is a fourth-year student studying International Relations at the University of British Columbia, and formerly served as president of the UBC Conservatives.

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Without Diminishment is a project of the Without Diminishment Foundation, a registered non-profit in British Columbia. If you value the unique perspective we bring to Canada’s political and cultural landscape, consider supporting our work with a generous donation.

Many are the politically undead, walking amongst us, the living Canadians, but few are as ghoulishly unkillable as the Red Tories. Regardless of the number of well-placed, sharp wooden stakes, pounded in with ferocious vigour, they inevitably return like cheap B-movie characters, confounding conservatives and frightening the children.

These pages recently featured a back-and-forth between Geoff Russ and Tyler Brooks on the subject. One was right. Russ argued that Red Toryism was a gateway into the movement for leftist ideas, thereby undermining the whole project, whereas Brooks saw it as part of a very broad tradition of ‘Tory’ thought, extending back centuries. I myself questioned the modern relevance of Red Toryism in C2C Journal, having collided with it over decades of activism, and had the pleasure of debating Tasha Kheiriddin on the subject at a Civitas conference.

My experience, beginning in the euphoria of High (Joe) Clarkian Red Toryism, supports Russ’s conclusions. One recalls that English Canada had had enough of the Trudeau revolution – after only four years – reducing the Liberals to a tenuous minority in the 1972 election. In fact, Pierre Trudeau would never have formed another government without reliably massive support in Quebec. Canada’s Swedification continued, however, thanks to the New Democratic Party (NDP), which propped up the Liberals. This led to multiple socialist experiments, such as the national oil company Petro-Canada, the Foreign Investment Review Agency (FIRA), and vastly expanded social spending.

And Canada had no intellectual counterweight – no Barry Goldwater or William F. Buckley Jr – while palaeo-Tory intellectuals like George Grant had no influence on policymaking. Our entire political class was riding the statist train – and supporting social progressivism – whether on the express or the bullet train. Sweeping dirigisme and the expansion of the welfare state were the order of the day. This paralleled the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States, where the Heath and Nixon/Ford governments would hardly be considered ‘conservative’ in any modern sense. As today, the media were more than 90 per cent left-of-centre, providing cover for our Liberal-Dipper coalition.

So it was that the federal Progressive Conservative (PC) leader Robert Stanfield proposed wage and price controls in the 1974 election to counter ‘stagflation’ (low economic growth combined with high unemployment and inflation). Trudeau lied during the campaign (surprise!), saying he opposed the policy, then promptly implemented the controls once his majority was restored.

Leaving theory aside for the moment, in practice Red Toryism was, in reality, merely the least-fast road to leftist unicornia, as Gad Saad would say. Adherents would describe themselves as ‘fiscally conservative but socially liberal’, despite the latter position’s reliance on the mega-state essentially ruling out fiscal prudence. Red Tories also suffered from a wicked strain of elitist fear of missing out (FOMO), an aching desire to be accepted and affirmed by the Laurentian elite. They preferred this to, say, rejecting and fighting the Liberal-NDP programme.

My C2C Journal article and the debate with Ms Kheiriddin posed this question: what relevance do Red Tories have in the twenty-first century, given that all the social ‘progress’ desired by 1970s progressives has been achieved? Does it mean continuously pushing the boundaries of traditional social norms? Swallowing wokeism whole?

Where I can broadly agree with Mr Brooks is that Canadian conservatives and conservative populists must decide which elements of our intellectual inheritance to retain as we strive to grow our movement. Red Toryism – as it really was, and as it is commonly understood – is not one of them. One can rant over Grant and laugh with Stephen Leacock as much as one wants, but people will hear and understand this when the term ‘Red Toryism’ is used: ‘moderation’, centrism, ideologiophobia, and acquiescence to any hare-brained leftist schemes.

This is plain in Brooks’s piece, where he begins by stating that ‘Canadian conservatives do not have the luxury of a clear doctrine to steer our ship’. Huh? He asserts that the ‘Tory mind’ is ‘neither on the right nor the left of the political spectrum; it is the political spectrum’. Remarkable. So, if it is everything, is it also nothing? Brooks appears to be channelling Charles Taylor – son of financial magnate E. P. Taylor – whose book Radical Tories (1982) included everyone from Leacock and Stanfield to socialist Eugene Forsey under the label ‘Tory’.

In reality, defining modern conservatism as some type of fusionism – à la Frank Meyer and Buckley – is straightforward enough. It combines key elements of traditional conservatism and libertarianism, drawing on thinkers from Burke to Hayek, Sowell, and Scruton. In the Canadian context, one wonders why we cannot simply mine the successes and failures of Mulroney’s PCs, the Reform Party, Harris’s Common Sense Revolution, and of course the Harper government.

Must they be skipped over in favour of some kind of palaeo-Toryism with ill-defined intellectual moorings?

Nor are we up against Pearsonian Liberals. Our opponents are more radical and ideological than ever, so that, in any confrontation, ‘moderates’ will be left like so much flattened roadkill behind the woke express.

Why a young conservative municipal candidate would wish to run explicitly as a ‘Red Tory’, as Russ describes, is baffling. Whatever his motivations, people will hear either ‘little red’, as in Liberal, or ‘big red’, as in Battleship Potemkin. They will not hear ‘conservative’; is that the point?

A final cautionary note involves the role of the state, the expansion of which Red Tories have either favoured or not opposed. Brooks draws a necessary distinction between the state used for the ‘common good’ and ‘revolutionary and ideological socialism’. But again, we are not dealing with the bureaucracy of Confederation’s first few decades, which was, in real terms, less than half its current size and largely populated by traditionalist Christians. Experience, including my own, shows that the ‘deep state’ (a very accurate term) has its own agenda – generally antithetical to an organically developing civil society and free markets.

The reality – not the theory – of Red Toryism yields one conclusion: that, to quote a prominent Red, Leon Trotsky, it should be consigned to the dustbin of history.

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.

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Last week, the House of Commons rose for the summer, and not a day too soon.

For many of us in Canada’s political world, this will be the first time we have had anything resembling a break in quite some time.

We chose this life, so it’s our own fault, but I know I’m not alone in saying that the last two years have been an absolute dead sprint.

In 2025, on 6 January, Justin Trudeau announced his resignation. On 27 February, Doug Ford won his third majority government in Ontario. On 9 March, Mark Carney became Liberal leader, and on 14 March he was sworn in as an unelected prime minister. On 28 April, Mark Carney became an elected prime minister with a minority government, and Pierre Poilievre lost his seat. On 18 August, Poilievre ran and won in an Alberta by-election. On 4 November, Mark Carney’s Liberals tabled their first budget, and Chris d’Entremont crossed the floor from the Conservatives to the Liberals. On 27 November, Steven Guilbeault resigned from Carney’s Cabinet. On 11 December, Michael Ma crossed the floor from the Conservatives to the Liberals.

In 2026, from 29 to 31 January, Conservatives met at their national policy convention in Calgary, and Poilievre passed a leadership review with 87.4 per cent of the vote. On 18 February, Matt Jeneroux crossed the floor from the Conservatives to the Liberals. On 29 March, Avi Lewis was elected leader of the NDP. On 8 April, Marilyn Gladu crossed the floor from the Conservatives to the Liberals. From 9 to 11 April, Liberals took a victory lap at their convention in Montreal. On 21 May, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announced that Albertans would vote on whether Alberta should remain in Canada or whether the Government of Alberta should commence the legal process required under the Constitution of Canada to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether Alberta should separate from Canada. On 30 May, the BC Conservatives elected Kerry-Lynne Findlay as their leader. On 18 June, the House rose.

These are just the main political beats; never mind the Carney government’s yet-to-materialise legislative agenda and the nobody-has-any-idea-on-any-given-day status of trade talks with the US administration. The Prime Minister gleefully jet-sets, having completely upended Canadian politics in a matter of 15 months.

This presents a dilemma for Poilievre’s Conservatives. In theory, they’re closer than ever to earning the right to form government. They gained 24 new seats and 2.5 million new votes, and secured the highest share of the vote since Brian Mulroney’s second majority term. Do they hold the line and soldier on with what got them to this point, or adjust now that we’re in Carney’s world?

