Wednesday, April 22, 2026

Mid-Week Post

Your middle-of-the-week journey down the rabbit-hole ...



Canadians do not understand freedom.

They do understand forcing others to subsidise their bad decisions. They do understand supporting systems regardless of function or purpose. They do understand being ashamed of seeing propriety and success in others.

But they don't understand freedom:

Since Bill C-4 became law in 2022, it has been a criminal offence in Canada for counsellors, doctors, pastors, priests, or even parents to help a consenting adult who wants to feel more comfortable with their biological sex, reduce unwanted same-sex attractions, or align their “gender identity” with their biological reality. Bill C-4 passed with unanimous support from the Conservative Opposition and all parties in the House. This legislation was sold to Canadians as a ban on “conversion therapy,” a term associated with inhumane practices such as forcing people to undergo electric shock during the presentation of same-sex erotic images, something that has not been practiced for many decades. In a clever but deceitful fashion, Bill C-4 purported to prohibit what was already illegal, namely, force and abuse.

Canadian parents can now be jailed for the “crime” of helping their own gender-confused children to feel comfortable in the body they were born with. Counsellors, too, are exposed to criminal liability if they help someone who previously identified as transgender and now wants to “detransition,” or if they help someone who wants to stop having same-sex attraction. Instead of proposing ways to overcome unwanted gender confusion, the only legally safe option for professionals and parents is to “affirm” it.

In March 2026, in Chiles v. Salazar, the US Supreme Court struck down a Colorado law similar to Canada’s Bill C-4. Kaley Chiles is a licenced counsellor in Colorado with a master’s degree in clinical mental health. She does not impose any predetermined goals on her clients. Instead, she listens to what they want to achieve and helps them pursue those goals through ordinary talk therapy. Some of her clients wish to reduce or eliminate unwanted same-sex attractions, change certain behaviours, or feel more at home in the body they were born with. Colorado’s law made the latter objectives illegal, while permitting (and in effect requiring) counsellors to support only a person’s transition to the opposite sex. ...

In today’s political and cultural climate, it’s easy to dismiss Dr. Nicolosi as a pseudo-scientist, a dangerous fraudster, or worse. However, there are many men and women who speak publicly about their own experiences of a change in sexual orientation. One could argue that these people are deluding themselves or lying, but modern research confirms that sexual orientation is fluid and can change with time.

Why, then, should the state be allowed to criminalize the personal counselling choices that consenting adults wish to make? Why should parents risk jail for trying to help their own gender-confused children feel comfortable in their bodies, rather than steering them toward medical transition and “affirming” said confusions?

Most Canadians believe, as the US Supreme Court affirmed last month, that the state has no place in the therapy offices and counselling centres of the nation. If Canada’s laws truly reflected the majority public opinion, and if our laws respected the personal freedom and choice of consenting adults, Bill C-4 would never have been approved by Parliament. Without Bill C-4, Canadians would still enjoy the basic liberty to seek the psychological help that best aligns with their own values and goals, and parents would be free to help their gender-confused children without fearing criminal charges.

**

Once it was confirmed that, for the first time, Canada wouldbe ruled by a majority government achieved through floor-crossing, it didn’ttake long for talk of a renewed Online Harms Act to be proposed.

Heritage Minister Marc Miller was approached after his party—thanks to winning three byelections to hold seats it had previously won in last year’s election and gaining five floor-crossing MPs—had turned a minority government into a majority with unfettered legislative power. …

Bill C-36, the Liberals’ first attempt to regulate speech on the internet, was actually a scaled back version of a draft bill that then-Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault’s staff had circulated for feedback in the year previous. It set off alarm bells across the board concerning the infringement of Charter rights.

Still, as I described it at the time, when it came to even the improved version, Guilbeault and his team “have succeeded in scanning the globe, identifying the most invasive and inefficient regulatory practices in place and bundling them all into a single piece of legislation that very likely has no hope of surviving Charter challenges.”

That one died on the order paper when Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of the day, called the 2021 election.

The next effort, Bill C-63, was too clever by half. In an effort to make sure it wouldn’t be tossed out swiftly by the courts, the Department of Justice, under its then-Minister Arif Virani, was put in charge of its composition. It had some positive aspects (most people agree the protection of children from harm is a laudable goal) that provided the sheep’s clothing for its more wolfish aspects. Those included empowering the Human Rights Commission to take complaints from people interpreting online comments as racist or otherwise offensive and the power to fine those who posted comments it deemed to be problematic up to $20,000. Hate speech laws were to be reinforced, with life sentences possible. Also envisioned was a new bureaucratic structure called a Digital Safety Commission with the power to order takedowns and punish platforms for failure to exercise their duty of care.

