Alexander Brown: Do not despair, conservatives, and look west
The good fight continues, particularly in British Columbia.
There are no two ways about it, Canadians aged 18 to 59, the wide age bracket still polling strongly for conservative reform to a failing status quo, were presented with coal in their stockings late Thursday. Conservative MP Michael Ma crossed the floor – and two Christmas parties – to mark the end of a parliamentary session long on promises of building “at a pace and scale not seen since the Second World War,” and woefully short on urgency and results.
With the Liberals all but securing a majority outside of the realm of the ballot box, the situation has been viewed as cynical and demoralising for many; that is part and parcel of the whole stunt, yet it does not unmake a movement.
We founded Without Diminishment in the wake of an electoral setback for Generation(s) Screwed, with the understanding that cultural shifts, federally, were underway, but in need of time. One cannot take their ball and go home following disappointment, no matter how jarring that “elbows up” rug-pull felt to many. You fill the space, that gulf between wants and realities, with the action-oriented and motivational, with a stout defence of what once was and can be again.
This moment and its momentum, on what is referred to in some circles as the “new right,” is not owned by any one party. And potential success at the ballot box, at least federally, now appears to be three years away, or more.
That does not stop the movement-building effort to fix all that was lacking over what continues to be referred to as Canada’s “lost decade.”
As Without Diminishment contributor Cole Hogan said on Twitter: “Canadians – especially younger Canadians – want a government that actually addresses unabated immigration, overflowing crime and addiction in our streets, a skyrocketing cost of living, unaffordable rent and housing. The good fight continues.”
However underwhelming, Liberal course-corrections back to the centre-left do not happen in a vacuum; they do not happen without the advocacy, arguments, and unvarnished truths that animate young and working-aged Canadians.
The catharsis gained from an imperfect but more trustworthy party apparatus holding a plurality of seats in the House of Commons would undoubtedly provide relief for those here in attendance, as well as for those on our masthead. But the math was not there, federally, for electoral change in the near future, regardless of Ma’s penchant for Christmas party-hopping, unpaid tickets, Irish exits, and even bilking the Secret Santa system.
That means the work we do now has not changed in importance. If anything, matters of social licence and expanding the Overton window matter more today than they did Thursday. The federal Liberals, made up of a super-majority of Trudeau holdovers, are not moving back towards semi-competence out of benevolence; that is you making that happen, and we are here to help.
Canada’s “amorphous status-quo-ism” can no longer mask its failures. Even a uniquely pliable and easy-to-distract Canadian electorate seem to understand we need to return to something more familiar, before Canada became an indiscernible international airport, a safety school, a buy-one-get-one-free deal.
There are still federal Conservatives and federal Liberals to push towards fixing that cultural rot and that which ails us, because that is what movements do.
There are provinces to steer back from zero growth and zero hope, such as Ontario, where Premier Doug Ford just granted himself a 14-week Christmas break at the height of tariff, housing, and unemployment crises, and with his Skills Development Fund now being investigated by the OPP’s anti-rackets branch.
And nowhere is more important than British Columbia at present, where the “mud-hut” wing of the NDP – Canada’s de-growth, anti-civilisational, anti-Canadian left – desperately holds on to its self-anointed veto over Canada’s natural resource recovery, and where the land is no longer even certain beneath its residents’ feet.
David Eby is working behind the scenes to cement his position with an election call expected in the months ahead, and British Columbia cannot be allowed to be the lone true hold-out from the Trudeau years. For all of Doug Ford’s unfavourable Trudeau-like qualities, even that President’s Choice Jimmy Hoffa racket understands the need to bring energy projects to market.
Eby, it seems, fancies himself as Canada’s very own Hiroo Onoda: the infamous Japanese lieutenant who refused to acknowledge WWII surrender from the jungles of Lubang for 29 long years. Yet Eby is little more than a vacant-eyed upmarket campus radical, with the poor polling numbers to match. With his opposition no longer in crisis, it’s all to play for.
While little consolation, Canadians aged 18 to 59 have likely been spared a double-dose of federal gerontocratic electoral disappointment in 2026. That does not change the equation for recovery, for rebuilding monuments of meaning and tearing down ill-conceived industrial complexes – be it Reconciliation Incorporated, the de-growth, de-colonial NGO hustle, or a Tim Hortons mass-immigration model – and for capitalising on an “opportunity for a reset” less insidious than the last.
There are still opportunities in abundance. Hope may feel in short supply on days like today, but it still springs eternal.
Look west. Look within. Look around. We are building something for the long haul. Normal people are no longer whispering their plain truths. More and more Canadians want immigration reform, pipelines, to fund the police and enforce laws, to feel part of a community, and to experience national pride that isn’t just poorly-obscured anti-Americanism.
What is old is new again. And on the new right, we are only getting started.
Alexander Brown is Managing Editor of Without Diminishment.