Every political strategist will tell you that you can’t run the same campaign twice, even though most political operators are extremely risk-averse. When your political opponent tramples your policy territory and takes it for their own, perhaps it’s advisable to go where you can’t be followed.

According to the latest work from David Coletto’s Abacus Data, the top six issues facing Canadians right now are:

• The cost of living

• The economy

• Health care

• Housing affordability and accessibility

• Donald Trump and his administration

• Immigration

The Liberals lead the Conservatives, 40 per cent to 35 per cent, on the cost of living, and 42 per cent to 39 per cent on the economy. Liberals have a 16-point lead on health care and a 3-point lead on housing affordability and accessibility. Liberals have a 34-point lead on Donald Trump and his administration. Conservatives have a 34-point lead on immigration and a 27-point lead on crime and public safety, although crime and public safety is seventh on the list of the most important issues facing Canadians.

The point is that, if Conservatives are to continue building trust with Canadians and gain the extra million votes needed to form government, they must simultaneously remain competitive on economic issues while bringing greater focus to the social and cultural issues that dominate the Canadian psyche. If Conservatives lead with issues on which they’re already most trusted by the electorate, like immigration and crime and public safety, such demonstrated competence and unfiltered leadership will spill over to areas in which Conservatives are less trusted.

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The institutional memory of the Canadian electorate is famously short, yet even a goldfish should be able to recall the acts of structural white-collar criminality that got us here.

For more than a decade, the Canadian domestic real estate market has been treated less as a foundational social good and more as a protected financial asset class. First came the deliberate Trudeau invitation to his backers—the foreign speculators and mainland Chinese mega-players—through a policy that effectively opened the floodgates to capital influx and global wealth looking for a safe, wilfully-blind harbour, with a promised high rate on return.

Then came the era of deliberate and unprecedented population growth, which added layers of artificial gains to an already bloated system. The result has been Generation Screwed, who have been priced out of stability amidst a landscape of hyper-inflated evaluations, and a shadow economy that the feds now deem too big to fail.

The latest project from Managed Decline Inc. just unfolded in Vancouver, where former central banker Mark Carney ludicrously scaffolded a lump payout for ‘struggling’ dog-crate hustlers, insultingly disguised as benevolence. To anyone watching the political circuit or who understands the depth of the ‘Vancouver model’ of institutionalized real estate f*ckery and de-facto money laundering, the move felt entirely predictable, as it arrived on the heels of high-dollar, cash-for-access fundraisers hosted by prominent industry charlatans such as Bob Rennie, the contemptible owner of ‘Piss Christ.’

When greedy developers overextend themselves on overpriced, single-bedroom ‘investment units’, primarily for foreigners to then overcharge Canadians to rent, the natural course of a market economy dictates that they bear the losses for their skullduggery, and for choosing, again and again, to ‘build’, barely, for those who they perceive as chattel. Instead, and like many of Liberal Canada’s failures, we are witnessing a concerted effort to socialize those losses, shifting the burden from the well-connected back to the already-struggling broader public.

To attempt to pass off this natural order-defying favour under the banner of housing affordability is a profound insult, particularly to our world-beating number of young and middle-aged workers on the hamster wheel. Subsidising developer losses does nothing to lower the entry floor for first-time buyers; rather, it ensures that prices remain artificially high. True affordability requires a downward adjustment in pricing, a correction that the experts of “experts say” will tell you will never happen if the state keeps guaranteeing the bottom line. By protecting the current price floor, policymakers are actively incentivising a permanent class of lifetime renters, ensuring that ownership remains an elite privilege, primarily to those who were born before price to income ratios of 10-to-1.

To make matters worse, there are looming indicators that the current ban on foreign buyers may be quietly rolled back or amended to backstop these exact projects, confirming the growing suspicion that Canadian real estate is increasingly designed for international capital rather than its citizens. That lingering feeling of modern Canada feeling more like an airport Hilton than a functioning, integrated society? That’s a feature, not a bug.

Slop like “Fortress North America”, “Protect Ontario”, and “Build Canada Homes” has always been purely cynical political performance: fictions designed to placate an aloof public while a non-loyal central planning machine grinds onward.

In this environment of deep, justified public anger among the have-nots, the duty of Pierre Poilievre and the Official Opposition becomes doubly important. Parliament may be in its summer recess, but egregious late efforts to ram through the problematic Bills C-9 and C-22, and now the presentation of a manila envelope to the friends of Gregor Robertson, mean there can be no vacation for the team in blue.

On this issue, Poilievre’s tone police can kick rocks. His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition’s sworn obligation is to aggressively scrutinise and criticise a system when its mandate is abused, and the House of the Common People acts for everyone but.

Canada must be more than that airport hotel; more than a safety school for a global hyphenate class and its co-conspirators who would pull up the ladders on their own children if it meant securing an infinite supply of Mainland Chinese investors and dirt-cheap workers from the subcontinent.

For those who care to notice, this is now a nation of shadow consulates that dot half-empty, silent suburbs, where foreign police services roam with impunity, and where political leaders are allowed to mimic the hubris of Arab strongmen, without possessing any of the competence required to generate genuine economic prosperity.

Voters in this country can drive you mad, but I tire of the rebuke that “Canadians get what they deserve.” There are enough Canadians—in the tens of millions—who are deserving of a better class of criminal than this, and the continuation of Liberal Canada’s housing Ponzi remains entirely unworthy of our home.

Socialising loss makes it ours, but this was largely out of our hands. The game was always rigged, by players well-versed in feeding the selfish, nigh insatiable beast that is gerontocracy.

A refusal, now, to not raise holy Hell, would be our mistake, and ours alone.

The original version of this column first appeared in Acceptable Views.

Alexander Brown is the Managing Editor of Without Diminishment, Director of the National Citizens Coalition, a contributor to Project Ontario, and a former host on Juno News. His writing has appeared in publications such as The Hub and the Toronto Sun.

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Without Diminishment is a project of the Without Diminishment Foundation, a registered non-profit in British Columbia. If you value the unique perspective we bring to Canada’s political and cultural landscape, please consider supporting our work with a donation.

Youth is being wasted on the old.

I was 21 when province-wide lockdowns were first announced in March 2020, and my little brother was two days from celebrating his 17th birthday. During supper that evening, we discussed the horrific prospect of being cooped up in our house for two weeks. We scoffed at my dad, who argued this would go on for at least a month. No one had a clue it would be more than two years before our lives would return to normal.

Illegal and life-threatening activities in Quebec included gathering at a park with more than five people, cycling outside alone after 8pm and being homeless. We were prohibited from celebrating birthdays, attending graduation ceremonies, proms, births and funerals. Kids were taken out of school and plugged into an iPad—screen time was now mandatory. Literacy and attention spans have not yet recovered.

While our young minds were desperate to continue developing, widespread atrophy set in, as it was virtually impossible to forge new friendships or develop meaningful skills without staring at that screen. Many, including my father, lost their livelihoods. The riskiest behaviour you could engage in was tweeting something edgy or eating a Tide Pod.

Life remained frozen despite health experts knowing those aged 65 and over were most vulnerable, as evidenced by the COVID-19 vaccine rollout. Canada’s first shipment of vaccines arrived in December 2020, more than a year before all restrictions were lifted. Nevertheless, my grandmother and I remained subject to the same restrictions until the bitter end.

During the twentieth century, many of the West’s young were called upon to make sacrifices far greater than those made by those of us locked in our homes, but both are examples of the young bearing the burden for generational crises. We remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice; we cherish their memory. This is because sacrifice is an integral part of civic life, but so is gratitude.

At the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, older Canadians seemed to have forgotten what the young had given up to ‘stop the spread’, and they went on with business as usual: steamrolling us in other ways.

This lack of recognition is in keeping with what has become the cornerstone of modern Western political life: mortgaging the future for present gratification. At the governmental level, debt-fuelled spending largely goes towards protecting the elderly, including, but not limited to, the COVID-19 response. Federal COVID-19 spending reached $360 billion, helping us reach the trillion-dollar threshold for our national debt.

