‘Among these fields is situated and seated the said town of Hochelaga, near to and adjoining a mountain…we named this mountain Mont-Royal’, wrote the explorer Jacques Cartier in 1535.

The value one places on history as essential to a country’s present and future is one of the great divisions among civilised people, Canadians included.

Another division peculiar to Canada is the fierce debate over whether Montreal or Toronto is superior, which may never truly die, and hopefully it does not.

If you think a born-and-bred Vancouverite’s opinion is irrelevant to that debate, stop reading now. But if you consider a relative outsider’s view valuable precisely because it is uncoloured by hometown bias, perhaps read on.

People often treat the Montreal–Toronto rivalry as something like a hockey pool, citing demographic data, the total number of head offices and GDP figures. An imperfect comparison would be to declare Milan, rather than Rome, Italy’s greatest city because the former is the modern Italian financial centre.

However busy Milan and Toronto may be, commercial bustle alone is no evidence of glory.

No doubt, Toronto is an important and famous city central to Canadian life. Nobody should deny this or overlook the charms that survive there. Nevertheless, Montreal remains the great Canadian city because no other place from sea to sea has ever come close to shaping history in the same way. Nor has any other city been the setting for so much of the ambition and conflict that made Canadians who they are.

Sentimentality aside, Montreal still commands the largest share of the Canadian imagination today, and that share was greater still in decades past. Even those who scoff at Montreal and the often brutal hang-ups of Laurentian Canada still spend time and energy doing so. While Montreal is no longer Canada’s most populous city, the size of its population has never been the sole reason for its greatness.

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Born in the ghost village of Point Anne, near Belleville, Manly E. MacDonald (1889–1971) was known as the ‘Interpreter of Old Ontario’. The son of a Bay of Quinte farmer-fisherman, MacDonald left over 2,000 works that capture the beauty and spirit of local Canadians and their lifeways. He depicted our lands and villages, our grandparents, and countless distant-felt and rooted moments which inspire and remind us in an age of mass and scale, speed and change.

Classically trained, MacDonald began his arts education locally at the age of thirteen and continued his studies at prestigious art schools in Buffalo, Boston, and Toronto. He launched his career as an official war artist tasked with depicting the dedicated agricultural workers of the First World War – those men and women who fought the all-too-important battle against starvation at home and abroad. MacDonald’s career spanned sixty years, punctuated and supplemented only by occasional fishing, ending in 1971, when he returned to the soil of the Old Ontario core, the land he loved, was born in, and painted with deep and undeniable affection.

First exhibited in his home town in 1922, MacDonald went on to be included in the first British Empire Exhibition (1924), the New Canadian Pavilion (1925), the esteemed Tate Gallery in London (1938), and the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The highlight of his career was arguably his 1959 commission of the Toronto skyline for Queen Elizabeth II – an honour that the modernists and abstractionists of his day felt was a royal insult given MacDonald’s status as a traditionalist painter.

This was the defining conflict of MacDonald’s life. By the middle of his career, the tradition he participated in was falling out of fashion. New forms and movements were coming into being, and society was undergoing radical change. The human subject was beginning to be seen as outmoded and overdone. Focus not just on the human subject but on the real object became reactionary, doubly so for the rural landscapes and quaint villages of MacDonald. As new ideas and interests gained institutional sway, money and attention were increasingly directed to art which perpetuated and better represented the developing set of mid-twentieth-century values.

Elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Art and the Ontario Society of Artists (OSA), MacDonald found that his continual protests were ill received by the ascendant progressives of the rapidly modernising art world. In opposition to what he perceived as a creeping modernism that sidelined talented artists, MacDonald resigned from the OSA in 1951. An active member for over thirty years, he was cleared from the records, and his name remains absent from the rolls to this day.

Though MacDonald received the royal commission in 1959, civic and popular commissions were slower to accommodate new and transgressive cultural developments. The next generation of traditionalists, MacDonald felt, would not be so lucky, and were well on the way to marginalisation and cultural endangerment if education and incentives deprivileged them for long enough. MacDonald was concerned not with his own personal career but with the future of Canadian culture and the foreseeable displacement of young and talented artists in the face of a critical, institutional, avant-garde shift.

Not some stodgy automaton thoughtlessly imitating the past, MacDonald cared deeply about art as an iterative and evolving practice. He personally embraced a bright, non-traditional colour palette and new impressionistic painting methods. He was never one to dismiss work merely for innovation. Instead, he is said to have commented that it was ridiculous for art students to ignore and not study the work of the Old Masters. It was not change but an explosive rupture of tradition that MacDonald feared in the abstract and deconstructive turn.

Importantly, representational art was never some stale, outmoded process of duplication. Great representational artists do not copy a given subject faithfully, as it is in the world. There is a great deal between pure abstraction and one-to-one realism. It takes tremendous skill not only to capture the essence of a thing but to draw out features with purpose and intention and cause the subject to inhabit a character and a chosen meaning. The process itself, at its most successful, is fundamentally interpretative and intrinsically semantically additive. So, it is not staleness or cultural stagnation, as modernist narratives often suggest, but the power over the culture-spirit of a given people that, for the modernists and their descendants, made traditional representational art such a thing worth deconstructing and disinheriting.

Traditionalists everywhere were starting to feel the squeeze rolling into the 1960s. Western culture was speeding towards deconstruction, the sort that would come to dominate from the academy to the cinema into the twenty-first century. Ambiguity, critique, reduction, and constructivist interpretability were ever more the standards of greatest value, depth, and quality. From the perspective of the classically educated and the traditionally rooted, there was coming to be scarcely any such thing as ‘good art’; there were no authoritative standards of merit, only equivalent meanings, preferences, and divergent artistic styles – a world defined in reality by the success of right-think, where art residencies, scholarships, and accolades accrued continuously to the revolutionary vanguard.

MacDonald was not alone in rejecting the modernist-abstractionist pivot. MacDonald was part of a talented group of skilled Canadian traditionalists who defected from the OSA, all converging on a preference for mastery and technique, and a desire to contribute to place and culture, against transgression, ‘the message’, and the accompanying yarns and nuggets of metaphor that would for decades receive the lion’s share of praise and patronage.

Kenneth Forbes (1892–1980) followed in the footsteps of his father, John Colin Forbes. His father was a founding member of the OSA and a portraitist of such venerable figures as Sir John A. Macdonald, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, and Sir William Gladstone. Kenneth, like his father, was a prime ministerial portraitist, painting prime ministers Borden, Bennett, Churchill, and Diefenbaker. In 1972, he published a scathing 67-page critique titled Great Art to the Grotesque. Going a step further than MacDonald, he argued that gallery directors, museum curators, and wealthy patrons were being duped into buying junk art by hacks, cons, and conspiratorial marketers. Forbes argued that rather than a matter of personal taste, the abstractionist pivot was a phenomenon of manufactured opinion that was supplanting the more serious and thoughtful work of talented artists who followed the painstaking methods of brilliant masters.

Marion Long was a decorated portraitist and the second woman admitted to the Royal Canadian Academy as a full academician. In her 1921 article, ‘Developing a National Art’, she called for the development of a national Canadian art rooted in local identity. She often portrayed military men and received the King Haakon VII Medal of Liberation for services to Norway during the Second World War. Exhibited across the country and throughout the Empire, her work can be found today in the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the University of Toronto, Annesley Hall, Queen’s University, and the Art Gallery of Hamilton.

With several other collectors and painters, the traditionalist trio founded the Ontario Institute of Painters (OIP) in 1958, intending it as a rival to the OSA. Its most notable event was the 1959 ‘Points of View’ exhibition at the Public Library and Art Museum in London, Ontario, which deliberately hung traditionalist OIP works alongside pieces by the abstractionist Painters Eleven. The intent was to highlight the technical superiority of traditionalist painters. But as happened with the traditionalists in our churches, academies, and social organisations, the OIP never reached the same heights as the OSA. The traditionalist rearguard, full of conviction, stalled, having packed up and started from square one without any of the clout, money, or influence which might have steered the development of the next generation of Canadian culture. They were old. They were dying. And they left the academies, the review panels, and the next generation almost entirely in the hands of the movements they opposed. The now-defunct OIP’s primary accomplishment in real terms was to give traditional Canadian representational art a quiet place to fall into a coma. Had they weathered the storm and continued fighting within the institutions, accepting losing battles but remaining in places of influence, perhaps planting the seeds of a future counter-revolution, there is no telling how things might have developed differently. Instead, traditionalists were severed from the next generation and excluded from developing the spirit of their time.

Men like MacDonald surrendered the institutions and unwittingly contributed to the decline of the very things they aimed to conserve.

More bereft of a sense of place and identity than ever before, one can look back nostalgically on the forlorn traditionalism of post-First World War Canada. Perhaps one can believe that its falling away was part of an inevitable functional process in which tired and obsolete modes were supplanted by ones which better served social needs or material interests. The modernist-abstractionist rupture is often presented as the next stage of development following the discovery of the limitations of representational academic and folk art.

But this is just not true; abstraction itself is not intrinsically acidic to an existing culture-spirit. Before the Painters Eleven were the Group of Seven. Where might we have been had there been a constructive rather than an iconoclastic dialectic? One with a genuine synthesis of new and old. Perhaps a National Canadian Art as Marion Long spoke about, one that evoked the primal force of the land and the strength and vitality of the people who settled it. Instead, we faced the Eleven’s abstraction, one which not only rejected the Group’s nationalism and adopted a globalist American aesthetic with little to say about Canada, but also lived in eternal definition by that which it critiqued and by all that it is not.

In some respects, we must be like MacDonald. The fires of collective spirit require new wood. We must be willing to learn and adapt, able to kindle our inheritance using new and constructive methods. Unlike MacDonald, however, we must be ready to create a true syncretism – an adaptive art with the spiritual potency to shape belief and identity in the modern day. And very much the opposite of MacDonald, we must be willing to stand amongst our enemies, weather their criticism, and fight out the storm of institutional capture. We must dig in. We must hold on to institutional power, even if that means years of lost votes and countless moments shouted down.

There are some who write art off as being ‘degenerate’ or ‘subversive’. It is a common myth both that art is left-wing and that the creative process involves an openness that runs counter to the exclusionary, stodgy, and set-in-its-ways temperament of rightist men.

But even a basic survey of history suggests that this is not true. Twentieth-century art of the liberal and progressive traditions, if it is even generally good, stands almost always on the shoulders of a rooted and reactionary past. Say what you will, there is still Shakespeare at the Stratford Opera House, even if it is tired, peppered with land acknowledgements, and littered with twenty-first-century ‘enhancements’ like Bridgerton-style casting.

Our enemies are still caught deconstructing the 1950s, living in a time that doesn’t exist any more. There is nothing except for institutions in the way of our cultural power. There is no reason but low-brow, knuckle-dragging stupidity not to get serious about art.

Anyone who rolls their eyes at art is basically unserious about the future of their way of life. It is essentially impossible for them to put forward a respectable politics. There is no future without art. There is nothing to transmit. There is a blank slate, a void that some force or other will fill.

So let’s go forward. We ought not to jump back to the old ways. There is no bringing back the dead. It is our turn to batter down gates and seize castles, strike down giants, tear down icons, to have a cultural revolution – one that recovers seriousness of craft, rootedness in place and heritage, and the capacity of art to speak to the transcendent and to the collective self.

Michael J. Ruttan-Stokes is a nationalist political activist. He envisions a distinct and sovereign Canada rooted in the tradition of ‘peace, order, and good government.’ He graduated from Queen’s University with a degree in philosophy and psychology.

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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 cultural landscape, consider supporting our work with a generous donation.

Imagine that the elites of the old Soviet Union had known nothing about communism.

What if they had never heard of Marx or Lenin and had known nothing of Das Kapital or What Is to Be Done? Versions of such questions have been asked before, and they sound absurd. And yet, the same kind of absurdity may now be found in the West. The regnant ideology from Hawaii to Helsinki and from Aberdeen to Athens is hardly ever mentioned, nor do Western elites ever seem to invoke the names of its theorists. When was the last time a European or American statesman mentioned John Stuart Mill or John Rawls? And when have our elites spoken of anything other than the vague abstraction that they call ‘values’?

The ideology to which I allude is, of course, liberalism. Its nineteenth-century heyday was ushered in by the British Liberal Party and the adolescent American and French republics. The early twentieth century seemed to see its death; the world after 1945, its resurrection; and the ‘end of history’ of the 1990s, its final triumph. In more recent years, those with ears to hear detect either the liberal death knell or the toot of the liberal cavalry horn. Which one you hear depends entirely upon partisan obedience, since there is no political party anywhere in the West that does not profess to stand for personal freedom—the primary liberal shibboleth.

That would seem to amount to an interminable disagreement, perhaps even a liberal civil war. And yet, everyone seems to agree that something has gone wrong with liberalism. We are either too liberal or not liberal enough. Liberalism, depending on whom you ask, is either the cure or the disease. As Homer Simpson said of alcohol, liberalism is both ‘the cause of, and the solution to, all of life’s problems’. Commentators, academics, and politicians regularly declare that the post-Cold War liberal order—emphasising individual rights, free markets, open societies, democratic institutions, and international norms—is unravelling. Some, such as Anne Applebaum, say that it is already gone.

