Kate Marland: Why I’m enlisting in the culture war

Young Canadians are ready to fight, so let them, writes Contributing Editor Kate Marland.

(A young Conservative Party of Canada supporter, April 28, 2025. Photo credit: BBC News.)

Introducing Contributing Editor Kate Marland.

Breaking: I am enlisting in the culture war.

Why, you might ask? Well, Canada is suffering from a crisis of cultural austerity. As a right-wing movement, Canada’s conservatives remained laser-focused on fiscal issues while surrendering cultural ground entirely to the left, much to our detriment.

For years, the Canadian right was content with a libertarian “just leave me alone” approach to society, culture, and identity. Unfortunately, as Curtis Yarvin so astutely pointed out on the New Founding podcast the other day, “just leave me alone movements always lose”.

Lose is exactly what we did. Canadian Conservatives have lost the last four consecutive elections, and in the most recent one, fumbled one of the largest leads in recent memory. I, for one, am no longer interested in losing.

This all came to a head on September 10, 2025. As my flight landed, I turned on my phone to see a text: “Charlie Kirk has been shot”. Charlie’s death spurred reflection and a flurry of conversation among the young and the politically engaged. Over the next few days, I spoke with many of them. The same frustrations came up again and again: exploding crime, educational collapse, stagnating social mobility, and above all, the emptying of our social, cultural, and national identity.

These are all the natural consequences of decades spent imposing cultural austerity in the pursuit of lower taxes. Let us reflect on, for example, Stephen Harper’s refusal to move out of 24 Sussex so that much-needed renovations could proceed. This, out of fear of being perceived to have misused taxpayer money.

A decade of dithering over whether it is a worthy endeavour to renovate the historic residence of Canada’s leader is a fitting metaphor for the cultural wasteland we now find ourselves in. Is it any wonder that we are in a crisis of national identity when we have let the historic seat of our leader disintegrate into rubble?

Fiscal stewardship, GDP growth, and tax competitiveness are all important, but they do not animate a citizenry. Somewhere along the way, big-c Conservatives decided they were too high-brow to discuss social issues and decided to talk mainly about the economy. But just as money can’t buy happiness, it also doesn’t inspire.

Cultural austerity constructs houses but not homes, paves roads with no destination, and worships all goods except the common one.

Conservatives delude themselves if they believe they occupy the moral high ground while ignoring the spiritual needs of Canadians out of loyalty to the ideology of classical liberalism.

The soulless defence of self-interest and lower taxes is not a compelling vision for the future of this country. Prioritising price optimisation over social cohesion has done nothing for us as a country, and young people are noticing.

We have been speed running the experiment of social atomisation in Canada. It may have taken me 30 years to wake up to this, but now that I’ve seen it, I can’t look away.

A few years ago, I felt so strongly about the momentum of the conservative movement that I quit my job as a lawyer to build a program focused on educating young people about the value of limited government, individual freedoms, and, most importantly, free markets.

It is from an insider’s view that I can admit that the principles I once advocated for must be harshly judged. The harm our blind focus on these ideas has wrought is impossible to ignore.

Over the last few years working with young people, I’ve spoken with hundreds of young Canadians who have the “right” instincts. Young people are rightly frustrated with the lack of affordability, many unable to buy homes, destined to pay high taxes with receding benefits.

But what truly animates them are issues that, until recently, were not addressed in the mainstream: rising gangland crime and its correlation with the breaking of our immigration standard, the negative impact of the flood of temporary foreign workers, Canada’s low fertility rate and lack of family formation, and the subversion of universal truth.

Are all the young people of Canada far-right extremists? Or do they just have eyes and ears and can see that the corrosive effects of unchecked self-interest have unravelled what made this country great? (And with the concern that there are potential far-right extremist sources out there who covet the animus and vulnerability of a younger audience, should we not be lighting the right path forward?)

The current offerings of the Canadian right fail to provide a fulsome vision for reaching spiritual fulfilment. This is why Charlie Kirk’s death has had such an impact, he understood that winning on economic issues was worthless without a discussion of the cultural and social virtues that have made Western civilisation great.

Young people need something to be proud of, an identity to fight for, and a reason to hope. Cutting taxes by 1 per cent or negotiating free trade deals so we can access cheaper goods won’t cut it. We need leaders who are not afraid to be strong advocates for what it means to live a good life, and who model what that looks like.

I do not want to live in a society that is subservient to the needs of violent, drug-addicted vagrants, emboldened to reoffend under seemingly protected legal status, and that in part prioritizes the foreign and fighting-aged, who have shown no loyalty to this country, and who also benefit from lenient sentences that wrongly err on the side of coddling their immigration status over protecting and respecting the public.

Delivering burritos on an e-bike as a replacement cog in the gaping maw of Canada’s thoughtlessly non-productive, “GDP go up” strategy is not the Canadian Dream. Some of you are not ready for this conversation but we can save that for another day. And I am frankly sick of the finger-wagging that comes from those who sit in Rosedale or Westmount or Rockcliffe and do not interface directly with any of these problems on a regular basis.

Young Canadians are ready for a fight, so let them. Save your scolding for the paywalled pages of The Globe and Mail. Culture matters, history matters, identity matters.

We have spent years watching this movement embrace cultural austerity in service of our “just leave me alone” approach. It’s time to win, or at least go down trying.

Kate Marland is a contributing editor at Without Diminishment. She spent the last few years working to identify, organize and educate young people interested in responsible government, individual freedoms, and conservative values, running programs with both the Montreal Economic Institute and the Canada Strong and Free Network. Prior to this, she worked as a commercial litigator in Ottawa.