Of the $400 billion spent annually on health care in Canada, half goes towards treating the elderly. As the elderly population grows, resources will continue to be allocated accordingly.

The largest federal programme, Old Age Security, costs over $80 billion and is projected to reach $108 billion by 2030–31. Total benefits for the elderly will be $88 billion next year. This represents 17 per cent of all federal spending.

On top of financing a growing debt, younger Canadians have been priced out of many of our cities’ housing markets because of decisions to halt and obstruct new housing construction to ensure property values keep rising. All the while, we face unprecedented labour competition and artificial wage suppression following the arrival of over 2 million international students and 1.6 million new temporary foreign workers between 2021-2025. The already-established want their property values high and their labour cheap, and the rest of us be damned.

And now, we are on the brink of the holy grail of child sacrifice.

The wild overvaluation of AI companies hinges on the promise of replacing human labour, specifically the labour of the young. As a result, entry-level and graduate jobs are in free fall. The double-digit annual market returns we’ve seen over the past few years reflect shareholders’ excitement over culling the least experienced workers.

Youth unemployment in Canada is approximately 14 per cent. Is the market champing at the bit to turn that 14 per cent into 50 per cent, so that the asset-rich class can enjoy higher returns in their stock portfolios while their children oscillate between OnlyFans and welfare?

From market sentiment to government policies, the young are treated as disposable.

Policies that would serve our interests include radical proposals such as means-testing all benefits for the elderly, removing the principal residence exemption, meaningful income tax relief for young families and, best of all, raising the retirement age. We should not accept any pearl-clutching from those who happily imprisoned and masked literal children.

I know it goes against our sensibilities, as we are a generation raised to be empathetic and collectivist, but if we do not insist that our interests be prioritised—something older generations have no qualms about doing—then we will continue to be collateral damage.

A new frontier of Canadian political life must emerge, beginning by distinguishing between what is good for them and what is good for us. A world dominated by the old is anxiety-prone and risk-averse. We should not underestimate how the attainment of comfort has come to be treated as an ultimate good across generations. While an understandable goal for the elderly, it is a puzzling one for the young.

We have found ourselves poorer, neutered and cultureless, while the elderly are cashing out, with their elbows up, enjoying what remains of our ‘universal’ health-care system. If older generations refuse to leave the world better off for their children, then we will have to demand that they do.

Sam Dagres is a writer based in London, U.K. She was formerly the Manager of Communications at the Montreal Economic Institute. Her writing has appeared in the Financial Post, the Globe and Mail, Le Journal de Montréal, and the Toronto Sun.

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Without Diminishment is a project of the Without Diminishment Foundation, a registered non-profit in British Columbia. If you value the unique perspective we bring to Canada’s political and cultural landscape, please consider supporting our work with a donation.

There is an understandable temptation among some Ontario conservatives right now to look outside the Progressive Conservative (PC) Party for political hope.

That temptation is not hard to understand, for the Ford government has been electorally successful, but many conservatives have grown tired of defending a party that often seems to govern without any clear conservative purpose. Too often, it has drifted from first principles on spending, free enterprise, competition, merit, family, public safety, and the proper limits of government. For those who hoped the PC Party would become the vehicle for serious reform after the long Liberal era, the disappointment is real, with the polling numbers to match.

That frustration helps explain why the Ontario Liberal leadership race has started to attract attention from people who would not normally see themselves as Liberals. There are candidates now speaking more seriously about housing, growth, public safety, institutional renewal, generational opportunity, and the need to restore trust in government. Much of that conversation is welcome, and conservatives should not be so partisan that they refuse to acknowledge good ideas when they hear them from outside their own party.

But there is an important distinction between a leadership campaign that says some true things and a party that is capable of governing according to those truths.

Leaders are just one part of politics. There are also political parties, caucuses, candidates, staff, activists, donors, policy networks, advocacy groups, and the broader culture that surrounds a government. Far from governing in isolation, a premier exists in a political ecosystem that shapes which ideas are treated as serious, which compromises are considered acceptable, which groups are given privileged access, and which fights are avoided once they become uncomfortable.

This is why conservatives should be cautious about treating the Ontario Liberal Party as a plausible vehicle for conservative reform simply because a leadership race has produced some better language than we have come to expect from that party.

The deeper problem with the Ontario Liberal Party is that modern Liberal parties tend to be built around flexibility more than conviction. Liberals are pragmatic, moderate, allergic to ideology, and willing to move with the times. There are moments when that temperament can be useful, and Mark Carney exemplifies this. But that also means that Liberal parties are very good at borrowing the language of more principled movements without necessarily absorbing the principles behind that language.

While that can win elections, it rarely produces durable reform.

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We are affected by a deep cultural malaise. News on Tuesday that the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton is to display Andres Serrano’s controversial “Piss Christ (Immersions)” is just the latest affront to the Western canon. For those blessedly unfamiliar, the 1987 work shows a photograph of a crucifix suspended in amber fluid that Serrano has identified as his own urine.

In 1989, Piss Christ was a flashpoint in American debates over funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Originally conceived as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society”, the NEA’s founding mission was to encourage the development and growth of the arts throughout the nation and to “foster the excellence, diversity, and vitality of the arts in the United States”. Serrano had received a grant of $20,000.00 from the NEA, resulting in backlash that contributed to restrictions on the NEA’s grantmaking process. Currently, the work lives in the Rennie Collection, based in Vancouver.

The persistence of a belief in progress and a century of insistence on discarding history and tradition in favour of exponentially obsolescent trends and relentless upward trajectory have coloured our cultural milieu inescapably. Works like Piss Christ cut right to the heart of an important debate: is the purpose of art to shock and to fulfil the modernist proposition, as put by Lionel Trilling in his Beyond Culture, that art “is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture”? Or is the purpose of art to carry on the traditions of the Western canon, rooted in our past, and to serve the human spirit by elevating the true, the good, and the beautiful?

At the turn of the 20th century, art that shocks quickly became part of the accepted modernist canon. Take, for example, Duchamp’s 1917 “Fountain”. You are hard pressed to find a more fitting indication that society was to soon fully embrace a concept of art that’s primary goal was to liberate the individual from the tyranny of early 20th century culture. For a urinal to be placed in an art exhibit, and to still be feted a century later as something that “changed the course of modern art” is the ultimate manifestation of this disease. New York’s 1913 “Armory Show”, which predated Fountain by a few years but featured some of Duchamp’s other work, is described as having “changed our perception of beauty”.

It’s not a stretch of the imagination to see how the absurdly grotesque and anti-social Fountain paved the way for Piss Christ. Inherent in accepting the ideology of progress is the promise that there will always be something better to orient towards. Butting up against culture, this ideology easily renders obsolete the Western canon. For how can we say, informed by our addiction to the idea of linear and indefinite improvement, that a J.S. Bach cantata is more valuable than Justin Bieber’s new album? One should not risk being admonished that “nostalgia is not a strategy” for thinking it more important to rescue Monet’s Waterlilies from a burning building than Piss Christ.

But are we willing to accept that Piss Christ and Fountain are the state of our Western canon? John Ruskin famously said that “the art of any country is the exponent of its social and political virtues”. It almost goes without saying that works like Piss Christ and Fountain, despite several decades between the two, are representative of the social and political virtues (or lack thereof) of our modern society. What a sorry state of affairs.

Urban myth has it that Churchill once said, in response to a question over cutting arts funding during the war, “then what would be fighting for?” While we have no documentary evidence that this precise statement was uttered, it nevertheless strongly underscores the important point: culture sustains and animates the human spirit in ways that the trappings of progress never will. It’s time to start treating cultural regeneration as the spiritual battle it is, rather than a sideshow to the Important Issues. Cultural regeneration will not take place purely and painlessly through the power of positive thinking and the invisible hand.

As a movement trying to build a positive vision of the future that places value on virtue, we need to face the question of art’s purpose head on. We should not be willing to accept at face value the modernist conceptualization that art is intended to liberate us from our supposed cultural tyranny. We need to be intentional about putting forward an understanding of art and culture that aims to elevate the human spirit through the celebration of tradition, grace, and beauty. Inherent in this is an immediate moratorium on any and all urine-themed art, relegating Fountain and Piss Christ to the cesspool of history where they belong.