It seems to me that liberalism’s most ardent partisans have lately made a very poor case for their beliefs. Political scientists and politicians are notably divided as to whether liberalism is a political philosophy or the absence of a political philosophy. Some speak of liberalism as though it were synonymous with modernity or the values of the Enlightenment. Liberalism, as others say, means that the state is above the ideological fray, mediating among competing worldviews and visions of the good life. Something like this idea is associated with Sir Isaiah Berlin and his assumption of value pluralism. For Berlin and others who follow this line of thinking, human values cannot accordingly be reduced or subsumed into a single principle, and many of them are equally valid. If this be true, then human beings must be free to choose among those values. Those who espouse this idea hold that liberalism is essential to harmonious living in the contemporary West, while their opponents see it as moral relativism or ambivalence that erodes human culture.

To be blunt, few ideas are actually less self-evident than the theory that ‘all men are created equal’ or that everyone has ‘natural and imprescriptible rights’, as the American Declaration of Independence and the French Rights of Man and the Citizen, respectively, declare. We see similar boldness in our own time in the language of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its ‘recognition’ of the ‘inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family’. Nor is it obvious that human beings are free by nature. On such assertions all other liberal freedoms and rights repose, and we assert them sometimes very loudly, but assertion is not proof. If there were any convincing rational proof, we would know by now. But the proofs offered by the likes of Hume, Kant, and Rawls fail to convince anyone who is not already a true believer.

To put that another way, one of the main problems with contemporary liberalism is that it is poorly understood. Many avowed liberals would, I think, be surprised to discover two things. The first is that liberalism emerged as a political theology. The earliest liberals’ assumptions about human freedom and equality are built on a foundation laid by mediaeval Western Christianity.

We can understand liberalism’s emergence from the Christian vision of freedom by examining what British academic and commentator John Gray called the four ‘elements’ of liberalism. Liberalism, he says, is individualist, egalitarian, universalist, and meliorist—a formulation that Francis Fukuyama has also adopted. But it seems to me that we should add a fifth: liberalism is also secularist. Altogether, then, liberalism asserts the primacy of the individual over the collective; it confers on all people the same moral status by virtue of an emphasis on unconstrained choice and free will; it presupposes the moral unity of the entire human species; it distinguishes between a secular and a religious realm; and it affirms that society and politics are not immutable and static but susceptible of improvement.

This article is an edited excerpt from The Crisis of Liberalism: The Origin and Destiny of Freedom, by Michael Bonner. It is on-sale online and in stores across Canada.

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The past decade has seen the cultural ascendancy of social progressivism within the cultural ecosystem of the West. This ascendancy has spread across the cultural landscape of Canada, including, most importantly, the academy.

With this change has come a homogenisation of the views of academics, 88 per cent of whom vote for left-leaning parties according to a 2025 Fraser Institute report. In this environment, a substantial proportion of students across the political spectrum do not feel that they can speak their minds. According to another 2025 report, 37 per cent of right-leaning students and 30 per cent of left-leaning students fear formal consequences for expressing honest opinions in their classes.

The homogenisation and self-censorship that characterise academia in the modern age undermine the capacity for open dialogue and freedom of speech to flourish within Canada, hindering the ability for transformative societal improvement to occur.

Perhaps the most significant development beyond the censoriousness of modern-day institutions has been the rise in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes, which are now embedded in virtually all major post-secondary institutions across Canada. These institutions sell racial grievance politics, promoting intergroup division at the expense of merit and competence, further undermining free speech. As a 2023 Heterodox Academy report notes, a greater number of DEI personnel per undergraduate at a university is related to higher levels of intolerance towards conservative speakers.

Many have advocated in opposition to the progressive hegemony of academia, believing that entering the institutions for the purposes of changing them from within is the best strategy. But the people who oppose those ends are standing at the gates and are in charge of hiring prospective academics and administrators.

While the struggle for the heart of universities is fundamentally an ideological one, on a material, substantive level, the challenge is one of personnel. In the absence of personnel already aligned with the objective of restoring merit and freedom of speech, or institutional incentives to force universities to act accordingly, it is exceedingly difficult to change the universities.

Some provinces have made efforts to try to address these issues, most notably Alberta and Ontario. In 2018, Ontario instituted a policy requiring every publicly funded post-secondary institution in the province to develop and institute a free-speech policy, with Alberta following suit in 2019.

But these policies have not done what they aimed to do. Alberta’s policy did not stop Kathleen Lowrey from being dismissed from an administrative position at the University of Alberta in 2020 over her views that transgender identity doesn’t trump biological sex for policy decisions. It did not stop Frances Widdowson from being fired from her position as an associate professor at Mount Royal University in 2021 for questioning whether the Canadian residential school system constituted genocide. It didn’t even allow Widdowson to be rehired when an arbitrator ruled in 2024 that her firing was disproportionate to her conduct.

Further, while some institutions, particularly in Alberta, including the University of Alberta and the University of Calgary, have begun to move away from DEI in their messaging, instead favouring slogans such as ‘access, community, and belonging’, these changes have not fundamentally affected the underlying structure of DEI and have instead cemented it under a different name.

The problem is that provincial governments have neglected to use hard power to address the failures of universities to live up to their ideals. In the absence of hard-line enforcement of free speech, meritocracy, and competent governance, post-secondary institutions will largely carry on as usual.

In fact, the present situation is even worse than a mere absence of enforcement. The Canadian federal government actively incentivises the promotion of DEI within universities, hindering universities in the process. For example, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) offers Dimensions Canada Grants valued at up to $100,000, which are designed to ‘help postsecondary institutions strengthen the competencies that they need to increase equity, diversity and inclusion’. Such initiatives further cement social progressivism as the only legitimate perspective to hold in the academy.

Many are uncomfortable with the idea of government involvement in universities to address their failures because of an intrinsic fear of intervention. But this ignores the present reality of universities, which are already largely propped up by government involvement. According to Statistics Canada, in the 2024–25 academic year, 43.1 per cent of university revenues came directly from government revenues. The purpose of this involvement should, ideally, be to support universities in their efforts to benefit the general public. The extent to which they succeed or fail in this effort should dictate how much government involvement and what kind of government involvement should take place.

There are some actions which it is not reasonable for the government to be expected to do. For example, due to the precedent set by the 1906 Flavelle Commission, it is not reasonable to expect the government to hand-pick administrators or professors to replace those who have served to undermine the aims of universities and who, in some cases, were themselves illegitimately hired through DEI policies. But several things can be done.

The simplest action to take is to defund DEI through changes in both fiscal decisions and regulations on universities. Florida has already done wonders in this regard. In 2023, Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill that officially prohibits public universities and colleges in the state from spending state or federal money on programmes or campus activities that advocate for DEI. Not only did the policy prevent state tax dollars from being spent on DEI, but it also prevented federal tax dollars from being spent on DEI. Controlling federal funding or other federal activities at the provincial level is not unheard of in Canada. For example, Alberta’s Provincial Priorities Act requires many provincial entities to obtain prior approval from the provincial government before entering into, extending, or renewing an agreement with the federal government. Thus, federal government reforms would not be required for an individual provincial government to block DEI funding to universities within its jurisdiction.

Beyond funding changes, provincial governments that have instituted regulations surrounding freedom of speech on campus must be more aggressive in enforcing their own rules. This should be done with measures including, but not limited to, tying funding to compliance with such policies. Universities are not invincible. As cases such as that of Laurentian University show, when a university goes under financially, it is willing to significantly restructure governance and operations to stay afloat. With many Canadian universities facing growing financial strain due to international student cuts, including the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, the University of Calgary, and Fanshawe College, this now presents an excellent opportunity to financially pressure universities into living up to their aims of promoting competent leadership, freedom of speech, and open debate.

Canadian universities ought to be seen as rich bastions of intellectual life. There is still ample opportunity to save them, but it will require a more proactive and aggressive stance than has been taken previously.

We can still save the universities, but only if we have the will to do so.

Jonathan Barazzutti is a researcher and incoming Master’s student at the University of Toronto. He has previously written for C2C Journal, City Journal, and the Fordham Institute, and has done consulting for the MacDonald-Laurier Institute, DeepAudit, and Maine Civic Action.

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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 cultural landscape, consider supporting our work with a generous donation.

In the latest episode of the Without Diminishment podcast, W.D. co-founders Alexander Brown and Caroline Elliott expose the NDP’s non-transparent ‘land back’ agenda. They discuss the controversial transfer of prime downtown Victoria real estate, the end of local municipal zoning, and the potential loss of more access to more provincial parks.

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Episode Highlights:

Victoria land transfers: Examining the plan to transfer $47 million in prime downtown real estate—on permanently ceded land, no less—to the Songhees First Nation.

Zoning risks: Discussing how future projects bypass local city rules, referencing the controversial Senakw development in Kitsilano, placing Victoria’s Inner Harbour at risk of over-development.

Provincial parks: Addressing concerns over the future transfer of Hatley Park and Discovery Island Marine Provincial Park.

The ‘Living Agreement’ loophole: Analyzing how open-ended treaties fail to deliver economic and legal certainty, posing long-term risks to B.C.’s economy and taxpayer stability.

A new ‘reconciliation’ framework: Answering the question of whether it is time to move to a model that serves the needs and rights of all British Columbians.

Caroline Elliott is a co-founder of Without Diminishment. She holds a PhD from Simon Fraser University in democratic theory and Canadian government. In 2026, Caroline ran for the leadership of the Conservative Party of British Columbia.

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For more from Without Diminishment and its contributors, follow along on X, YouTube, and Instagram.

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 cultural landscape, consider supporting our work with a generous donation.

At the height of summer, Osoyoos looks like a theme park based on New Mexico or Arizona. You might call it Fauxrizona, with Pueblo-style, ageing accommodations like the ‘Spanish Fiesta Resort’ and a nearby theme park called ‘Rattlesnake Canyon’.

Osoyoos is gathered around a dark blue lake, with palms and patios near the shore. The green of the vineyards is painted upon the ochre-coloured hills that surround the town. At a certain point, the grapes suddenly terminate as the water lines end, returning the country to little more than dust, rocks, and sagebrush on the slopes of the southern Okanagan Valley.

The wildfire smoke split the sky above, with half of it a lighter blue than Osoyoos Lake and the other half filled with reddish-grey wildfire clouds rolling in from the west. No view was permanent as the campfire-scented plume changed the skyline and the sightlines upon the water. It arrived in sheets that erased the ridges, before lifting and settling once again with the wind.

To the east, the Crowsnest Highway snaked up Anarchist Mountain and Canada’s only little desert further disappeared with each metre of elevation as we ascended. The sage and brittle grass made way for the more familiar, cooler forests of pine and alpine farmland. Looking back down the 1,490-metre slope of the mountain, we saw that the smoke had finally covered Osoyoos in full, like a pungent blanket. But there were true blue skies and sunshine above it where we were, riding along the patchy asphalt through the ghostly surroundings of the Boundary Country.

Here we rode through yellowing mountain meadows, recently verdant in the spring, divided between large agricultural estates. Every single one of them had a pile of dying metal behind the property fence, whether it be a motor pool of decrepit old trucks or a scrapyard of shapeless rust. Why farmers accumulate this junk, exposed to the yearly elements and the decay that comes with it, is a secret known only to them. It is as if dead and living people just forgot to remove the debris, allowing weeds to grow high above the axles.

Not all the lots were clearly inhabited. In the middle of the meadows, many of them bordered by a sheer drop down the mountainside, there were ancient farmhouses leaning over, with silvering boards and roofs folding in on themselves. The yellow grass had swallowed whatever roads or paths once led to the impatiently sagging front porches, making it appear as if these houses had sprouted from the ground. Many of the outbuildings had outright collapsed, and the occupied houses on neighbouring properties looked only a little less abandoned.

Soon after, we descended back into valleys and found ourselves in Greenwood, our base camp for those few days.

As the name Greenwood suggests, the area is forested and indeed very green, especially compared to the areas we had just passed through. The entrance to it is marked by a tall smokestack from the old copper smelter, not used since 1918. Three thousand people once inhabited the place. Over 700 people allegedly live there now. At night, you would think nobody did.

‘Copper Street’ is the main road of Greenwood and is a stretch of the highway that runs the length of ‘Canada’s smallest city’, a category that the place proudly refuses to surrender.

Our accommodation was the Greenview Motel & RV Park, a genuinely superb establishment. Without exaggeration, its spotless rooms and pressed sheets rival those of any Fairmont.

A small town in British Columbia (BC) with a sufficient population will host the following: a Chinese restaurant that serves chicken strips, a Fields (or a Walmart, depending on local affluence), a beloved greasy spoon, a BC Liquor, a ‘historic’ downtown, an old railway station that serves as the local museum, and a Legion bar.

Greenwood is not one of those places. It lacks the theatre, Chinese food, and the Fields. It does have a railway station turned museum, a BC Liquor, and a Legion. The nominal city also has a memorial to the Japanese who were interned there during the Second World War; the memorial is the most modern and sleek structure in Greenwood. The monument, filled with sad stories, even lights up at night.

As we meandered about in the dark with a bag of assorted, uncracked beers, the modern pedestrian signals flashed on Copper Street for only the five of us. We had no use for traffic lights on such an empty thoroughfare; the only signs of life were the occasional car or semi-truck rolling through town in the darkness.

The Windsor Hotel is the most prominent building on Copper Street, with a large sign reading ‘Greenwood Saloon Inn’, and it has sat unoccupied since 2017. Next door to it is an empty commercial building with another sign, ‘Pacific Grill’, with lace curtains still draped across the windows.

Empty Victorian and Edwardian windows glared from all angles at around 11:30 in the night, with the only sounds apart from our conversation and laughter being the faint sounds of a nail gun thudding somewhere nearby. On the wall of what used to be the ‘Pacific Grill’ is a historical photograph of Copper Street, in a lost world busy with pedestrians and horse-drawn traffic.

In the moonlight, the British Columbia Copper Company’s smokestack was visible on the hillside. Thirty-six metres high, the brick chimney towers over a black slag field.