Kate Marland is Deputy Editor at Without Diminishment. She presently runs youth outreach for the Canada Strong and Free Network, and formerly oversaw the Montreal Economic Institute’s Liberty and Leadership program. She also worked as a commercial litigator in Ottawa.

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In the latest episode of Without Diminishment’s podcast, W.D. co-founder Dr. Caroline Elliott joins fellow co-founder and Managing Editor Alexander Brown for an exclusive interview that pulls back the curtain on the leadership race, shares what lies ahead for her work in politics and policy, and dissects the most pressing crises facing British Columbia.

📌 What We Cover In This Episode:

• Inside the Leadership Race: Caroline opens up about her campaign, the razor-thin margin, lessons learned, as well as the lessons the party must carry forward to build a winning coalition.

• What Comes Next: From her deep roots in democratic theory to grassroots advocacy, what does the next chapter look like for Caroline’s fight to reform B.C. politics?

• The Erosion of Rights: A critical look at the ongoing property and mobility rights infringements occurring across British Columbia, driven by aggressive provincial overreach.

• Preserving Canadian History: Why our education systems are failing to properly teach our national story, and how we can restore cultural and historical literacy without apology.

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Recently, a rather vulgar image of author Mariana Mazzucato’s foot, decorated with blue toenail polish, appeared on X to promote the book on which it was treading — The Common Good Economy, which argues that the state needs to intervene to align every aspect of society with a single universal perspective of the common good — namely, bigger bureaucracy and more regulation, while preserving private ownership of capital.

In this, she echoes the work of Giovanni Gentile, who saw the state as the highest form of human expression, and believed that aligning one’s will with the state granted one the greatest true spiritual freedom one could possess. Fabian socialism in many ways found common ground with fascists in interwar Europe, much to the chagrin of its luminaries, who found nationalism déclassé. They just had different ideas of the higher good.

Today, executive authority is regarded with fear and scepticism, and we are unlikely to see a rainbow-spangled despot hailed as the herald of this new dogma. But of the classical trias politica, the other electoral element, Parliament, has also been neutered. At one stage, ministers would have had total control of their own departments. Even after twentieth-century professionalisation, they still had power to direct senior administrators.

But over the past 30–40 years, political influence on actual governance has diminished so much that it may as well not be there. Agendas and policies are set at an international level, and legislatures rubber-stamp them and vote on budgets they don’t read. Cabinets cede power to civil servants whose policies are set by NGOs, treaties, and private contractors, with the entire system of government drifting into a strange realm of unreality, becoming increasingly unaccountable to any tangible party or authority.

Politicians who attempt reforms are lambasted if they appeal to any popular sentiment, and hounded until their dying days if they stumble trying to ride the mob. Instead, in the eyes of almost all those involved in professional politics these days, reform must take a decidedly predetermined direction, raising the question of why we bother with democracy in the first place.

In South Africa, we have this liberal opposition party called the Democratic Alliance. They aren’t the opposition any more; they are part of a ruling coalition with the black-nationalist, Marxist African National Congress (ANC). However, they remain a sort of left-liberal outpost of the global Western establishment, something that clashes with the long-term vision of the more radical black nationalists who occupy two-thirds of the legislature. Their party manifesto is literally just the UN Sustainable Development Goals — why conservative minorities vote for such a progressive party is a whole essay in itself.

The DA can’t get enough votes to take over Parliament, but they can hold on to one key province and take a couple of key metros. This should imply that ruthlessness matters when it comes to establishing and deepening power over what one can. And yet, despite staring over the civilisational brink every day, they display some of the most bizarre priorities.

One such priority is the ‘separation of party and state’. To a South African, this makes sense as a response to the ANC’s 30-year policy of ‘cadre deployment’, whereby they subverted the supposedly meritocratic selection process for civil servants by selecting them on the basis of party loyalty rather than technical capacity.

So, to ‘separate party and state’ means getting rid of cronies and incompetents and diversity hires, right? Apparently not. In 2016, the DA managed to eke out coalition victories in four major metros, pushing out the ANC for the first time since the introduction of universal franchise. They were expected to clean house, and one of the first things journalists asked of Helen Zille, the de facto dominatrix of the liberal opposition, was whether the DA would clear out all the ‘cadres’.

She said no. The party’s public line was that they would not replace officials on party-political grounds. Instead, they would use normal performance-management processes. But the same ANC cadres remained, and they sabotaged, looted and dragged their feet, sometimes even dragging DA people down with them. Similar things are being seen now that they are in charge of some of the ministries.

Why do they do business this way?

Part of the reason is that the DA is trying to avoid escalating competition with the ANC, with whom Zille had entertained plans to merge since at least 2012. But the biggest answer lies in ideology. Zille’s favourite thinker is Francis Fukuyama, and between her and the rest of the party leadership, the dominant role models are Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, Brazil’s Lula da Silva and Britain’s Tony Blair.

Fukuyama is known for his big-picture End of History thesis, but he also writes on more empirical topics. In a 2013 CGD working paper called ‘What Is Governance?’, he tries to identify objective metrics of government performance, and pushes for ‘bureaucratic autonomy’ as one of two gold standards, alongside ‘capacity’. Even Samuel Huntington, Fukuyama’s late opponent, considered this autonomy essential in his book The Clash of Civilizations.

But the professional discussions of years ago had a balanced character, speaking of a ‘Goldilocks’ zone with just enough oversight and just enough autonomy. Since Trump and Brexit, the talk has become more one-sided. Fukuyama has explicitly defended the use of the ‘deep state’, even to manipulate political outcomes, much as the European Union does whenever a population votes the wrong way.

Europe, like the Anglosphere, has its own theoretical model. It’s called ‘non-majoritarian institutions’, the purpose of which is to prevent elected officials from deviating from European centralisation. Giandomenico Majone, who remains one of the most prominent theorists of European federalism, explains the entire point as ensuring that no electorate will be capable of changing the policy direction of its state.

In 2005, Majone wrote a book on this topic called The Dilemmas of European Integration: The Ambiguities and Pitfalls of Integration by Stealth. He quotes Lord Acton on Austro-Hungary: ‘In those countries where different races dwell together [...] the power of the imperial parliament must be limited as jealously as the power of the crown, and many of its functions must be discharged by provincial diets, and a descending series of local authorities’.

This could have been written by Hendrik Verwoerd, one of the primary ‘architects of apartheid’. Majone and Fukuyama also, oddly, end up referring extensively to Arend Lijphart, whose theory of consociationalism was popular in right-establishment circles in 1970s South Africa when reform was debated. The idea was that multicultural democracy could be managed by giving each ethnic bloc a veto, and letting an independent civil service simply work. Like Belgium.

The underappreciated Fabian intellectual Antony Giddens, whose ‘Third Way’ defined not just the Clinton administration but also Tony Blair, Thabo Mbeki and Gerhard Schröder, effectively established the prevailing blueprint for all Western government: a synthesis of American free-market liberalism with socialist ethics. Unions replaced by welfare expansion, ‘ethics’ guarded by unaccountable bureaus, open borders and anti-racism, market incentives for civil servants, ideological constraints on the market, and general financialisation of everything.

But even according to Giddens, this thinking had emerged among both communists and market fundamentalists by the mid-1980s. By marketising the civil service, Thatcher and Reagan allowed it to grow faster. By regulating private enterprise but deregulating trade and finance, Clinton and Blair gave greater lobbying and agenda-setting power to major corporations.

The ideas of Fukuyama, Giddens, Majone and Mazzucato offer the dream of ‘politics without politics’ and ‘ethics without moralism’. The position is that ‘evidence-based’ policy and expert governance can find the best way to govern in the most ‘ethical’ fashion. But as Blair makes clear in his book On Leadership, this is really just a rhetorical strategy to cloak various agendas that one cannot afford to let become part of a political discussion. But as people like Dominic Cummings have exhaustively demonstrated, and as many have observed on the ground, competence is declining everywhere. All of these checks, balances and credentialled checkpoints are becoming worn out, and the system is leaking.

On the right, democracy is regarded with just as much scepticism as in the liberal centre, just a bit more openly. But this has made for unusual bedfellows. Curtis Yarvin and the Peter Thiel network both think democracy is stupid, and populism doubly so, yet have found populism to be a useful vehicle to mount a sort of technocratic dirigisme within the bloated federal bureaucracy.

There is now no meaningful political oversight, and international policy agendas are almost impossible to counter from the national stage. This is something critics of central banking have long observed in their own field — that institutional autonomy ultimately ends up creating a sphere outside government that creates its own policy mandates beyond political accountability or national interest. But there is nobody on top any more; nowhere the buck stops.

What we are doing is cutting the cords attached to all tangible levers, and those who do wield power are receding into some Olympian mountaintop obscured by clouds, perhaps unsure themselves whether they actually control the outcomes any more.

Nobody believes in kings, parliaments, experts or corporations any more, and even exotic ideas become banal in practice. We have fascism without thymos, liberalism without freedom, nationalism without ethnos, communists who cheer corporate management, populists electing anti-democrats, and anti-populists ‘defending democracy’.

No political philosophy means anything any more — the left and right are costumed morons beating each other up for clicks, demographic pluralism appears to have become a foregone conclusion, and the centre stays the centre. Even the most extreme anti-materialist force of the twenty-first century, ISIS, turns out to have been covertly supported in part by the United States for geopolitical reasons before being discarded.

Whatever we come up with to change the status quo, it will have to recognise how deep the dissolution of meaning has become, and let go of our favourite ideas, which are all sinking into the great amorphous foundations. Perhaps, eventually, we can just ignore it.

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

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Samuel de Champlain has been erased from Orillia. As early summer raindrops fell last Wednesday morning, the statue of the great explorer and Father of New France was placed on the back of a flatbed trailer and hauled off into storage.

Orillia’s own city council voted 6–3 to remove the statue, with Mayor Don McIsaac among those opposing the move.

It has been 101 years since the statue was erected in Orillia’s Couchiching Beach Park, a creation of the English sculptor Vernon March, who also designed the National War Memorial of Canada in Ottawa. Generations played in the park beneath Champlain’s shadow, now veiled in tarps after years of ideological vandalism, all part of the campaign to stamp out the memory of Old Canada.

The Champlain statue was larger than life in size and majestic in its intent: to honour those who made possible this country, which men like Vernon March regarded as a great achievement. To continue to commemorate Canada with such a monument was an affront to those seeking to deconstruct this country, and Champlain became a magnet for political, cultural, and even racial resentment.

Champlain’s erasure was not an isolated incident in Ontario, or the rest of Canada for that matter. What happened in Orillia will be the method by which the statue of Queen Victoria in Kitchener will be taken down, along with any and all national symbols of the Canadian people.

The symbols of pre-modern Canada are all targets to be delegitimised, isolated, boxed up, and forgotten, along with the memory and heritage of the people who built the country. By now, most who pay attention to the culture war will be familiar with the pattern by which national symbols are removed.

First, monuments and names that had meaning for generations of Canadians are declared harmful, and the attachment of the majority is subordinated to activists in the minority by way of bureaucratic process. This was the case with the removal of Sir John A. Macdonald’s statue in Victoria, which was taken down after a city council vote without any real public consultation.

Any attempts at dialogue or even compromise are treated as insufficient and temporary delays by the antisocial ideologues who spearhead the removals, for whom only elimination is considered to be progress in the moral sense. Then, the twisted vision of those who led the sanctioned or unsanctioned toppling becomes what replaces the statue’s empty plinth.

The case of Orillia demonstrates the futility of attempting compromise. In 2019, Parks Canada announced that they would modify the plaque beneath Champlain’s figure. Other measures were also announced, such as the inclusion of local Indigenous communities, like the Chippewas of Rama First Nation.

Specifically, Parks Canada thanked the people of Orillia for giving their earnest participation and goodwill in the process, while reiterating that the Champlain monument was a testament to artistic skill and historical vision. According to a survey at the time, 70 per cent of respondents wanted the original monument to stay, with additional elements to satisfy ostensibly popular modern sensibilities.

Then-mayor Steve Clarke said the revised statue ‘needs to recognise our whole history, and that is the great and the good, but it’s also the bad and the ugly’.

The public were mistaken if they thought that consultations and bargaining meant a permanent settlement. What was actually meant was a ratchet. In the following years, the Champlain statue was repeatedly vandalised in the name of ‘decolonisation’, despite the explorer’s friendship with the Huron and others.

The Rama First Nation were unsatisfied with the process, and stated that their position as the Aboriginal rights holder for the Orillia area demanded greater involvement. The statue was never about history or local culture; it was about power. Specifically, it was about power over the people of Orillia, who thought they were having a constructive dialogue about art and history.

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When housing activist Eric Lombardi entered the Ontario Liberal Party (OLP) leadership race this week, many conservatives throughout the province were thrilled. The 32-year-old political outsider is popular among moderates for his pragmatic centrism, and could find himself uniquely qualified to build a cross-partisan coalition that can topple the Ford government and end an era of populist incompetence.

Lombardi, an engineering graduate who has worked in tech and finance, burst onto the activist scene five years ago when he founded More Neighbours Toronto, a YIMBY (‘yes in my backyard’) housing advocacy group. He was among the first and loudest voices in the city to criticise restrictive housing policies (e.g. exclusionary zoning) that throttle residential construction and keep home prices artificially high.

When I attended a More Neighbours Toronto social event in late 2021, I personally witnessed how the organisation attracted a young, wonk-ish, and non-ideological crowd where evidence-based policymaking mattered more than partisan affiliation – earnest nerds, essentially.

Within a year, these people were giving consultations to Ontario’s Housing Affordability Task Force and getting op-eds published in the national press. ‘Thanks, More Neighbours Toronto, for your leadership and advocacy!’ wrote then-leader of the Ontario NDP, Andrea Horwath, after her party adopted many of the group’s recommendations.

Having helped revolutionise the provincial housing debate, Lombardi began to write essays for The Hub (a policy-focused conservative media outlet) that not only excoriated the Ford government, but called attention to national failures on affordability, corruption and generational fairness.

His writing often went viral and seemed particularly resonant with frustrated Millennials. Among other things, he argued that Canada risks becoming a ‘neo-feudal’ society where homeownership is functionally a hereditary privilege, and that Canadian policymakers are betraying younger generations by ignoring our ballooning debt, decaying institutions and bureaucratic bloat.

Yet, despite being an avid critic, Lombardi also knows how to build bridges – as was demonstrated by his rapprochement with the OLP’s previous leader, Bonnie Crombie.

As Mississauga’s mayor, Crombie fiercely opposed Ontario’s YIMBY movement and championed overly-restrictive housing policies. When she became leader in 2024, though, Lombardi joined her team; helped persuade her of the virtues of pro-supply housing reforms; and eventually co-authored the party’s new platform. By focusing on facts and air-tight arguments, he brought a former adversary on-side, much to the benefit of the Ontario Liberals.

When Lombardi told me earlier this year that he was exploring a run for OLP leader, I was ecstatic. Although he and I are personal friends, which creates some bias, he is, genuinely, one of the smartest people I know (and I know a lot of people). As word got out, most moderate conservatives in my social circles shared this enthusiasm, because, despite partisan differences, they respect him for his common sense on issues such as crime and immigration reform, and deep understanding of public policy.

There is another factor at play, though: the chronic misgovernance of Premier Doug Ford – a man who, in the eyes of many conservatives, lacks discernible principles.

It is an open secret that many among Ontario’s conservative intelligentsia possess disdain toward Ford for his perceived lack of intelligence and disregard for conservative values. He governs with a simple-minded populism that, guided by short-term polling considerations, provides neither the economic nor cultural leadership that the province so sorely needs.

When Ford was elected in 2018, he promised to eliminate Ontario’s deficit and significantly reduce its $324 billion net debt. Yet, the deficit persisted and the provincial debt remained undented, reaching $459 by 2026 (approximately a 1.5 per cent increase, after adjusting for inflation and population growth). Instead of fostering a more competitive economy, he poured money into the public sector and corporate subsidies, prioritising managed decline over innovation.