Much like Fauxrizona and the sign reading ‘Greenwood Saloon Inn’, Greenwood has manufactured a bit of frontier heritage for itself.

‘Fort Greenwood’ is an RV community built behind a twelve-foot timber stockade, presumably to guard the inhabitants of Greenwood against the Indians.

Woe be to their neighbours in the older, unfortified houses across the street. People underrate the pleasure of kitsch, like the Wild West staging of Osoyoos and Greenwood. Such comforts are rare in a Canadian metropolis.

All in all, the Greenwood Saloon and Fort Greenwood sound better than the ‘Windsor Hotel’, which we have lots of in Canada, and the ‘abandoned smelter’, of which there are plenty in this mostly post-industrial country.

Not far out of town, on the shoulder of the Crowsnest Highway, is a crumbling road tunnel built in 1913, which we explored the next day. It once carried traffic beneath a Canadian Pacific Railway embankment. Bypassed in 1964 and exposed after the railway was abandoned around 1990, the concrete tunnel is decaying like a useless throat, tattooed inside and out with graffiti. It is taller than it looks and is frightening to climb.

On a small mountain above Greenwood lies Phoenix, or rather what remains of it. There is nothing left in Phoenix except for some concrete foundations and rebar hidden beneath a thick layer of overgrowth. Once a copper-mining town like Greenwood, Phoenix completely emptied by the 1950s, with the last inhabitant passing away in 1951.

What sticks above the earth is the well-maintained Cenotaph, honouring the men of the town who died in the First World War. It sits at a dirt road junction, across from a sign directing people to the aptly named Phoenix Mountain Ski Area.

Back down the mountain lies the Phoenix Cemetery, built on the slopes. Unlike those commemorated on the Cenotaph, who were almost entirely of British stock, those buried in the cemetery were mostly continental Europeans.

The whole of eastern BC was, and still is, filled with people with heritage from the old Austro-Hungarian Empire and its neighbours. Bearing Croatian, Serbian, Italian and Lithuanian names, they formed a major share of the region’s mining workforce. By far the most common cause of death listed in the Phoenix Cemetery was a mining accident. The second most common cause was Spanish flu, with a concentration of fatal cases dating from 1918 to 1920, many of the victims being little babies.

Our next stop was Grand Forks, situated in a broad, golden valley and home to large farms and signs demanding that drivers embrace Jesus.

The place has true bustle and traffic and Red Ensigns flying from the beds of old Dodge trucks outside a rudely modern coffee shop. That same old, honourable banner is portrayed in a piece of street art on 3rd Street. The mural itself is dominated by the old flag, but also shows horses, grain, and the earlier life of the town. It feels less like a museum piece when you know that a truck with the same banner is parked around the corner, and lucrative farms surround the downtown.

Around the corner from that is a venerable Chinese-Canadian restaurant where you can still get chow mein and chicken strips in the same order. Both the aforementioned flag and that particular type of Chinese restaurant are slowly fading or gone in Vancouver, making each a pleasant surprise to find. Ginger beef itself is a delicious Canadian dish, created in Calgary in the 1970s, and tastes better than most modern, ‘authentic’ Chinese options.

After we had enjoyed a succulent Chinese meal in Grand Forks, Castlegar was next on the list. Officially, Castlegar has some of the highest incomes in the region, with its economy anchored by the Mercer Celgar pulp mill and other industries. Depending on the flow of the wind, the pulp mill makes the whole area smell like a unflushed, dry toilet.

Downtown Castlegar, much like Greenwood, was eerily quiet. We could hear a faint honky-tonk piano playing somewhere we could not identify, and the few people seemed to mainly congregate in the local café. There was no smoke and the sun was blazing hot, the piano being the only sound apart from the frequent whoosh of cars driving through on the highway, which cuts through the middle of town. The history of Castlegar is on display, with murals dedicated to miners alongside preserved ore carts dotting the landscape.

After Castlegar comes Nelson, whose appearance is a jarring experience. The populations of the other places were rather old, with the average age sitting between 60 and 70.

By contrast, Nelson has a multitude of youth. It is like an island of Whistler-style social modernity dropped in the middle of a different set of mountains. The core is exceptionally well-preserved, even more so than Victoria, with the century-old buildings maintained by frequent customers and millions in ski resort revenue. There are rainbow crosswalks and even an Italian restaurant that looks as though it makes carbonara without cream. They must be very proud.

More than 350 heritage buildings have been restored, and the city is the regional citadel of arts, tourism, commerce and government, containing the local courthouse. The coffee is naturally very good, at places like the Dominion Cafe. Nelson also has a working tram for tourists that runs beneath the magnificent steel bridge crossing Kootenay Lake. The city has a tremendous, youthful energy and is one of the few spots in the province where it can credibly boast that its best days lie ahead.

A short distance south of Nelson lies Salmo, where the forest thickened in previous decades as the human presence grew sparser. According to the 2016 census, nearly 1,200 people lived in the village, which sits on the flat plain at the bottom of a valley. It lacks a Fields or a movie theatre but has a hotel and pub, a private liquor store, and a coffee shop. As with Castlegar and the other spots, it is difficult to believe 1,200 people live in Salmo when you are there.

Salmo also has a retrofitted school bus that sells seafood about 650 kilometres away from the Pacific Ocean, including prawns, which none of us were brave enough to purchase. Unlike those in most other places, the former railway station does not serve as a museum but is instead a modestly maintained shack. The line itself stopped running in 1989.

At the Historic Salmo Hotel, you can buy a pretty damn good bacon cheddar burger and play pool with some very friendly locals. Local laws allow patrons to smoke on the outdoor patio as they sip an excellent local beer. Even if you personally do not enjoy cigarettes, you should patronise businesses that allow adults to partake in the small pleasure.

At Salmo’s Silver Dollar Liquor Store, a Union Jack can be seen in the upstairs window. Just outside town, there is another flying beside the Maple Leaf, flying over an RV park promising ‘full hook-ups and hot showers’ on a hand-painted sign above gravel and in front of mountains dark with trees.

From Grand Forks to Salmo, our route was dotted with Red Ensigns and Union Jacks, which were the brightest objects in a landscape of fading lumber, rusty trucks, and hills coated in smoke. It is also a landscape of sweeping vistas, changing from dark green woods to fertile hills in minutes, girded by running rivers and teeming with wildlife. The buildings of the towns are old but have been the setting for history older than anyone alive. Old rusted trucks and industry serve as landmarks, blending in perfectly with the land.

Things move more slowly out there. A person may know Vancouver like the back of their hand and be satisfied with all the comings and goings of that fine city. But how could anyone ever begin to understand this province, or this country, if they have never been to places like Salmo, Grand Forks, or Greenwood?

We were due to return the day after. So we left, following one last night at the motel in Greenwood, travelling through those same forested valleys and mountain meadows on the Crowsnest before heading back down into the smoky desert of Osoyoos.

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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You’re sitting there, one eye on the clock, eagerly waiting for the bell to ring. How you crave the chime of that sweet-sounding bell, a ring marking the start of your allotted outdoor time. You rush outside, feel the sun on your skin, eat a snack reminding you of a world that exists on the other side of the fence. But for most of the day, you are sat, effectively immobile for 8 hours. Stillness is the highest virtue, and any violation leads to punishment and an ADHD diagnosis. Day in and day out, you wait for the last bell.

Most of us will have experienced this kind of imprisonment, befitting what crime, you may wonder? We are punished for the crime of being born into a society where all forms of care are by default institutional, a society whose ‘child care policy is adult policy, not early childhood policy’, as Katharine B. Stevens noted.

According to Statistics Canada, approximately 5.5 million students are enrolled in K–12 public schools, dwarfing the 67,000 who are home-schooled. Nearly 99 per cent of all school-aged children in Canada are currently institutionalised.

In 2025, 58 per cent of children aged 0 to 5 were in childcare facilities, representing approximately 1.4 million children. One-quarter of those were aged under 1.

As someone who attended public schools all my life, I never thought of it as anything but natural. But as I reach a point in my life where family formation is uppermost in my mind, I wonder whose interests are prioritised whenever I walk by a school and hear, not see, kids playing on the other side of a tall brick wall.

We do not leave it to children to decide very much for themselves, which means their interests are ours to safeguard. Luckily, the research exists: institutional, non-familial care is not what is best for most of our young.

The incomparable Institute for Family Studies recently enumerated the relevant studies, one of which is the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, which followed 1,000 children from infancy through adulthood and found that ‘children who had spent at least 30 hours per week in those settings beginning in infancy had three times the rate of social-emotional difficulties, including lower social competence, higher externalising behavior, and more conflict with teachers and peers. These effects persisted through elementary school, and by adolescence appeared as impulsivity, risk-taking, and substance use’.

Similarly, studies of Quebec’s universal childcare system have shown that the programme ‘has been associated with increased anxiety, aggression, hyperactivity, worse parent-child relationships, and lower self-reported life satisfaction in adolescence. By young adulthood, the negative effects extended to a 22% increase in criminal conviction rates’.

The foundations of our emotional and cognitive lives are formed early on while we bond with caregivers, and early institutionalisation disrupts that. The emotional downsides resulting from the systematic separation between the young children and their mothers are not broadly grasped, since the opposite is widely believed. When I share my musings about home-schooling with my friends, without fail, I receive the unanimous response: ‘Aren’t you worried they’ll turn out weird?’ To that I respond, ‘Have you been paying attention?’

We are living through an era of weird, surrounded by friendless, non-eye-contact-making, socially anxious individuals. Nowadays, most schools encourage gender exploration and, through intense anti-bullying campaigns, demand a near-total embrace of any and all quirks. Not to mention that these tiny balls of anxiety, for some reason, require Vietnam-War-vet-levels of pharmacological intervention. I had someone tell me, ‘In my current role, I feel more like a pharmacist than a teacher’.

We can attribute the explosion of weirdness to a whole host of factors, notably digital devices and their role in mass social atrophy, but the forced dislocation of young children from their families is the foundation for a lifetime of alienation.

When we consider the impact of school on older children, the kind of socialisation permitted in school matters, and it increasingly takes place under the watchful eye of (overwhelmingly) progressive women. This means that the type of play is mediated by what this specific demographic thinks is tolerable. For example, in 2010, my elementary school’s annual Olympic Day was turfed when the staff banned us from keeping score. Olympic Day stirred up too much competitive spirit, they said; can you believe that? Even at 10, most of us accepted there was no point in participating and spent most of the day picking grass.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has written extensively on both the pervasiveness of overbearing parenting and the scourge of digital media among children, believes it is free play that makes the difference:

‘It is in unsupervised child-led play where children best learn to tolerate bruises, handle their emotions, read other children’s emotions, take turns, resolve conflicts and play fair.’

Even if teachers wanted to allow free play at recess, issues ranging from legal liability to parental intervention would make it extremely risky. Our cultural tolerance for affording children even a modicum of freedom is nil, and thus schools must protect against everything from scraped knees to hurt feelings.

The quality of classroom education seems to be in decline. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), through its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), found that, in 2022, 18.1 per cent of 15-year-olds in Canada had ‘low literacy’ skills, a meaningful jump from 13.8 per cent in 2018. Similarly, 21.6 per cent had ‘low numeracy’ skills, up from 16.3 per cent. With ever-growing class sizes, teachers with 30+ kids must always teach to the lowest common denominator. This is not a surprising outcome.

This brings us back to Ms Stevens’s findings for the Institute for Family Studies: ‘Early childhood policy must be driven by what young children need from us, not the other way around’.

Mandatory schooling in Canada was first instituted in Ontario in the late 19th century and quickly spread across the country. Liberal activists advocated school-attendance laws in tandem with child-labour restrictions, as placing children in school saved them from the dangerous and gruelling life of factory work. It was believed an educated child would be a more responsible, productive, disciplined, and learned citizen. My, how things have changed.

During a period when free-market ideas were ascendant, school-attendance laws might appear to be a rebuttal; however, the most fervent push for institutionalisation came from the female economic empowerment movement after the Second World War.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who wrote about this issue in the 19th century, argued that for men and women to be on an equal footing, family life, i.e. childcare and education, would require professionalisation.

In 1976, 40.5 per cent of mothers in Canada were employed; by 2023, the figure had increased to 79.8 per cent.

Despite masquerading as childcare policy, this form of market-driven feminism prevails to this day; it equates personhood with the ability to contribute to GDP. Kids do not come out of the womb contributing (lazy), and if babies had their way, they would stop their mothers from contributing for much longer than maternity leave allows.

This view of feminism also requires that we view men and women as interchangeable. Mission accomplished: I had a Cambridge PhD candidate tell me that there is no biological difference between male and female brains, perhaps too literal an interpretation of Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘one is not born, but becomes a woman’, but not far off!

As Mary Harrington writes in her book Feminism Against Progress:

‘If your concept of personhood is based on market participation, mothers don’t really show up as people. Mothers are only visible within this market society to the extent that we detach ourselves from caregiving, which is seen largely as an obstacle to that participation. And therefore, to self-realization’.

In a liberal society, a woman is not equal to a man unless she can become unmoored from motherhood and, ergo, from her biological realities. The mainstreaming of contraception, abortion, and state-funded childcare is an attempt to artificially equalise men’s and women’s relationships to sex and procreation.

Viewing economic autonomy as the precursor to full personhood is so ubiquitous in modern feminism that UN Women’s ‘women’s economic empowerment’ page states:

‘When more women work, economies grow. Women’s economic empowerment increases economic diversification and income equality for shared prosperity’.

Therein lies the tension for conservatives: market worship means women must work, and if those women decide to have kids, the children must be locked up.

There is no shortage of conservative moaning about the indoctrinating effects of schools and the lack of robust family values being disseminated, or of continuous fretting about cultural formation. But instead of imbuing our children with those values ourselves, we reflexively hand them over as soon as we can.

Criticism of the Liberal government’s $10-a-day childcare plan is near-constant, but every single major Canadian Conservative politician has supported some form of government-subsidised childcare. And the wheels of the industrial machine go round and round.

We should be having a meaningful conversation about school choice in Canada if we’re serious about the health and strength of our families and, most importantly, our children. This could mean both introducing a voucher system so that at-home carers aren’t losing out on taxpayer-funded benefits and reinstating income splitting for spouses.

Delegating the responsibility of edifying our children shouldn’t be automatic. State facilities, by and large, offer depersonalised, bureaucratic and largely progressive environments for children to grow up in — a system designed to prioritise the needs of adults over children. The unfortunate truth is that all sides participate in the race to get women out of the delivery room and into the office as quickly as possible.

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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Depuis l’élection fédérale de 2025, la question générationnelle est au cœur de la politique canadienne. Pour la première fois, les jeunes ont davantage appuyé le Parti conservateur que leurs aînés, une tendance insoupçonnée alors qu’il est devenu coutume de caractériser les générations montantes comme les plus progressistes. Pourtant, une différence de priorités, de vision du monde et de tempérament devient de plus en plus visible politiquement et socialement, et elle n’est pas le propre du Canada.

Il va de soi que le contexte de socialisation politique varie grandement d’une génération à l’autre, selon les réalités que l’on côtoie dans les années formatrices de l’adolescence. Alors que l’on constate que le rapport à l’enjeu migratoire divise aussi les générations, souvent à l’intérieur même des partis de droite, ce facteur y est sans doute pour beaucoup.

Quiconque est né dans les années 2000 a indubitablement un rapport à la diversité foncièrement différent de celui des baby boomers, qui représentent la génération la plus culturellement homogène dans la plupart des pays occidentaux. Ils ont grandi à une époque de forte natalité et de basse migration internationale, alors que la génération Z vit exactement le contraire. Dans des lieux de socialisation comme l’école, cela produit naturellement des relations interculturelles qui, en quelques décennies seulement, sont absolument méconnaissables.

Ironiquement, celui qui a le mieux décrit le phénomène est lui-même un boomer : Jean-François Lisée, ex-chef du Parti québécois, maintenant chroniqueur au Devoir. Dans un texte qui a eu l’effet d’une bombe en 2024, intitulé Identité anti-québécoise, il résumait les témoignages de nombreux enseignants de la région montréalaise lui exprimant, avec désarroi, le mépris dont faisait l’objet l’identité québécoise dans leur classe.

Le portrait que brosse Lisée est aussi déprimant qu’inquiétant : on y lit qu’une majorité d’élèves issus de l’immigration refusent de s’identifier à la nation québécoise, et tournent en dérision l’idée qu’ils seraient eux-mêmes québécois. Les « Kebs », car c’est à cette appellation que sont réduits les élèves de la majorité historique francophones, sont décrits comme des gens qui « n’ont pas de culture », « pas de valeurs » et dont les « femmes sont en fait des traînées ». Le documentaire Garçons, un film de genre, de Manuel Foglia, présentait en images le même phénomène, lorsqu’un groupe d’élèves de la Gaspésie visite une école multiethnique de Montréal. Les filles, en particulier, sont choquées d’être reçues avec des insultes, comme « plotte gaspésienne » ou « esti de blanche ».

On devine aisément que la génération de Lisée n’a pas vécu d’expérience similaire lors de son propre passage à l’école secondaire. Cela tombe sous le sens. La démographie était bien différente, alors que l’on compte désormais plus de 50% d’élèves immigrants de première ou de deuxième génération, issus principalement de cultures non-occidentales, dans les écoles publiques de Montréal. Ce phénomène de minorisation des « Kebs », couplé à un discours public qui encourage le ressentiment à l’endroit de la civilisation occidentale et de ses valeurs, puisqu’on ne les décrit plus comme un héritage riche à partager mais comme une source d’oppression, produit des résultats prévisibles.

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Since the 2025 federal election, generational issues have been at the heart of Canadian politics. For the first time, young people supported the Conservative Party more than their elders, an unexpected trend, given that younger generations are usually characterised as very progressive. Yet a difference in priorities, worldviews, and temperament is becoming increasingly visible politically and socially, and this phenomenon is not unique to Canada.

Every generation goes through a different process of political socialisation, depending on the realities one encounters during the formative years of adolescence. As it is clear that attitudes towards immigration also divide the generations, often even within right-wing parties, this factor undoubtedly plays a major role.

Anyone born in the 2000s undoubtedly has a fundamentally different relationship with ‘diversity’ than that of the baby boomers, who are the most culturally homogeneous generation in most Western countries. They grew up during a time of high birth rates and low international migration, whereas Generation Z is experiencing exactly the opposite. In social settings such as school, this naturally gives rise to intercultural relationships that, in just a few decades, have become completely unrecognisable and, unfortunately, much more acrimonious.

Ironically, the person who best described the phenomenon is himself a boomer: Jean-François Lisée, former leader of the Parti Québécois and now a columnist for Le Devoir. In an article that caused a sensation in 2024, titled ‘Anti-Québécois Identity’ (Identité anti-québécoise), he summarised the accounts of numerous teachers in the Montreal area who expressed to him, with dismay, the contempt with which Quebec identity was treated in their classrooms.

The picture Lisée paints is as depressing as it is alarming: a majority of students from immigrant backgrounds refuse to identify with the Quebec nation and mock the very idea that they themselves might be Quebecers. The ‘Kebs’, for that is the label to which students from the historic Francophone majority are reduced, are described as people who ‘have no culture’, ‘no values’, and whose ‘women are actually sluts’. The documentary Garçons, un film de genre, by Manuel Foglia, depicted the same phenomenon on screen when a group of students from the Gaspésie region visited a multiethnic school in Montreal. The girls, in particular, were shocked to be greeted with insults such as ‘Gaspé wh*re’ or ‘da*n white girl’.

Lisée’s generation did not have a similar experience during their own high school years. That makes perfect sense. The demographics were very different back then, whereas today more than 50 percent of students in Montreal’s public schools are first- or second-generation immigrants, largely from non-Western backgrounds. This marginalisation of the ‘Kebs’, coupled with a public discourse that encourages resentment towards Western civilisation and its values, since these are no longer described as a rich heritage to be shared but as a source of oppression, produces predictable results.

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I grew up in another country. I still visit it a couple of times a year, and I miss it more each time. For the last four years I’ve taken a house there for six weeks in the summer, just a few minutes’ walk from my childhood home. The house is on the water overlooking McNeil Bay, where in 1843 the S.S. Beaver anchored before the party on board, including Sir James Douglas, went ashore a couple of miles down the coast to select the site for Fort Victoria.

This morning, as I looked out of the window with my coffee, the bay was clear. That’s not something I would have noticed as a child, but it’s forest fire season in Canada now. Those weeks of claustrophobic haze and apocalyptic sunsets are now as recognisable a ‘season’ as leaf peeping in Laurentia and the opening of the ski hills in the Rockies. There have always been forest fires in Canada, but the annual return of the smoke is new in this new country.

Lots of things have changed since my childhood, a few of them no doubt for the better, though none come to mind. Others haven’t. Looking up from my seat at the Oak Bay Marina, which I jokingly but accurately call ‘my office’ in the summer, I see three boys fishing off the rocks of the breakwater. The excited chitter when one of them pulls up a crab clinging to the bait on the end of the line hasn’t changed since my friends and I fished for the same plug-ugly rockfish, often under the covetous eye of a pair of harbour seals.

The sea is still there, of course, though there are fewer salmon and whales in the straits, and more cargo ships and tankers. So are the mountains, when the smoke hasn’t obscured them. The great rampart of the Olympic Range and, to the east on a clear day, standing proudly apart, the storybook peak of Mount Baker. There are deer now in the neighbourhood, and so there are taller fences and netting above them.

The most visible change is more expensive and less friendly. There are more houses, mostly boxy infill and cold geometric houses replacing bungalows half their size. The old homes had shaggy wildflower gardens that were quite obviously tended by the owners rather than the professional services that trim new landscaped frontages, but still the place feels more or less the same, and that is not something you can say about much of Canada.

In Vancouver, English Bay is just about recognisable, but Coal Harbour, the North Shore, and most of the rest of the city aren’t. Toronto cowers under bristles of thoughtless buildings and, beyond the high-rises, its suburbs have been stretched across field and farmland in all directions from the lake. Of Canada’s great cities, only Montreal still feels close to the way it did forty or fifty years ago, and then only if you squint. Canada, you see, is now another country.

The new country is not the country I knew as a boy, but it would have been more familiar (mutatis mutandis) to our early settlers: the high levels of immigration; the proliferation of strange languages, clothing, and customs; the opportunism of émigrés free of their native customs and as yet unconstrained by ours, sometimes bleeding into ignorant or contemptuous lawlessness; the clash of old enemies in new lands. None of this is new, but the old Canada had managed to smooth the rough edges (mostly) and maintain the peace.

Immigration, education, integration

To see what went wrong, start with education and immigration. The choices of who joins us and what we teach them as well as those who are already here, together, decide what the future electorate will look like, so the best way to know what a country will look like in 20 years is to extrapolate from government policies in these two areas.

Our education system started to go off the rails in the 1980s and has been steadily dumbed down ever since. Over the same time, our immigration levels were high compared with those of our peer countries, but the process was mostly orderly and legal and focussed on permanent settlement. That changed when Trudeau removed restraints on both quantity and quality. These two changes are obvious reasons why Canada has declined over the same time.

The bad news is it is going to get worse before it gets better – if it does. Until our provincial governments reverse the rot in higher education, starting with the education faculties, return our K-12 system to what it was before the education faddists got their hands on it – or better yet, conform it to a traditional classical and liberal education, following the example of some charter schools – and reinstate rigorous standardised exams to restore accountability, we can’t expect to produce a well-formed citizenry.

Those changes to education would mitigate the effects of the corruption the Trudeau ministries introduced into our immigration system, but hope for a better future requires significant reform there too. The first step is to stop treating immigration as only, or even primarily, economic policy. Our national immigration policy must be social and cultural policy first, and economic policy second and mostly derivative of the first.

Without a high-trust society and the social capital that comes from a common respect for our historic order, the rule of law, and a politics that is not based on ethnic allegiance, economic freedom is of little benefit, if not impossible. This means, as MP Michelle Rempel Garner recently wrote, that ‘the first principle of Canada’s immigration system’ must be ‘integration’. This starts with better selection of fewer people, and must extend beyond arrival.

Those who are selected should be those more likely to integrate. This means much tighter control over family sponsorships, where standards are much lower than for primary applicants. Much higher language skills and credentials that are recognised before you arrive would also help. So would reinstating in-person interviews for permanent residents and extending the probationary period before citizenship, with zero tolerance for criminality and proof of net financial contribution to the country.

Quebec has demonstrated the possibilities of linguistic assimilation, but also the limits of shared language to form a common culture. More work must be done here, starting in schools. Publicly funded education should not be provided in any language except English or French, and there should be no public curriculum based around foreign culture and identity. Multiculturalism programming should be directed away from highlighting differences towards bridging gaps between immigrant communities, where most of our social friction is today.

The unfinished work

If we managed to get the provinces, which have hitherto shown no interest in taking responsibility for education, and the federal government, which has only reluctantly and ineffectually begun to address the worst excesses of the immigration system it broke, to take these jobs seriously, it would be a start, but not enough. There would still be the legal system, the tax system, and the regulatory systems to deal with, though fixing the education and immigration systems would have downstream effects on these too.

Then there is the bigger question: can any country buck the global trends of cultural disintegration and physical and social deracination? How do you integrate newcomers into a fragmented culture, when the causes of fragmentation are largely beyond your control? People who sold everything to cross an ocean a century ago had no choice but to put down roots here. Now even Canadians born here have shallow roots, while those who arrive can come and go easily while living in a diaspora bubble of social media and popular culture.

How do we break down atavistic commitments and build a Canadian people in a world of fluid transnationality? Without broadly shared cultural references, moral teachings, and sources of information, and with few fixed relationships beyond our nuclear families (which we are now also free to move away from or abandon altogether), is it even possible to build what almost everyone who ever lived before us would recognise as a society? These questions bear on national unity while eluding national solutions.

Each of us used to belong naturally to the community that raised us, unless we consciously chose another one and it accepted us, which, except for members of the eternal tribe of misfits and transients, could only be done once; now we define and redefine ourselves by constant individual choices. When we each curate our own hermetic community, partly virtual and partly real, it is hard to see how 40 million individuals scale up to a national community of shared interests in which there is a cognisable common good. Without that, what do we expect newcomers, no matter how carefully chosen and vetted, to integrate into?

It doesn’t bear thinking too hard about these things. They are global forces that are easier to avoid individually than to control collectively as Canadians. Even as individuals, the difficulty of building community when implacable technological, moral, and legal pressure conspires always to pull it apart betrays the fatal flaw in unconstrained liberalism. Until we can re-tame the feral form that modern liberalism has taken since it slipped the leash of the natural law, change for the better can only be local and limited.

I don’t intend any of this as counsel for despair. Despair is always irrational. It makes nothing better and discourages the good. We made Canada once, then we unmade it. We can remake it again. It will take time, as it did before, and external forces we can only imperfectly control will make it harder this time. If we do it right, starting with fixing the immigration and education systems, what will emerge will not be recognisable as the country I grew up in, but neither will it resemble the confused anticulture of the current country.