Normal conservatives care about the return-on-investment of their infrastructure projects. Ford, on the other hand, wants to build a mega-tunnel under the 401 highway, even though this wildly expensive project – with an estimated $130-billion price tag – would explode the province’s capital budget without providing commensurate benefits. Burning mountains of taxpayer dollars in front of Queen’s Park would make about as much financial sense.

And while he markets himself as tough on drugs and crime, his government continues to distribute hundreds of thousands of free crack pipes each year despite having no evidence that this promotes public health. He publicly opposes the provision of ‘safer supply’ opioids, yet the province has done absolutely nothing to curtail this failed harm reduction experiment, leading addiction doctors to describe Ontario as the ‘wild west’ of opioid diversion.

This constitutes just a small sample of Ford’s reckless decisions and innumerable hypocrisies, which, collectively, have made it clear to many conservatives that he cannot be trusted.

When skeptics have voiced their concerns, though, they have been met with bullying and censorship. For example, when conservative activists launched Project Ontario, an organisation that advocates for principled governance, last autumn, Ford’s associates allegedly called potential supporters and threatened to sabotage their careers and businesses if they got involved.

If Lombardi manages to become leader of the OLP, there is a good chance that the Liberals can hoover up disaffected conservatives, creating a grand coalition that can finally dislodge Ford from his gravy-encrusted throne.

‘I’ve had at least a dozen friends who voted PC in 2025 tell me they’d vote Liberal with Eric as leader,’ wrote Nolan Welsh, a Montreal-based Liberal organiser, on X this week. His sentiments were shared by Daniel Bordman, a conservative-leaning activist, who posted: ‘This guy will win the Ontario election with 70% of the vote if he becomes leader of the Liberal party.’

‘Eric is one to watch!’ concurred conservative journalist Elie Cantin-Nantel in another post.

Of course, Lombardi first needs to win the leadership race – which is a problem as he is currently an underdog. The fact that he has never been elected to office may increase his cross-partisan appeal, but it also means that he lacks deep party connections.

In contrast, the current presumed front-runner, Navdeep Bains, is a former federal Liberal cabinet minister. Two of the other candidates are sitting MPPs (Rob Cerjanec and Lee Fairclough), with a fourth one (Dylan Marando) being a former advisor to Justin Trudeau.

Lombardi may also find himself thwarted by the sizeable contingent of OLP members who want to move further to the left, and who reportedly engineered Crombie’s ouster in January.

Should these members get their way, though, Ford’s reelection prospects would grow substantially. The OLP desperately needs more votes, and there are roughly twice as many to poach from the Progressive Conservatives (PC) than the Ontario NDP (ONDP), who are polling at 38% and 19%, respectively. Not only is the PC vote generally more elastic and vulnerable to defections, the ONDP have almost never polled below 17%, which suggests that there aren’t that many leftist votes left to steal.

If Lombardi can convince his fellow Liberals that the path to victory hews towards the centre, and that expanding the base requires a fresh face, then perhaps he can neutralise his opponents. To this end, it could be useful to cite the B.C. Liberal Party (which brought together federal liberals and conservatives) as an illustrative, albeit imperfect, comparison.

Moderate conservatives, for their part, should consider supporting Lombardi’s leadership run. (Lombardi’s past Covid comments have proven to be a sticking point for some, and have recently been addressed.) They should remember, however, that compromise goes both ways, and that they certainly will not get everything that they want.

Coalition politics aren’t easy, but, given the failing state of the status quo in Ontario, some outside-the-box thinking is in order.

Adam Zivo is a freelance writer and journalist, director of the Canadian Centre for Responsible Drug Policy, a columnist with the National Post, and a correspondent with The News Forum.

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Today marks sixty-nine years since John Diefenbaker led the Progressive Conservatives to victory in the 1957 federal election. At the time, it was the first non-Liberal government in 22 years.

Diefenbaker would follow that up a year later with a spectacular humiliation of Lester Pearson’s Liberals, winning re-election with a majority of 208 out of 265 seats.

A nationalist and genuine populist, Diefenbaker was one of the few Canadian political leaders of the twentieth century who tried to stop the country’s absorption into the American-led international order. Diefenbaker is a mythical figure among conservatives, largely due to his victories over the otherwise unbeatable Liberals and his dogged resistance to American Cold War power.

That myth presents a problem. Diefenbaker’s 1958 majority was the high-water mark of his career, which began to wobble soon thereafter. Winning a large parliamentary majority does not make one a statesman, as Justin Trudeau and Boris Johnson have illustrated. Diefenbaker’s PCs would lose their majority in 1962, and then government entirely in a snap election held the following year.

Diefenbaker’s many admirers often confuse the size of his 1958 majority with the use he made of it. Certainly, the man brilliantly harnessed populism, but he failed to turn it into a durable, winning conservative doctrine.

No doubt, Diefenbaker stood up for Canada, but imperfectly and, ultimately, unsuccessfully. Even when he tried to champion an older, more venerable vision of Canada, he kicked the legs out from under many of its remaining foundations for personal and political reasons.

The irony of Diefenbaker’s legacy is that the most celebrated parts are progressive, not conservative. He gets credit for reforming health care and putting it on the road to our single-payer programme. Praise is heaped upon Diefenbaker because he broke various barriers for minorities and women, such as appointing Ellen Fairclough to Cabinet; she would spearhead progressive reforms, including the elimination of national-origin immigration restrictions.

Diefenbaker is also widely praised for his Bill of Rights, a statute passed by Parliament which is cited as a precursor to Pierre Trudeau’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Far from being a Tory restorationist, Diefenbaker was an outsized contributor to the rights-based vision of Canada that would be cemented by Lester Pearson and Trudeau.

Diefenbaker’s weaknesses were personal too. One of his biographers stated that the man was ‘never fully in control of his emotions’. He was also suspicious of colleagues, poor at compromise, and reluctant to share authority. Some of it went back to Diefenbaker’s childhood and early adulthood during the First World War, when his German surname made him a target of mockery.

‘I used to get quite upset when my schoolmates teased me about my name,’ Diefenbaker wrote in his memoirs, adding that he was referred to as a ‘Hun’ in his adult life. This trauma, if it can be called that, became the basis for Diefenbaker’s insistence on ‘unhyphenated’ Canadianism as a politician.

It is easy to sympathise with these very human emotions, but they are not the basis for conservative statecraft, nor is erasing national adjectives conducive to that objective. Canada is a compact between two peoples. From them stem all the institutions and trappings that made Canada into a worthy country, not the other way around.

Diefenbaker understood this, to a degree. His PCs were tossed from government in the 1963 federal election by Pearson’s Liberals, with the help of American political operators connected to President John F. Kennedy, but Diefenbaker was not done yet.

From 1963 to 1964, Lester Pearson’s Liberals embarked on a crusade to replace the Red Ensign as Canada’s flag with a more modern and ‘inclusive’ symbol.

Diefenbaker became the champion of the grand old banner, campaigning tirelessly to preserve it. His efforts were well received by English Canadians, only 35 per cent of whom wanted to see the Red Ensign hauled down. But the political power of Quebec and the wider French Canada carried the day, despite the jeers and anger of English-Canadian veterans, in whose faces Pearson all but spat. The iconic photo of the Red Ensign being lowered for the last time on Parliament Hill in 1965 shows Diefenbaker with his head bowed in indignation and protest.

Though a doomed effort, there can be no sneering at Diefenbaker’s defence of the Red Ensign, the most prominent symbol of the British connection. He understood the value of a people’s symbols and history far better than Pearson, whose new flag ironically did little to assuage the rising nationalism in Quebec.

Nonetheless, Diefenbaker’s devotion to the old flag in the 1960s, and his devotion to the British world, was at odds with his enthusiasm for the Commonwealth of Nations, already transformed from an imperial family of nations into a post-colonial forum for Africa and Asia’s third-world revolutionaries. As prime minister, Diefenbaker frequently put Canada on the same side as those seeking to eradicate British colonial legacies, much as Pearson did in his own way.