Howard Anglin is a founding partner of Haultain Group. He was previously Deputy Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Principal Secretary to the Premier of Alberta, Jason Kenney, and a lawyer in New York, London, and Washington, D.C.

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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 cultural landscape, consider supporting our work with a generous donation.

In my previous posting, I suggested we live in a time of tumult – national and technological – that has persuaded conservatives to embrace a concern that for the past half-century they have ignored: culture. I further recommended that conservatives turn to contributions from Harold Innis, a conservative Canadian academic who has made important contributions to Canadian and global history on the topic of communication. Innis’s writings here have never received the attention they deserve. We should reverse that neglect because they have important things to say to us in the present.

In the preceding posting, I presented Innis’s key insights on how our communication technologies impinge on societal and individual thought, and presented a key theme that pervades his histories: all this has happened before. We worry about our inventions. We should. But Innis also urges us not to remain passive users of the instruments bequeathed to us. Via the Oral Tradition – a combinatorial mode of thought, expression and practice – users and cultures mix and remix content, and in turn adapt to emerging opportunities and threats presented by their environments.

The purpose of today’s post is to explore how Innis’s ideas regarding cultural adaptation can be applied. We can escape our cognitive traps, traps he referred to as Biases and Monopolies, if we make it a point to detect them and challenge them via the Oral Tradition. Let us see how.

The first adaptation: Integrate the ‘Wisdom of the Crowd’ into cultural decision-making

One of the truisms of contemporary society is that our major institutions have been captured by a single class. We have various names for it – Bobos, Symbolic Analysts, the Creative Class – but most descriptions employ a label we all know: the Woke. This class has captured the commanding heights of industry, government ministries, universities and the media. It has sought to leverage its cultural and economic power to become our current manufacturer of consensus. David Brooks notes, ‘It constitutes the massive network of academics and analysts who determine what is true’. More importantly, he writes, ‘It possesses the power of consecration; it determines what gets recognised and esteemed …’

‘The setters of elite taste,’ he continues, ‘tend to be graduates of selective universities …’ ‘If you feel seen in society, that’s because the creative class sees you; if you feel unseen, that’s because this class does not’.

One would be hard-pressed to find a description of the present that better aligns with Innis’s monopoly of knowledge. Our society is filled with such monopolies, and they are all aligned – or biased – in a common direction. And, because of the imprimatur of expertise conferred by our universities, the inhabitants of these same monopolies now presume to rule.

In Canada, the scenario Brooks describes is fully reflected in the Canadian government’s patronage of the arts. The Canada Council for the Arts, for example, likes to present itself as a neutral arbiter that operates free from political interference. Via peer-review panels composed of artists and professionals, as well as representatives from Canada’s multiple regional, social and linguistic locations, the council purportedly oversees a neutral and fair system of patronage. We would be wise to ignore the marketing. While panels do not receive direct instruction from government, they are required to conduct their adjudication using values and criteria set by bureaucrats and government. Those values, Graeme Gordon writes, reflect the values of ‘a Laurentian elite largely appointed and tied to Canada’s natural governing party’. They are values harvested from ‘the country’s left-leaning academic establishment’ and run counter to individuals, such as Don Cherry, who have an ‘unapologetic, blue-collar, proudly nationalist sensibility’.

In the face of such siloing, Innis’s advice is to create policies that enact fusion and practise the Oral Tradition. He doesn’t tell us how, but it is plain that he is calling for the construction of decision-making systems in which our country’s disparate parts encounter each other and account to each other. We all have biases. Through interaction with fellow citizens, we can see them and confront them. His writings further suggest we must apply the Oral Tradition not only to our cultural constructs but to our political ones as well: we must reconfigure their operations and potentially acquire new practices when they are no longer fit for purpose. It is an idea echoed in the present by Beth Simone Noveck, author of Smarter Citizen, Smarter State. ‘The design of our current institutions of governance,’ she writes, ‘can evolve. No law of nature … holds them rigidly in place’.

‘Our time,’ she further writes, ‘requires a transformation, not just in the choice of policy but, more fundamentally, in the way we make policy in the first place …’

The democratic theory literature suggests one important way we could implement Innis’s programme for reform. With respect to the importation of new content or a new practice, we could use citizens’ assemblies and juries. Under such a plan, government departments, councils and institutes concerned with culture would incorporate an external entity – a deliberative body composed of a random selection of citizens – to formulate policy and select projects for funding. Such a body would be selected independently of the government ministry, not by it. It is an idea that has been tried multiple times in the past and present, and it enjoys historic and democratic legitimacy.

The ancient Greeks used random selection by lottery, or sortition, in part to populate their legislatures. Today, we use a similar principle, though less than we should, to adjudicate guilt or innocence in criminal trials via the jury. Citizens’ assemblies have been used to create new constitutions in Ireland and Iceland. In the United States (US), citizen panels are participating in the ‘participatory budgeting’ of city budgets. In the context of cultural policy, citizens’ assemblies of some 100 members or more could be assembled, say, every four years, to determine national cultural policies and priorities. Citizens’ juries of 12 members could be convened to assess grant applications. In multiple countries, governments have recognised that there are some domains too important to be left to the whims of partisans, even elected partisans. Monetary policy is one of them. Culture should be another. It is, after all, a national concern, not one that is partisan or identitarian.

The second adaptation: Support cultural innovation

Some two years ago, Rose Horowitch wrote an article in The Atlantic that attracted widespread attention. Its primary concern was that Ivy League students were no longer reading novels. ‘It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading,’ she writes, ‘it’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to’. Aside from mediocre public education systems, the problem has been compounded by the ubiquity of the smartphone. Students are constantly distracted even when reading something as short as a 14-line poem. ‘Whether through atrophy or apathy, a generation of students is reading fewer books’.

As we saw from Innis, concerns about technology’s impact on our cognitive stamina are not new. But it is hard not to be sympathetic to Horowitch’s core concern. If she is right, through a combination of neglect and laziness we are saying goodbye to an age that produced Balzac and Tolstoy, Cervantes and Goethe, Jane Austen and Robertson Davies. Innis’s writings on the Oral Tradition, however, point to a conclusion that should partly mitigate our regret: no form of storytelling is permanent. As we saw, the ancient Greeks created new forms of storytelling, including lyric and epic poetry, to meet their aesthetic and contemporary social needs. Perhaps we are at a similar juncture, one in which we are shifting to forms of storytelling no longer reliant on print. Through its ability to acquire and generate, convert and repurpose textual, audio and visual content, artificial intelligence (AI) is democratising visual storytelling and expression, and, in turn, expanding the expressive toolkit of the individual person.

Marshall McLuhan predicted such a transformation in a letter to Innis in 1951.

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Au Québec, chaque problème de société semble désormais suivre la même trajectoire.

Un événement tragique survient. Un reportage fait réagir. Des groupes de pression réclament une intervention. L’opposition exige que le gouvernement agisse. Le ministre responsable, en réaction à tout ça, se dit ouvert à légiférer. Puis vient ensuite un projet de loi, un règlement ou un plan d’action gouvernemental qui est présenté comme étant la preuve ultime que le gouvernement a entendu la population et est en action.

Dans notre culture politique, intervenir, c’est devenu synonyme de gouverner.

À l’inverse, un politicien qui refuse d’intervenir s’expose rapidement à être accusé d’indifférence, d’inaction ou même de manquer de leadership.

Il existe pourtant une question que nos politiciens, les médias et la société civile se posent de moins en moins souvent : est-il réellement nécessaire que l’État intervienne ?

Le biais de l’action

Les chercheurs en psychologie comportementale parlent du « biais de l’action » pour décrire notre tendance à préférer une intervention visible à l’inaction, même lorsque rien ne démontre que cette intervention produira de meilleurs résultats.

Une célèbre étude publiée dans le Journal of Economic Psychology s’est intéressée au comportement des gardiens de but lors des tirs de pénalité au Soccer. En analysant des centaines de tirs, les chercheurs ont constaté que les gardiens plongeaient presque systématiquement à gauche ou à droite, alors qu’ils auraient souvent eu davantage de chances d’arrêter le ballon en demeurant au centre du filet.

Pourquoi ?

Parce qu’un gardien qui plonge donne l’impression d’avoir essayé. Celui qui demeure immobile et accorde un but risque plutôt d’avoir l’air passif, même si sa décision était statistiquement plus rationnelle. Les auteurs qualifient ce phénomène de « biais de l’action » : lorsque l’action constitue la norme attendue, l’inaction devient psychologiquement et socialement plus coûteuse, même lorsqu’elle peut être la meilleure décision (Bar-Eli et coll, 2007).

Les politiciens se trouvent dans une situation semblable.

Lorsqu’un problème occupe l’espace médiatique, ne rien annoncer devient politiquement plus risqué que d’annoncer une mesure imparfaite. Les critiques arrivent rapidement et parfois durement. Une loi inefficace pourra toujours être défendue comme étant une tentative de régler le problème. L’absence de loi, elle, sera facilement présentée comme un refus d’agir.

Ce phénomène ne relève pas nécessairement du cynisme. Il découle aussi des incitatifs propres à la vie politique. Le politicien assume personnellement et immédiatement le coût de l’inaction. Les coûts d’une mauvaise politique publique, eux, seront dispersés entre des milliers de citoyens et d’entreprises sur une longue période.

Le politologue américain R. Kent Weaver a d’ailleurs démontré que les élus sont souvent davantage motivés par la volonté d’éviter le blâme que par la possibilité d’obtenir du crédit pour une bonne politique. Dans un contexte où les électeurs sont généralement plus sensibles aux pertes, aux échecs et aux événements négatifs qu’aux gains diffus, les élus cherchent d’abord à éviter qu’on puisse lui reprocher de ne pas être intervenu (Weaver, 1986).

Autrement dit, il est politiquement plus sécuritaire de faire quelque chose que de devoir expliquer pourquoi le gouvernement ne fera rien.

La loi québécoise sur les boissons énergisantes

Le récent encadrement par le Québec des boissons énergisantes constitue un exemple particulièrement révélateur.

Soyons clairs : les boissons énergisantes ne sont pas des produits nécessaires au développement des adolescents. Et leur consommation peut présenter des risques réels, particulièrement lorsqu’elle est combinée à certains médicaments stimulants.

Le décès tragique d’un adolescent de 15 ans, mort après l’interaction entre une boisson énergisante et sa médication, mérite d’être traité avec sérieux et compassion. Son histoire a d’ailleurs provoqué une mobilisation tout à fait légitime de sa famille et a pu sensibiliser de nombreux Québécois à un risque qui était largement méconnu.

Mais c’est précisément dans les dossiers chargés émotivement qu’il faut être capable de distinguer la compassion de l’action gouvernementale.

Le 5 juin 2026, moins d’une semaine avant la fin de la session parlementaire à l’Assemblée nationale, le gouvernement du Québec a présenté le projet de loi no 9, visant, entre autres, à interdire la vente et le don de boissons énergisantes aux jeunes de moins de 16 ans. Le texte prévoit également des infractions pénales, des mécanismes d’inspection et d’enquête confiés à Santé Québec ainsi que différentes obligations pour les détaillants.

Des consultations particulières d’une journée ont eu lieu le 9 juin. Le 11 juin, soit moins d’une semaine après sa présentation, le projet de loi a été adopté puis sanctionné le même jour, le tout dans un processus d’adoption accéléré.

En moins d’une semaine, une nouvelle catégorie de produits de consommation venait de faire se faire interdire.

Le caractère presque unanime du vote est également significatif. Dans un tel contexte, s’opposer au projet de loi ne revenait plus seulement à débattre de l’efficacité d’une mesure réglementaire. C’était présenté, tant par les promoteurs de la mesure que par les médias, comme une opposition à la protection des enfants.

Le débat s’est donc refermé aussitôt, avant même d’avoir véritablement commencé.

Pourtant, ces produits faisaient déjà l’objet d’un encadrement fédéral strict. Santé Canada limite notamment la quantité totale de caféine à 180 milligrammes par portion de boisson énergisante. Les fabricants doivent aussi afficher des mises en garde concernant la teneur élevée en caféine, les quantités maximales pouvant être consommées et les populations auxquelles le produit est déconseillé.

Cela ne signifie pas que l’encadrement fédéral était nécessairement suffisant. Mais cette réalité aurait dû faire partie d’un véritable examen des solutions disponibles.

On aurait pu améliorer l’information transmise aux parents. On aurait pu mieux sensibiliser les médecins et les pharmaciens quant aux interactions possibles avec certains médicaments. On aurait pu intervenir dans les écoles ou responsabiliser davantage les fabricants et les détaillants.

Certaines de ces mesures auraient peut-être été insuffisantes. L’interdiction était peut-être, au bout du compte, justifiée. Mais la rapidité du processus démontre à quel point la question centrale est rarement posée : une situation préoccupante exige-t-elle automatiquement une nouvelle loi ?

Le véritable enjeu n’est pas de savoir s’il est souhaitable qu’un adolescent boive une boisson énergisante. Le véritable enjeu est de déterminer si chaque comportement déconseillé mérite une intervention de l’État.

La réglementation par accumulation

On va se le dire, une mesure gouvernementale est rarement complètement absurde lorsqu’on l’examine isolément.

Le problème apparaît lorsque ces interventions s’accumulent.

Une seule exigence représente rarement un fardeau insurmontable. Mais elle s’ajoute à des dizaines, puis à des centaines d’autres obligations.

Le coût réel de la réglementation ne se trouve donc pas dans chacune des mesures prises séparément. Il réside dans leur effet cumulatif.