As with so many other Canadian conservative leaders, Quebec was Diefenbaker’s Achilles’ heel. When he won a decisive share of Quebec’s seats in his 1958 majority, it was not a realignment but a transaction.

Quebec’s provincial government of the time, led by the right-wing nationalist Maurice Duplessis, was at loggerheads with the Liberals and wanted them out of power in Ottawa. Duplessis committed his political machine to helping Diefenbaker get rid of the Liberals, to great effect. By 1963, Duplessis was dead and his government had been ejected from office. Diefenbaker was left with no allies in Quebec, leading to the party’s annihilation there in the 1963 federal election.

Diefenbaker did not help his case by rejecting special status for Quebec and an expansion of recognition for the French language. He thought he was defending Confederation from splitting into ‘Two Nations’ by insisting on a single national identity. In reality, not recognising Quebec as a distinct nation went against Canada’s founding compact, and he paid the price.

By losing Quebec, Diefenbaker lost government, paving the way for a future defined almost solely by the Liberals. Even Diefenbaker’s vision of a single Canada that included just two languages and a limitless bounty of new rights to be created was more similar than not to the country that Pierre Trudeau would officially remake with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982.

In fairness to Diefenbaker, his stridently progressive conservatism was not out of place in the Anglosphere at the time.

In 1964, Enoch Powell, who would make his famous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech a few years later, was becoming a pariah within the Conservative Party by calling for far stricter restrictions on immigration. Prior to 1964 and the rise of Barry Goldwater, the American Republican Party of the 1950s expanded the size of the federal government and enforced civil rights literally at the point of the rifle and bayonet.

Concurrently, the centre-right Coalition government of Australia was, like Canada, liberalising immigration so that countries of origin were deprioritised.

Still, this only magnifies the failures of the Canadian right, which has mistaken moderation for a political identity for far too long. There are countless examples of this.

Ontario’s vaunted former premier Bill Davis, who is still admired by conservatives today, was a major booster of Trudeau’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Brian Mulroney strengthened multiculturalism by codifying it with the 1988 Multiculturalism Act. The modern Conservative Party still often shakes in its boots when given the opportunity to differentiate itself on culture and identity.

Diefenbaker was an indisputably admirable man, as his many biographies attest. These accounts include his support for natural resource sovereignty and northern development, which are more relevant than ever. His support for property rights is salient today, and his strong anti-communism and devotion to the Crown and Canadian traditions should be emulated.

However, his canonisation among Canadian conservatives is the result of his ability to win a historic majority, rather than his having left a solid ideological legacy. The next two decades following the fall of his government were among the most progressive and revolutionary in Canadian history. It should make conservatives question whether this was helped or impeded by Diefenbaker’s government.

Diefenbaker loved Canada’s history and culture, but was not capable of crafting a plan to defend them. He could win the largest majority in Canadian history but could not establish a new counter-regime following 22 years of Liberal government. He briefly defeated the Liberals, but did little to stem the tide of capital-L Canadian Liberalism.

Diefenbaker was not some sort of great conservative exception to the unravelling of Canada, only a remarkable interlude.

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

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On 5 December 2025, the B.C. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, or DRIPA, took on new and unfortunate legal significance that has led to a whole new level of legal risk in British Columbia. It was on that date that the B.C. Court of Appeal delivered judgment in Gitxaala v. British Columbia (Chief Gold Commissioner), 2025 BCCA 430.

Unfortunately for the B.C. NDP government, the B.C. Court of Appeal determined in Gitxaala that, when properly interpreted, DRIPA, coupled with an amendment to the Interpretation Act put forward by David Eby in 2021, when he was Attorney General, has brought the articles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or UNDRIP, into the positive law of British Columbia.

Put simply, this means that a provincial statute apparently never intended by the government to be subject to judicial oversight has now become fully justiciable and allows challenges to be brought through the courts against any B.C. laws that are alleged to be inconsistent with UNDRIP. As a result, virtually any B.C. law can be rendered of no force or effect if found by a court to be inconsistent with UNDRIP.

The initial response to Gitxaala 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 Premier described the results of the judgment as an ‘existential threat’ to the province. The government then announced that it would seek leave to appeal Gitxaala to the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC).

On Thursday, 21 May 2026, the SCC granted the province leave to appeal.

Let’s be crystal clear about the B.C. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, 2019, or DRIPA.

This is a piece of provincial legislation put in place by the Horgan government in 2019 to align all of British Columbia’s laws with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or UNDRIP.

As a piece of provincial legislation, DRIPA can be amended, suspended, or repealed by the B.C. legislature. What DRIPA says and what legal effect it has can be determined entirely by the legislature. If the legislation is causing legal problems, those can be fixed through amendment, suspension, or repeal. Simple.

While Canada already possessed the most comprehensive protections for Aboriginal and treaty rights anywhere in the world under its Constitution, the B.C. NDP and, later, the Trudeau administration in Ottawa decided it would be a good idea to effectively override Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 as the appropriate framework for achieving reconciliation in B.C. and Canada, and replace it with UNDRIP.

As former Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould has correctly noted in the past, ‘… simplistic approaches, such as adopting the Declaration as being Canadian law, are unworkable …’

The concept that UNDRIP should form the framework for reconciliation in Canada came directly from the Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015. It is likely that this was the basis for the enthusiastic adoption of DRIPA (and thus UNDRIP) by the government of British Columbia in 2019, followed by the government of Canada in 2021.

The NDP government intended that its adoption of UNDRIP was to be accomplished through a process carried out by way of a closed and totally secretive alliance of provincial officials and the B.C. First Nations Leadership Council (FNLC). It involved those parties, and no one else, sitting down to ‘co-develop’ interpretations of the various unimaginably vague articles of UNDRIP and comparing them to existing and forthcoming B.C. laws, with the goal of amending the latter to achieve conformity with the former.

According to the NDP government, it was never their intention that this process be subjected to court oversight, despite then Attorney General Eby’s amendments to the B.C. Interpretation Act stating:

8.1(3) Every Act and regulation must be construed as being consistent with the Declaration.

On 20 April, Rob Shaw detailed on CHEK News the history of the Premier’s and his Attorney General’s attempts to deal with the Court of Appeal decision and the apparently huge potential legal liability that the Premier himself admitted it creates:

“Eby pushed back on questions about whether the continued changing of his position on DRIPA — from saying it was ‘urgent’ in January to proposing to amend it, then suspend it, then make it a confidence motion, then back down from that confidence motion, then abandon the changes entirely — has undermined public confidence in his leadership.”

Flip-flop, flip-flop, flip-flop — no less than six times in a row.

The FNLC immediately pounced on the Premier, letting him know 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 (under the terms of UNDRIP itself), which they indicated in no uncertain terms would not be forthcoming.

Premier Eby and Attorney General Sharma now found themselves caught in the middle of a disagreement with the FNLC, which is adamant that it will accept no changes to DRIPA whatsoever and insists that the government live with the result of UNDRIP effectively being positive law in British Columbia — with all of the attendant significant legal liability, as admitted by Eby himself, that will engender.

And what if the Premier had refused and proceeded with his amendments or suspensions, which he had originally said were ‘non-negotiable', as the legislature has every right to do in the public interest?

In a news release dated 9 April 2026, the FNLC made it abundantly clear what would happen if the Premier proceeded to amend or suspend portions of DRIPA without their 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.’

Since 2019, when DRIPA was passed, the FNLC has been given the power under that legislation to effectively decide what the government can and cannot choose to do in legislation, regulation, or even policy. Some commentators, including myself, have pointed to the fact that this effectively amounts to enabling the co-governance of the province by the government and the FNLC — a conclusion confirmed publicly by the Regional Chief of the AFN, Terry Teegee.

So powerful is that apparent practical and possibly legal veto over provincial legislative supremacy — particularly when backstopped by actual threats of ‘direct action’ and ‘collective resistance’ against the government and, presumably, all British Columbians — that it was enough for Attorney General Sharma to ‘tap the Premier on the shoulder’ and convince him to stand down in favour of six more months of talks with the FNLC, or longer.