C’est ainsi que l’État québécois se retrouve dans une situation tout à fait paradoxale. Il adopte continuellement de nouvelles règles, puis doit périodiquement lancer des plans d’allègement réglementaire pour réduire le poids de ses décisions précédentes.

Le paradoxe est presque caricatural. Le 11 juin dernier, au moment même où l’Assemblée nationale adoptait la nouvelle loi sur les boissons énergisantes, elle adoptait aussi le projet de loi no 11, visant précisément à alléger le fardeau réglementaire et administratif.

On réglemente d’une main et on tente d’alléger de l’autre.

Le problème vient du fait qu’une nouvelle réglementation procure un bénéfice politique immédiat. Son retrait, quelques années plus tard, est beaucoup plus difficile. Tout assouplissement pourra être présenté comme un recul.

Il ne s’agit pas d’affirmer que toute intervention gouvernementale est excessive. Il s’agit de reconnaître que l’action publique peut elle aussi échouer, déplacer un problème, produire des effets pervers ou imposer des coûts supérieurs aux bénéfices recherchés.

Une société adulte

Les Québécois entretiennent une relation particulière avec l’État.

La Révolution tranquille a fait de celui-ci un puissant instrument d’émancipation nationale. On peut avancer que l’État québécois a permis aux francophones de reprendre le contrôle de leur économie, de leurs institutions et de leur destinée collective.

Malheureusement, l’État est devenu au fil des décennies un réflexe plus qu’un instrument.

Nous avons remplacé le curé par le ministère. Nous nous sommes libérés d’une institution qui prétendait encadrer l’ensemble de la vie sociale, tout en conservant le besoin qu’une autorité supérieure définisse ce qui est souhaitable, ce qui est acceptable et ce qui doit être interdit.

Or, une nation ne doit pas seulement reposer sur l’État.

Une société vivante repose aussi sur ses familles, ses entreprises, ses associations, ses communautés locales et la responsabilité individuelle. Ces institutions sont les premiers lieux où doivent se transmettre les comportements, les valeurs et les normes sociales. Ils ne sont pas que de simples bénéficiaires de politiques gouvernementales.

Lorsque l’État prend automatiquement en charge chaque problème, il ne fait pas qu’augmenter la réglementation. Il affaiblit aussi la capacité de la société à se gouverner elle-même.

Une société adulte ne devrait pas exiger une politique publique pour chaque risque ou chaque indignation.

Cela ne signifie pas que l’État doit demeurer passif devant les véritables injustices. Il possède des responsabilités fondamentales : protéger la population, maintenir l’ordre, sanctionner les comportements criminels, protéger les enfants et intervenir lorsque les gestes d’une personne imposent des dommages importants aux autres.

Mais reconnaître la légitimité de l’État implique aussi d’en reconnaître les limites.

Le rôle du politique ne consiste pas à éliminer tous les risques de l’existence.

Le véritable courage politique

On demande constamment à nos politiciens d’avoir le courage d’agir.

Il faudra éventuellement leur reconnaître aussi le courage de ne pas intervenir.

Le courage de dire qu’un événement est tragique, sans prétendre qu’une loi aurait nécessairement pu l’empêcher. Le courage d’admettre qu’aucun gouvernement ne pourra éliminer tous les risques. Le courage de rappeler que les parents, les citoyens, les entreprises et les institutions de la société civile possèdent eux aussi des responsabilités.

Gouverner ne consiste pas à intervenir partout. Gouverner consiste à faire des choix, à établir des priorités et à réserver la puissance de l’État aux situations où elle est véritablement nécessaire.

Kevin Paquette est consultant chez Crestview Strategy. Il a été conseiller politique du ministre de la Sécurité publique du Québec et président de la Commission de la Relève de la Coalition Avenir Québec. Il a également travaillé dans le war room du Parti conservateur du Canada lors de la campagne électorale fédérale de 2019.

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In Quebec, nearly every social problem now seems to follow the same trajectory.

There is another tragedy that occurs, and news reports spark more public outrage. Soon after, advocacy groups demand intervention, and opposition parties call on the government to act. In response, the minister responsible says the government is open to legislating. Then comes a bill, regulation, or government action plan, presented as definitive proof that the government has heard the public and is taking action.

In our political culture, intervening has become synonymous with governing.

By contrast, a politician who refuses to intervene quickly risks being accused of indifference, or even lacking leadership.

Yet one question remains: must the government really intervene?

The action bias

Behavioural psychologists use the term ‘action bias’ to describe our tendency to prefer visible intervention over inaction, even when there is no evidence that intervening will produce better results.

A well-known study published in the Journal of Economic Psychology examined how football goalkeepers behave during penalties. After analysing hundreds of penalties, researchers found that goalkeepers almost always dived to the left or right. This happened even though they would often have had a better chance of stopping the ball by remaining in the middle of the net.

Why?

Because a keeper who dives appears to have tried, and a goalkeeper who remains still and concedes a goal risks looking passive, despite it being the more statistically rational decision. The researchers described this phenomenon as the ‘action bias’, denoting when action is the expected norm. In this case, inaction becomes psychologically and socially more costly, even when it may be the better choice.

Politicians find themselves in a similar position.

When an issue dominates media coverage, announcing nothing becomes politically riskier than announcing something imperfect. Criticism comes quickly and fiercely, and an ineffective law can always be defended as an attempt to solve the problem. By contrast, the absence of a law can easily be portrayed as a refusal to act.

Beyond cynicism, this phenomenon also reflects the incentives inherent in political life. Politicians personally and immediately bear the political cost of inaction, and the costs of a bad public policy are dispersed among thousands of citizens and businesses. Often, these effects are felt over a period of time that extends beyond a politician’s career.

American political scientist R. Kent Weaver demonstrated that elected officials are often motivated more by the desire to avoid blame than by the possibility of receiving credit for good public policy. In a context where voters tend to be more sensitive to losses, failures, and negative events than to diffuse benefits, politicians primarily seek to avoid being accused of having failed to intervene.

In other words, it is politically safer to do something than to explain why the government will do nothing.

Quebec’s energy drink law

Energy drinks are not essential to the healthy development of teenagers. Their consumption can present genuine risks, particularly when they are combined with certain stimulant medicines.

The tragic death of a 15-year-old boy following an interaction between an energy drink and his medication has to be treated with seriousness and compassion. Understandably, his story prompted his family to mobilise and helped make many Quebecers aware of a risk that had previously been little understood.

But it is precisely in emotionally charged cases that we must be able to distinguish compassion from the need for government action.

On 5 June 2026, less than a week before the end of the National Assembly’s parliamentary session, the Quebec government introduced Bill 9. Among other provisions, the bill prohibited the sale or distribution of energy drinks to anyone under 16. It also created penal offences, granted inspection and investigative powers to Santé Québec, and imposed various obligations on retailers.

A single day of special consultations was held on 9 June. On 11 June, less than a week after it was introduced, the bill was passed and received Royal Assent the same day through an expedited legislative process.

In less than a week, a new category of consumer products was made subject to government prohibition.

The near-unanimity of the vote was also significant, for in this context, opposing the bill no longer meant merely questioning the effectiveness of a regulatory measure. Both the proponents of the legislation and much of the media framed opposition to it as opposition to the protection of children.

Therefore, before the debate had truly begun, it closed almost immediately.

Yet these products were already subject to strict federal regulations. Health Canada limits the total caffeine content of an energy drink to 180 milligrams per serving, and manufacturers must also display warnings concerning the product’s high caffeine content. In addition, the maximum number of servings that should be consumed must be displayed, as well as the groups for whom the product is not recommended.

The government could have improved the information provided to parents, and done more to raise awareness among doctors and pharmacists about possible interactions with certain medicines. It could have intervened in schools or placed greater responsibility on manufacturers and retailers.

Some of these measures might have proved insufficient, but in the end, a prohibition may even have been justified. Nonetheless, the speed of the legislative process begs the familiar question: does every troubling situation automatically require a new law?

The central issue is whether every risky or undesirable behaviour warrants government intervention.

Regulation by accumulation

Let us be honest and state that a government measure is rarely completely absurd when examined in isolation.

Rather, the problem emerges when these interventions accumulate.

A single requirement rarely creates an unbearable burden, but that is not the case with dozens and eventually hundreds of other obligations.

The true cost of regulation always lies in the combined effects of different measures.

This is how the Quebec government finds itself in a profoundly paradoxical position. It continually adopts new rules, only to periodically launch regulatory relief plans aimed at reducing the burden created by its previous decisions.

The contradiction is almost a caricature. On 11 June, at the very moment when the National Assembly adopted the new energy-drink law, it also passed Bill 11, a piece of legislation specifically intended to reduce the regulatory and administrative burden.

We regulate with one hand and attempt to deregulate with the other.

The problem is that new regulations produce an immediate political benefit. Repealing them several years later is far more difficult. Any attempt to relax the rules can then be portrayed as a backward step.

Every government intervention is not excessive by default, but we must recognise that public action can also fail. It can shift a problem elsewhere, create unintended consequences, or impose costs greater than the benefits it was meant to produce.

A mature society

Quebecers have a particular relationship with the state.

The Quiet Revolution transformed the provincial government into a powerful instrument of national emancipation. One can reasonably argue that the Quebec state enabled French-speaking Quebecers to regain control over their economy, their institutions, and their collective destiny.

Unfortunately, over the decades, the state has become more of a reflex than an instrument.

By replacing the parish priest with a government ministry, we liberated ourselves from an institution that sought to regulate nearly every aspect of social life, yet retained the need for a higher authority to define what is desirable, what is acceptable, and what must be prohibited.

A nation cannot rest on the state alone, and a vibrant society also depends on its families, businesses, associations, local communities, and individual responsibility. These social institutions are the primary places where behaviours, values, and social norms should be shared and passed down.

If the state automatically takes responsibility for every problem, it weakens society’s capacity to govern itself.

A mature society should not demand a public-policy response to every risk or every source of outrage.

The state still has fundamental responsibilities like maintaining public order, punishing criminal conduct, and intervening when one person’s actions cause serious harm to others.

But recognising the legitimacy of the state requires both recognising its limits, and that the role of politics is not to eliminate every risk from human existence.

True political courage

We constantly ask politicians to have the courage to act.

At some point, we must also recognise the courage required not to intervene.

This includes the courage to acknowledge that an event is tragic without pretending that a new law could necessarily have prevented it, the courage to admit that no government can eliminate every risk, and the courage to remind parents, citizens, businesses, and civil-society institutions of their own responsibilities.

Governing means making choices, and reserving the power of the state for situations in which it is genuinely necessary.

Kevin Paquette is a consultant at Crestview Strategy. He was a political advisor to Quebec's Minister of Public Security and president of the Coalition Avenir Québec's youth wing. He also worked in the Conservative Party of Canada's war room during the 2019 federal election campaign.

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On weeks like this, when smoke blankets the sky and the bone-dry land beneath British Columbians’ feet has been pitched into further uncertainty through more dodgy land deals struck behind closed doors (this time in Victoria’s idyllic Inner Harbour), it can no longer be all quiet on the Western Front from a B.C. Conservative Party in transition.

Let us not forget that at a time of Ottawa and Victoria’s supposed and expressed interest in a kind of pseudo-economic recovery, David Eby has repeatedly and explicitly blamed our ecological footprints and oil and gas for the increasing scale of disaster seasons, noting that the ‘ferocity of the fires’ and ‘historic nature of the forest fires’ are ‘without a doubt . . . clearly linked to human-caused climate change’. And he has stated that recent federal concessions to Alberta’s oil interests amounted to rewarding ‘bad behaviour’.

Never mind that firebugs or human negligence are responsible for as many as 60 percent of British Columbia’s fires annually; the political world abhors a communications vacuum as much as nature abhors dry Okanagan timber, meaning these are the weeks when the Findlay administration must shift out of second gear to project sensibility and security in the face of natural disasters, while defending the province’s delicate social license against a resurgent NDP mud-hut encroachment.

After months of messaging omnipresence leading into May’s leadership result, it’s been an undeniably inauspicious period for a group short on goodwill, culminating in the unpopular pushing out of Executive Director Angelo Isidorou and Managing Director Phil Dippenaar to end July.

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In Canada and elsewhere, the ‘New Right’ has primarily sought to distinguish itself through a certain scepticism, if not outright hostility, towards the ‘fusionist’ thesis that has animated Anglosphere conservative politics since the end of the Second World War.

According to this thesis, substantively conservative social and cultural positions are best advanced alongside a robust defence of free markets and economic liberty. In more extreme formulations, proponents even suggest that true conservatism is only possible under a minimalist state that ‘gets out of the way’ and allows individuals to live their lives as they see fit.

As against the fusionist thesis, proponents of the New Right point out that the political right’s successive wins on economic issues over the past several decades have not precluded the marginalisation of conservative social and cultural beliefs. The failure to make use of the state to advance these ideas, it is said, has amounted to nothing less than a cultural surrender. To make matters worse, the very economic wins for which fusionist conservatism can be credited have often come at a cost borne primarily by the very same people who hold socially and culturally conservative attitudes, while fusionist conservatism has been neither willing nor able to offer any countervailing response.

The nature of the disagreement between proponents of the New Right and fusionist conservatism suggests that it is primarily one of means, rather than ends. That is, both proponents of the New Right and proponents of fusionist conservatism generally agree on what a substantively ‘conservative’ polity would look like. Most also share a conception of what the ‘good life’ entails, which is to say that they have similar ideas of what counts as individual virtue, ideas that are distinguishable from those that have currency on the political left. Consistent with this outlook, most proponents of fusionism do not, in fact, understand free markets and economic liberty as ends in themselves, but as mere instruments for achieving the good life, just as proponents of the New Right do not think that the good life is tantamount to individual subordination to the state.

Yet, despite this shared commitment to substantive ends, it would also be a mistake to dismiss the disagreement between proponents of the New Right and proponents of fusionist conservatism as a mere policy difference. Rather, this disagreement over means reflects a profound divergence over the relationship between the coercive power of the state, as given effect most notably through law, and the pursuit of substantive social and cultural ends. For proponents of the New Right, both individual and collective flourishing, understood to mean the achievement of a substantively conservative culture, require the use of politics, and thus the law. Fusionist conservatives may share the same understanding of collective flourishing and individual virtue, but they hold that the use of the law is generally, if not always, contrary to the achievement of this outcome.

To understand the disconnect between these two positions, it is instructive, as it so often is, to begin with Aristotle. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle discusses the virtue of justice, which he first presents as a ‘master’ or ‘perfect’ virtue that embodies all others. This leads to an account of the relationship between law and virtue — that is, human flourishing — more generally:

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Classical liberals are some odd ducks in Canada.

That’s all very well. They are allowed to exist. They truly have some very good ideas regarding urbanism and internal trade, and maybe even free trade. It is their misfortune that their ideology has exerted so little influence over the course of Canadian history, especially in politics.

Many self-described conservatives who call themselves classical liberals often belabour the claim that Canada has liberal foundations from which the country has strayed and which it has betrayed. So the argument goes: much of what went wrong with Canada can be attributed to forgetting these principles of Confederation.

What if these liberals (lower-case) are simply heirs to an at-best modest tradition in this country? What if Canada’s political foundations, far from being a sort of lost paradise of John Stuart Mill and Richard Cobden, instead amounted to an embrace of executive power and centralisation that had to be eroded through generations of political battles?

To be sure, Canada inherited a liberal constitutional apparatus from Britain. It included an elected Parliament, responsible government, et cetera.

But is that what liberals on the centre-right tend to wring their hands about? Not particularly.

Instead, they mostly have their eyes fixed on the economy and the ways to liberalise it, as befits their name, while cutting the size and spending of government and reducing federal power for the benefit of the provinces. However, old-fashioned liberalism is about far more than politicised accounting.

One thing that conservatives cannot emphasise enough is that it was their faction that won the ‘Battle of Confederation’, in the words of Sir John A. Macdonald. It was the right that led the process of Confederation and proceeded to dominate the Dominion’s politics from 1867 until 1896, with the exception of an uneventful five-year interlude between 1873 and 1878.

George Brown, the leading Liberal of Confederation, privately referred to the British North America Act as ‘dreadfully Tory’ and placed great hopes in the ability of Parliament to help amend it. To achieve this goal, Brown even helped establish the Liberal Party of Canada in opposition to Macdonald.

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In the car park outside the pizzeria where my most recent local election victory party was being held, I made a promise to my husband and my long-suffering chief of staff.

I would proceed with my new mandate under a set of three ground rules.

My primary objective would be to serve as an outstandingly effective advocate for my constituents. I would do everything possible to promote stability within the party and the caucus. And I would not compromise the first objective while attempting to accomplish the second.

Until April of this year, staying true to that course felt relatively simple. We had held the Liberal Party to a minority government, which meant opposition members like me had considerable parliamentary procedural leverage: the ability to amend legislation, compel information from the government and use other parliamentary tools to hold the government to account. Our caucus had welcomed a large cohort of new, energetic and talented first-time MPs. A minority also meant that our party would have some measure of control over when the next election would be and, in all likelihood, that we would have another chance to form government before several years had passed.

So while my party had once again lost the general election, there were many grounds for optimism.

But these circumstances probably also prolonged the first stage of grief following any loss – denial. For me, anyway, this became apparent on the day in April when Canada’s federal Liberals contrived a majority government through a floor crossing. In one instant, advancing policy from the opposition benches became a far more difficult task. And the realisation that the Liberals would now govern for several more years, and the impact that would have on Canada, weighed heavily on me too.

Judging from the tone of the public discourse that has been taking place between some luminaries of Canada’s political right since the Liberals solidified their majority, not everyone is moving through the stages of grief over this loss on the same timeline.

But in political leadership, no allowance is made for the self-indulgences of denial, anger, bargaining and depression. There is only the expectation to brush off the dust and get back in the saddle. That is the right path and the reality of accepting a job in which millions of people are counting on you to deliver for them.

And so, the wrong path for our movement to take after this loss would be to descend into yet another prolonged, grief-driven, frustrated and puerile round of inward tent-pissing.

More bluntly put, we must accept that we lost and get on with the business of winning.

It is worth spelling this out because, after a decade in opposition, it is easy to forget this foundational principle: the top objective for the Conservative Party is to form government. The entire point of a political movement’s existence is to form government and advance the priorities and interests of its members. There is too much at stake to believe otherwise; even some long-standing Liberals will quietly agree that allowing the Liberal Party to reign unchecked has profoundly negative consequences for the country.

Sure, there’s honour in the duty of being a member of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, and a democracy requires both government and opposition. But no principle – no matter how strongly held – can be widely implemented from the low ground. Principles without power are just speeches. The high ground of government must be taken to effect widespread change. So while some activists-turned-pundits are still focused on reinterpreting auguries to explain why the Conservative Party lost the 2025 general election, we should instead address the only two questions that really matter for the future: How do the Liberals keep winning? And how can Conservatives win instead?

I’ll begin with the former.

For starters, it’s worth stating the obvious once again: political parties win when they are focused on winning.

At present, the Liberals’ entire decision-making apparatus is focused on this singular principle. They are ruthlessly intolerant and seek to politically eradicate anything or anyone that could derail their chances of winning, and they govern themselves accordingly. Over the past decade, they have used the levers of government, such as legislation, regulation, political appointments and taxpayer funding, to build a machine designed for one purpose: perpetual power. If you have ever watched any Star Trek, this analogy will resonate – the Liberals have become the Borg Collective of Canadian federal politics.

So is resistance futile, as the Liberal apparatus would have the Canadian public believe?

Of course not. The first step to winning for Canadian conservatives is believing that winning is possible. And it is.

Right-of-centre Canadians – even those who aren’t politically active in the traditional sense – are the drivers of Canadian progress. We invent things. We build things. We work relentlessly. We protect rather than restrict freedom. We reject homogeneity of thought. If every Canadian who identifies with these characteristics were truly activated to reject Liberal ideology that enriches technocrats, cancels speech and snuffs out builders, a right-of-centre victory would be certain.

The new voter coalition that turned out for the Conservative Party in 2025 proved that, on this front, progress is eminently possible. I am proud of the foundation that was built.

But progress and victory aren’t the same thing.

It cannot be overemphasised that the Liberals win because their political party is now the outgrowth of a much more expansive political apparatus. For the conservative movement in Canada to win, and win repeatedly, the Conservative Party cannot be viewed as the sole vehicle through which the movement takes power.

Canada’s centre-right needs dozens of credible think tanks churning out public policy to counter the dogma of the Liberals. We need hundreds of credible independent media outlets to question the pro-Liberal spin of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. We need our own credible awards to counter the Liberals’ dominance within civilian award organisations. We need our own credible NGOs to advocate and organise for positions that counter those of the Liberals. We need book clubs, dinner parties and salons that establish the constructive side of our movement as a normative, upwardly mobile mainstream view. We need credible right-of-centre thinkers in the judiciary and in all manner of political appointments. We need like-minded people to own businesses and run educational institutions to teach and employ our people, rather than feel obliged to be apologists for Liberal Party ideology in order to get ahead. We need singers, songwriters, fashion models, sports legends, scientists and poets to send cultural signals that make liars out of the Liberals’ apparatus, which presently broadcasts the same message repeatedly: ‘We are cool; they are not.’

But we need people to actually do these things and fill these roles. This means eradicating the mindset that has normalised familicide amongst activists in our movement. The Liberals have only one purity test: ‘If you want the Liberals to win, welcome to the team.’ When was the last time a senior Liberal activist took even semi-public ad hominem shots at another? When was the last time a former Liberal staff member, activist or defeated MP ever had trouble finding a job? The answer to both questions is ‘never’. Like it or not, the Liberals have removed much of the risk from participating in their political infrastructure, while handing us the rope with which to undermine our own. There are too many people who work too hard in the Canadian conservative movement to allow this to continue. We must fight the Liberals, not aid them in their efforts to get us to shoot at each other instead of doing the work of defeating them.

But there are two additional issues our movement must confront in order to win.

The first is the assumption that the tactics and policies that worked two decades ago to attract a broad voter coalition will work again in the future.

Take, for example, the incremental style of policy advancement that was a hallmark of former prime minister Stephen Harper’s government. To illustrate, imagine you are me in 2013: a newly minted cabinet minister in his government. By all major metrics back then, the country was largely on the right path. Politically, the Liberal Party was firmly in third place, and Tom Mulcair hadn’t yet lost the plot as leader of the New Democratic Party (NDP). After the country successfully emerged from the 2008 financial crisis, most of Harper’s cabinet governed according to the philosophy that minor tweaks were all that was really needed. And this was the right approach for that time in Canadian history.

Now imagine 2026 me crashing through a time portal to deliver the news: over the next 13 years, the Liberals would take power and effectively legalise hard drugs, more than double the federal debt, nearly double the non-citizen share of the population, systematically erase or dilute many of Canada’s longstanding national symbols and actively support legal challenges to established property rights. Tariff-free North American trade would appear on the brink of collapse, antisemitism would be rampant, legislators would shut the country down for nearly two years during a pandemic, house prices would nearly triple, artificial intelligence would likely reach the singularity, an active secessionist movement would emerge in Alberta, and major kinetic wars would be raging.

2013 me would have (rightly) assumed 2026 me had experienced a psychotic break. But if 2013 me tried to convince anyone today that the incremental policies of yesteryear could still make voters swoon the next time an election rolls around, she would (rightly) be considered a relic of the past.

The reality is that the steady-as-she-goes approach of Stephen Harper’s deliberately boring government, coupled with a more centrist NDP and a Conservative election campaign that rested on its laurels and promised more of the same, was precisely the runway that a much further-left Liberal Party needed in order to seize power in 2015. The Liberals saw a fertile field of Canadians, tilled by a decade of pro-growth Conservative policies, who could afford to take a gamble on a new government, and they presented a bold, alluring and sharply different vision of the future.

We must do the same, but out of the ashes of a decade of Liberal ruination.

To win today, the conservative movement must accept that the political conditions and approaches to developing public policy that defined Canada during the heyday of the Harper government no longer exist in the same form that they once did. Too much has changed since then, and even in the best of times, for the most part, voters don’t care about what a political movement has done in the past, only about what they’re going to do for them in the future. Canada’s conservatives need to carefully, consistently and quantitatively assess who belongs in our potential voter coalition, how we speak to them and what we are offering them. We started that in 2025, and we need to push even harder now.

For example, much of the Conservatives’ new voter coalition in 2025 supported the party because it focused on changing the Liberal status quo and making life more affordable. But for many of those voters under 35 who have grown up under a federal government that has now been in office for a decade and feels ubiquitous, the old message framing of ‘smaller government’ isn’t guaranteed to carry the same punch in perpetuity. For them, the size of government or the deficit probably matters far less than what that government and its spending are actually used for, and who benefits or falls behind as a result. And so, a necessary detour for the conservative movement on the path towards ‘we will cut wasteful spending and balance the federal budget’ may be ‘we are going to first change how this money is spent to make sure you directly benefit’. In some conservative circles today, even suggesting this as a possible shift in approach would be considered an abomination. But getting to a more effective government for Canada requires less pearl-clutching, more openness to new framing and greater tolerance for the movement to play with new ideas.

But boldness for the conservative movement does not simply mean changing our approaches to certain issues. In some cases, the political context has changed so dramatically that it means leaning harder into positions we’ve long held and going further than we have before. The Liberals have big vulnerabilities. Their further-left flank will not allow them to touch issues with deep cultural roots, but failing to address them risks driving away more centrist voters. For example, a decade of bringing in too many people too quickly for housing, health care and jobs to keep up has left less capacity for newcomers to integrate into Canada’s economic and social fabric. The same applies to deeper questions about what cultural values define Canada as a people and how those values should shape immigration and social policy. There is not only a political opportunity for the right-of-centre movement to offer bold answers to these questions but also a moral imperative to do so.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of actions. But perhaps the most important change needed is how the movement views the role and function of political party leaders.

Strong political party leadership is essential to give a movement order and the discipline needed to maintain it. At the same time, a sustainable, long-term political movement cannot be built around the belief that leaders are infallible. For progress to be made, a movement owes grace to a leader who, in turn, chooses to show humility and discipline after a setback.

This bargain has produced examples that provide ample grounds for optimism.

After the 2004 election loss, Stephen Harper absorbed the hard lessons of his first campaign as leader. Over the following year, he imposed strict discipline on himself and his caucus, avoiding the kind of high-profile gaffes that had previously undermined Conservative momentum. Harper kept his focus – and that of his team – relentlessly on the Liberals’ emerging sponsorship scandal, steadily building the case that Paul Martin’s Liberal government lacked the moral authority to govern. When Jean Brault’s explosive testimony before the Gomery Commission in April 2005 shifted public opinion, Harper’s Conservatives were ready. The resulting surge in the polls was not accidental; it was the product of a full year of disciplined opposition that allowed Harper and his team to capitalise on Liberal weakness and ultimately win government in 2006. He exhibited humility, adaptability and personal discipline, the movement rewarded him with grace, and we won and governed for a decade.