Now the SCC has indicated that it will hear the province’s appeal in Gitxaala — an outcome which led the Premier and his Attorney General to state that they are ‘very pleased’ the court has chosen to do so. This, despite the fact that there is no way of knowing how the SCC will decide such an appeal.

It is just as possible that it may choose to affirm the judgment of the majority of the B.C. Court of Appeal as it is that it will choose to overturn it. Such an outcome would clearly require the Eby government to move to amend the legislation. More worrisome is the fact that the Eby government has no idea what else the country’s highest court may say about the legal enforceability of UNDRIP generally, or specifically in the context of the province’s legislative authority.

Unfortunately, the reality of an appeal process in the SCC is also that it takes a considerable amount of time to complete and for a judgment to issue from the Court. It will use up considerable judicial and court resources and will cost the B.C. taxpayer a large amount of money. It could be well over a year, or perhaps longer, before a judgment is rendered by the SCC in Gitxaala.

In the meantime, we have a Premier and his Attorney General choosing to allow what they have stated to be virtually unlimited provincial legal liability to continue — resulting from UNDRIP being positive law in B.C. This liability can now continue for six more months or possibly well over a year, because they are afraid to confront the FNLC’s effective veto — through threats and intimidation — of their legislative authority, rather than moving quickly to protect the interests of 5.7 million other British Columbians.

More problematically, we have an NDP government preparing to waste the limited and valuable time and resources of the highest court in Canada by pursuing an appeal of Gitxaala, when this whole debacle could have been solved easily and readily in the provincial legislature during its recently ended sitting.

To repeat, DRIPA is a piece of provincial legislation that can be amended, suspended, or repealed by the B.C. legislature. What DRIPA says and what legal effect it has can be determined entirely by the legislature. There is absolutely no need at all for an appeal to the SCC to deal with a legislative problem that is easily fixed with the proper political will. Clearly, the proper political will is missing, except for the will to continue to try to prop up a piece of legislation that never should have been conceived in the first place.

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

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Culture is where we live, breathe, and have our being. It is the sum total of the norms, artefacts, institutions, beliefs, and patterns of life that make up a people. Tools and their use in the activity of making—what the Greeks called techne, and what we now call the technological—are therefore at the core of culture-making. Technology has always served human aims, but now, more than before, it has come to enframe and structure the whole of life, shaping and, at times, supplanting those aims through the expansion of efficiency-seeking and controlling technique as an end in itself. This orientation is consistent with the progressive worldview of both left and right, in which boundaries are to be overcome and limits transgressed in pursuit of the ever-fleeting satisfaction of subjective desire.

The social consequences of this worldview are becoming harder to ignore: anomie, isolation, loneliness, and demographic decline all bear the mark of a culture obsessed with technology yet increasingly estranged from human flourishing. It was not the case just years ago, but in 2026, most people can now recognise either inherent flaws or serious deficiencies in the omnipresence of the digital, social media, euthanasia and assisted suicide, transgender ideology, rampant pornography, the prospect of surrogacy, assisted reproductive technology that severs life from the loving bond of mother and father, and much more—even if they are afraid to say so. All of these things involve the deployment of technique to create technology that allows us to exert ever more control in the interest of unrestrained subjective desire and the impulse to overcome everything that is given.

Indeed, even Liberals in Canada have at least begun to recognise that certain features of social media design are harmful, even if they often take the wrong approach to content through ‘hate speech’ and ‘online harms.’ With a few notable exceptions, conservatives, by contrast, have had little of substance to say, treating technology with the same naïve laissez-faire they bring to so many other cultural questions, as though it were simply a neutral engine of innovation and growth.

Culture must be preserved, improved upon and passed on, and that requires an approach to technology ordered to that end. We have to recognise that many of the social ills that animate conservatives of different stripes are the consequence of ignoring culture and the technology that shapes it, and of an excessive reliance on the assumption that individuals should always be left alone to make their own choices, even if those choices evidently inflict harm on themselves or others.

This overemphasised belief in unrestrained freedom has left us powerless to properly design technology, and tailor its application in countless domains of law and policy. But we all recognise in our own lives that happiness is the result of commitment, of order, of using our faculties well rather than poorly, and many now see that we need a major shift in emphasis on the side of order in our politics and policy. We can’t continue to look to the liberal traditions of the libertine left or libertarian right for the answer—we need properly conservative ideas manifested in ordered liberty that tilts towards the side of order and manifests itself in policy ordered to the common good. Inspired by George Grant, we must recognise our unique position next to the United States—a nation that views technology as inherently transformative. In line with our own philosophy of peace, order, and good government, our approach to technology should build upon the past rather than break from it, ensuring that innovation ultimately serves humanity rather than supplants it.

The Canadian position

Canada stands beside the United States—the paradigmatic nation of the progressive ethos where technology stands for unrestrained freedom and constant change, which are treated as the foundational values of the culture and pursued almost as ends in themselves. Grant recognised this clearly. America’s immense productive power and technological ambition are inseparable from its revolutionary character, which is to treat inherited forms, natural limits, and settled boundaries as things to be overcome. It is a political philosophy that has generated extraordinary wealth and dynamism, but it has also unleashed a vision of progress that is increasingly inimical to the human.

The evidence shows as much. Compared with Canada, the United States has markedly higher inequality, higher violent crime and a homicide rate about three times as high, and worse health care outcomes for a significant part of the population, despite far higher spending. It also has a higher share of children living with a single parent. On some other family indicators—such as divorce and births outside marriage—we are more comparable, and there are contrary trends like the rise in euthanasia and assisted suicide in Canada. But the broader pattern remains: the United States spawned the left-wing takeover of the universities, and every socially liberal phenomenon that is now worse here originated there. The U.S. has been the world leader in technological dynamism, but also in the commercialisation of practices and industries that treat natural limits as obstacles to be overcome. Commercial surrogacy is illegal in Canada but permitted in many U.S. states; the U.S. has built a vast commercial gambling market, including expansions into online gambling, sports gambling and polymarkets, with clear, documented harms: increased bankruptcy and insolvency rates, addiction, and declining mental health; its speech regime is more permissive towards pornography than Canada’s, and it is the United States that spawned Playboy and the pornography industry we have with us today; and many of the firms most responsible for the psychologically manipulative attention economy are American. These things derive from its highly libertarian society—the champion of ever-increasing, unrestrained, and unrefined liberty.

Standing next to that power, Canada should not simply imitate it, whether in its progressive or libertarian form as we have thus far. Our task should be to soften the sharper edges of an all-enframing technological order and to assert political and cultural agency over it. But we must not do so in the paltry way we’ve attempted to date.

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L’un des reproches les plus persistants envers la droite canadienne consiste à l’assimiler au conservatisme américain. Dès la fondation du Parti conservateur du Canada en 2004, les libéraux affirmaient dans une publicité que l’on ne « reconnaîtrait plus le Canada » si Stephen Harper prenait le pouvoir, car il enverrait des troupes en Irak, permettrait le port d’armes et démantèlerait le système de santé. Vingt ans plus tard, Pierre Poilievre se voit caricaturé en « mini-Trump », alors même qu’il existe un fossé entre son propre libéralisme classique et le national-populisme du président américain.

Ce raccourci rhétorique joue cependant sur une ressort de la psyché canadienne depuis le changement de régime opéré par Pierre Trudeau en 1982, selon lequel être un patriote canadien revient d’abord à être « plus à gauche que les États-Unis ». Le pays ne se définit plus par son histoire et encore moins par ses peuples fondateurs, mais par un rejet de certaines caractéristiques « de droite » prêtées aux États-Unis : système de santé privé, militarisme, port d’armes, libéralisme économique ou contrôle de l’immigration.

Une telle posture politique ne fait pas une identité nationale, surtout considérant que beaucoup de ces éléments ne se retrouvent pas dans la plupart des pays européens. « Ces différences ne sont donc pas propres au Canada. » Surtout, l’anti-américanisme bon marché de la gauche canadienne serait bien plus crédible si elle n’agissait pas elle-même en permanence comme une succursale du Parti démocrate américain.

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