After the 2012 Alberta provincial election, Danielle Smith spent years sitting with hard lessons learned from her loss at the helm of the Wildrose Party. She worked hard to demonstrate the adaptability required to regain the credibility to lead after a major setback. So when the leadership of the United Conservative Party (UCP) became vacant in 2022, Smith returned and used those lessons to successfully knit together Alberta’s right-of-centre coalition after it had been strained by pandemic policies. By maintaining focus on winning and capitalising on the moment, she won the party leadership in 2022 and delivered a majority government in 2023.

For my part, I will do everything within my control to help ensure that a similarly prominent example of success emerges in the future. This point matters. While, at the end of the day, the accountability for a political party stops with its leader, our movement shouldn’t expect our leaders to carry the full pressure to win – and the full weight of the Liberal machine that they’re up against – all by themselves. The Liberals sure don’t. Helpful criticism that offers real solutions and constructive ideas must be welcomed by our leaders – especially when problems are obvious. But the opposite is also true: baseless fatalism and lazy, ad hominem, fame-seeking potshots should not be received with anything other than the dismissive eye-rolls they rightly deserve.

So the path towards winning – and keeping the promise I made on election night – is perhaps best summed up in a recent tweet from The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson:

There is no “they” in a political movement. There is only you, and we. And yes, most of the time – no matter what the political stripe – there is a lot of adaptability, creativity, and courage required to set a forward path.

I choose to view this operating reality not as an indictment of the political process but rather as an invitation to build, and a reaffirmation that any Canadian conservative can (and should) just do helpful things.

Consider this a formal invitation to do the same, and a note of gratitude if you already do so.

See you on the flip side, winner.

Michelle Rempel Garner is the Conservative MP for Calgary Nose Hill, Vice-Chair of the Standing Committee on Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship, and is the Conservative Shadow Minister for Immigration.

The original version of this essay was first published Michelle Rempel Garner’s Substack, and is running in syndication with permission.

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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 cultural landscape, consider supporting our work with a generous donation.

If you missed the fracas on conservative Twitter in recent weeks, do not fret. Bridges were burnt, credibility was lost, and feelings were hurt. Your time would be better spent reading the exchange between Howard Anglin and Ben Woodfinden, in which collegiality remains between those who disagree. The remarks from the leader’s lectern that sparked that dust-up have revived a debate we thought had ended at the convention in January: should Pierre Poilievre continue as leader of the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC)?

Remarks accusing fellow conservatives of being ‘eastern liberal lobbyists’ are, his detractors claim, unbecoming of a leader. They divide a party sorely in need of unity and demean individuals who have given much to the conservative movement. This is difficult to dispute.

There was little to be gained from kicking Caroline Elliott’s campaign team while they were down, beyond the satisfaction of returning fire in an ongoing spat between the respective circles of Poilievre and Doug Ford. Were a few chuckles and cheers at a Stampede breakfast worth it?

His critics have given as good as they’ve got – I certainly don’t defend their actions – but it is Poilievre who wears the mantle of leader and Poilievre who must be held to a higher standard. For anyone who seeks to lead the big, raucous tent that is the Conservative Party of Canada, magnanimity is mandatory. There are enough forces at work against the movement in this country; we need not bolster their ranks with our own.

For my part, I was reminded of a conversation I had at the party convention, at which we thought we had settled the question of Poilievre’s leadership. I went into the leadership review as an undecided voter, unconvinced that Poilievre had a path to victory. My vote was won by a question: ‘If not Pierre, then who?’

The CPC may have failed to form government in the previous election, but Poilievre has exerted a unique influence on policy from the opposition benches. He won the debates on the carbon tax, crime, and immigration so decisively that he forced the Liberals to reverse course on core policies.

As Anglin remarks to Woodfinden, conservatives do not lack ideas; they lack only the ability to execute them. Mark Carney’s quasi-implementation of conservative ideas may sting, but it is proof positive that a platform built from those ideas can win. Although Poilievre was not the one implementing those policies, he is nevertheless the reason they were adopted.

Questions of leadership require an alternative, not simply dissatisfaction. Poilievre is not without fault, but that is not a sufficient argument to replace him as leader. While aspirants to the leader’s chair would no doubt prefer to run against a vacancy, we should not allow them to do so.

If we are to discard a leader who has proved remarkably able to force the government to concede on key issues and who is beloved by the grassroots, if not the Empire Club, there must be good reason to believe that a better alternative exists. To oust Poilievre in response to anonymous pressure is to replace him with whoever survives the ensuing knife-fight, not necessarily with the person the party would prefer.

If there is a conservative who believes they are better suited than Poilievre, let them stand and be counted. Let them present their vision alongside Poilievre’s and win support for their cause. A public leadership challenge would stress the party, to be sure, but so too would undermining Poilievre in the hope of turning the party against him.

If you cannot convince your fellow conservatives of your vision, why would we believe you capable of convincing the electorate?

Jay Gamma lives in Edmonton Alberta and holds a PhD in Translational Medicine from the University of Alberta. He serves as Vice President for the Edmonton Gateway CPC Electoral District Association, and volunteers with the Alberta chapter of Build Canada.

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Last week, the Globe & Mail ran a controversial but fascinating piece by Andrew Coyne on Canadian conservatives’ relationship with patriotism.

‘In virtually every other democratic country, patriotism is the province of the right. Only in Canada has it been the monopoly of the left,’ wrote Coyne.

Owning patriotism and national identity is much easier for the side that seeks cultural (or postcultural) hegemony, rather than nurturing the many distinct local communities and traditions in a country as large and regionally diverse as Canada.

It must be admitted that the Liberals have dominated the political landscape for much of the past century, enabling them to weave their own partisan symbols and values into the fabric of Canadian institutions.

The federal state as it exists today is a legacy of Liberal Party rule. Pierre Trudeau’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms fundamentally changed the trajectory of this country, but the ideology underpinning it had begun to take shape even before his time. Whether one considers multiculturalism, mass immigration or the red maple leaf flag, Canada is a country whose institutions naturally lean, if not lurch, to the left.

Therefore, conservatives must swim against the current, almost perpetually. Why is this? I submit that it stems from the fact that Liberals in both English Canada and Quebec are ideologically closely aligned and share a common vision of Canada. The left often looks much the same everywhere. Certainly, its values, methods and codes of communication are identical across the Western world.

In Canada, Liberals will not hesitate to weaponise the state to ensure their values endure. The alignment between Liberals in Quebec and English Canada has been critical to their electoral success.

Conversely, the right are more locally rooted and provincial, and are therefore less inclined to share a broad common vision with their compatriots across the country. This poses a challenge to both the coherence of Canadian conservatism and its electoral arithmetic.

Conservatism in Quebec is not libertarian, and here we envisage using the state to advance nationalist and conservative ends. What we conserve in Quebec is not what our friends in Western Canada or Ontario seek to conserve.

Arrayed against our alliance of local political traditions are the Liberals, who share and promote a single, pan-Canadian narrative. The inability of the right to offer a catch-all vision capable of rallying the anti-Liberal vote partially explains the electoral success of the Liberal Party over the past few decades.

Structurally, the 1982 rupture over the imposition of the Charter has made this phenomenon almost permanent, despite the efforts of prime ministers Brian Mulroney and Stephen Harper to rally coalitions against the Liberals. Neither was able to prevent the Charter from entrenching itself as Canada’s new national narrative, despite the explicit opposition of Francophones, one of the country’s founding peoples.

If there is a fault, it does not lie solely with the pan-Canadian conservative movement, but also with Quebec’s bleus, who failed to invest in the Conservative Party of Canada, the only political party capable of rivalling the Liberals. As a result, the Quebec vote is split between the Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois, whose voters are much less left-wing than the party’s current leadership. In the 2025 federal election, the combined Conservative and Bloc vote in Quebec actually exceeded the Liberal vote.

With the federal state lost to the Liberals, Quebec nationalists, whether right-wing or left-wing, retreat into autonomism or support for independence from Canada. This reinforces the tendency in Quebec to ‘conserve’ what falls within the jurisdiction of the National Assembly rather than the federal Parliament.

Federal strategy thus becomes one of ‘harm reduction’ rather than a positive proposal to refound Canadian nationalism within a narrative framework that might appeal to Quebec nationalists. Given the libertarian or anti-statist reflexes of many Conservatives in the rest of Canada, I do not know whether that goal is achievable amid these differences. The contours of Quebec nationalism are much more clearly defined and related to culture, history and language, as Quebec understands itself as a nation in the older, sociological sense.

Canada, for its part, seems determined to become ever more of an economic zone that seeks to give itself the trappings of a nation through ‘national programmes’, such as writing exorbitant cheques to fund a struggling healthcare system. Perhaps this is the true challenge of Canadian conservatism.

Can we truly build a national narrative capable of rallying Western and Ontarian conservatives, together with Quebec nationalists, even as each seeks to preserve something different?

I am no longer certain.

Carl Vallée is a Senior Managing Director with Teneo’s Strategy and Communications business, based in Montréal. He was the press secretary to former prime minister Stephen Harper from 2010 to 2015.

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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 cultural landscape, consider supporting our work with a generous donation.

In recent years, conservatives, especially Canadian conservatives, have revived a conviction that was self-evident and should have remained self-evident: culture matters. In the closing decades of the twentieth century, culture was an easy concern to demote. Inflation had to be tamed, the national debt curbed, and the vast pretence of the welfare state extinguished. In this decade, however, we have learnt, to our shock, that culture is not a minor concern best kept on the periphery.

The first sign of this is the alarming decline of national cohesion in Canada. We lack the myth and matter needed to contest the things that divide us, largely because our elites have failed to formulate or locate them. Far too many have been happy to serve the empty gruel that is the post-national state.

The second prompt, of course, has been the recent emergence of artificial intelligence (AI). AI, in many ways, is the perfect archetype of creative destruction, one that may prove the undoing of Hollywood. It is likely to be an eruption point in history equal in magnitude to the printing press. It will upend many things, including the ideas, objects and practices associated with cultural expression. As was the case with fire and the printing press, it will be an amoral instrument. Through it, we will know both good and evil. Through it, the expressive toolkit of human life and the expressive possibilities of human culture will expand in ways that cannot be foreseen. And because of it, conservatives have every reason to reconsider how culture can be mobilised to enable Canada to navigate the national, geopolitical, economic and technological storms in which it finds itself.

In his recent encyclical on AI, Pope Leo XIV called upon people of good will to play a role in ‘the construction sites of history’. Conservatives must play their part.

Harold Innis: an under-appreciated resource for conservatives

Canadian conservatives are fortunate in that we have an under-appreciated resource to help us think through a cultural policy fit for the twenty-first century: Harold Innis. Innis is not a well-known figure in Canada, yet his writings will always figure in any contemporary description of the Canadian canon. An economic historian at the University of Toronto from 1920 to 1952, Innis first made his mark studying the history of commodities in works such as The Fur Trade and The Cod Fisheries.

In each, Innis advanced the staples hypothesis, the proposition that Canada was operationally and politically distinct from the United States by virtue of the Dominion’s origins in the fur trade. In 1940, Innis shifted his attention to the impact of human communication systems, making them the linchpin of a larger history of the West. Innis scholars continue to debate his reasons for so doing. Some argue it was simply a natural progression from his earlier economic work. His focus on commodities led to an interest in the transport systems that convey them. If you change the terms of human interaction, he realised, you change the nature of the economies and societies that house them. That insight, he would later recognise, also applied to a neighbouring class of technology: communication systems. Other scholars suggest it was the emergence of the Second World War that prompted Innis to move from economic history to communications.

A veteran of the First World War, Innis viewed both great wars as indicators of a civilisation undergoing collapse. How is it possible, he asked in Political Economy in the Modern State, that after the relative peace of the nineteenth century, European civilisation should turn ‘from persuasion to force or from ballots to bullets’?

Innis would spend the final twelve years of his life seeking to answer that question. More broadly, in Political Economy and in the volumes that followed, Empire and Communications and The Bias of Communication, Innis would present a history of the West in which the combination of human choice, circulating information and technological evolution had a direct bearing on the cognitive and physical health of nations. Cultures that continually challenged their first premises and innovated survived. Those that rested content in cultural ruts and established practice did not. Innis’ communication writings did not make a huge impact on their initial release. They were terrible reads. They remain terrible reads. But over time, some of Canada’s best and brightest thinkers would come to value his work highly. Marshall McLuhan was not a particularly modest man, but he was motivated to write the ultimate academic accolade in 1964: ‘I am pleased to think of my own book The Gutenberg Galaxy as a footnote to the observations of Innis’. In a 1980 book review, George Grant argued that ‘it would be a shame if Innis did not continue to be read … his writing continually lights up whole areas of human history. And we need this light’.

We do indeed. Innis’ writings were devoted to the destabilising impact of technological change, and his writings are worth considering as Canadians seek to revive their culture and consider the implications of AI for our collective future. For conservatives, Innis’ writings are also worth revisiting because he, in the end, was one of our own. As a conservative, he left a corpus of writings that has important things to say to us today. In today’s feature, I will consider the implications that changes in communication technologies have presented for historical cultures. As we shall see, many of the fears we express now were expressed by predecessors in the past.

In the post that follows, we will briefly consider Innis’ counsel when we are confronted with new communication technologies such as AI: we must adapt. For Innis, prohibiting a new invention was not an option. Remaining passive in the face of a new technology was not an option. The only sane response, he wrote in his major anthologies devoted to communication, was to recognise the opportunities and threats such technologies posed. In short, our only option is to adapt.

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