That bill also died on the order paper in early 2025 when Trudeau prorogued Parliament in order to ensure his successor could control the timing of an election.

Now, with little chance of an election, the government is likely going to finally get an Online Harms Act passed. It has put a panel in place to help it do so and has suggested it will include a ban on children under 14, or maybe 16, from accessing social media. Either way, that means age verification will be required.

So get ready. There is no shortage of people asking for the government to, on their behalf, silence people online whose words they feel harmed by.

The National Council of Canadian Muslims has backed the concept in all its forms from the beginning and can be expected to continue its support.

The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, similarly, continues to advocate for stronger policing of online speech.

Even media unions are throwing their support behind it. While journalists have traditionally been staunch defenders of free speech, particularly as it forms the foundation upon which modern, liberal democracies are based, that is no longer the case for some.

“For many journalists, especially women, minorities, and LGBTQ members, the toxicity we face online and in person while doing our jobs is becoming overwhelming,” Jane Robertson, president of the Canadian Media Guild, which represents CBC journalists, told the House of Commons Heritage Committee on April 16.

“We urge the government to support stronger protection though the upcoming Online Harms Act particularly with journalists’ safety and mental health as explicit priorities.”

There will, of course, be other groups such as the Free Speech Union and Canadian Constitution Foundation taking issue with whatever the authors of Online Harms 3.0 come up with. They will have their voices heard during the legislative process and, likely, in the courts once the bill is passed.

But this time, the power of a majority in their pocket, Miller, Carney, and others will most certainly get what they want.

And when they are done, Canadians will speak less freely. The only question remaining involves whether they do so by a little or a lot.






Canada’s military housing shortage has grown to as many as 10,000 units, with new testimony revealing many existing homes are in poor condition and unsuitable for families.

Canadian Forces Housing Agency CEO Paula Zurro told the Commons public accounts committee the gap between available housing and demand now ranges from 7,000 to 10,000 units, with the agency aiming to meet the higher end of that estimate through future construction.

The figures follow a scathing audit by Karen Hogan, which found long waitlists and widespread deficiencies in military housing across the country.

Hogan’s report identified 3,706 service members waiting for just 205 available units and noted many existing quarters failed to meet basic standards for space and livability.

Testifying before MPs, Hogan described visiting bases in British Columbia, New Brunswick and Ontario, where most inspected buildings required at least one major repair, including issues as serious as unsafe drinking water.

“I know I would want my family to have safe drinking water and a functioning toilet,” she said.

Conservative MP James Bezan warned the situation is worsening, noting previous estimates already showed a shortfall of 6,700 homes in 2024.

(Sidebar: this douche-tool.

Federal officials say a construction program is underway to deliver 7,500 new housing units, while also expanding supply through purchasing homes on the private market.

But critics argue those purchases are putting additional pressure on already tight local housing markets.

Bezan said some military members are being forced into precarious living situations, including couch surfing, living in vehicles or even staying in tent encampments due to a lack of available housing.

He also raised concerns that buying existing homes in competitive markets like Halifax and Esquimalt may worsen affordability challenges for civilians.

“When are we going to get the new builds?” Bezan asked.

Defence Minister David McGuinty has acknowledged the state of military housing, saying after touring units himself that improvements are urgently needed.

“We have work to do,” McGuinty said.


Nothing but the best for the troops and their families!





A 33-year-old Indigenous B.C. man who choked and kicked his girlfriend’s “vulnerable and defenceless” two-year-old son last summer has been sentenced to six months in prison for two separate assaults, both of which were captured by a nanny cam in the child’s room.

The Crown had asked for just one year behind bars, while defence counsel sought a conditional sentence of two years less a day to be served in the community.

In her recently published sentencing decision, Provincial Court of B.C. judge Temara Golinsky said that while the man “was not raised with a traditional upbringing,” doesn’t have status and neither he “nor his “immediate family were impacted by state actions such as residential schools, even the dissociation with one’s past and cultural heritage is a negative consequence of colonization.”

As such, his Indigeneity was given some weight as a mitigating factor when she gave him concurrent six-month sentences on charges of choking and assault earlier this month.

The man, referred to only as K.J.M. due to a publication ban to protect the child’s identity, pleaded guilty to both charges and expressed remorse during a two-day sentencing hearing in an unnamed provincial courtroom earlier this year.

According to The Crown, the now four-year-old boy escaped “serious long-term” consequences from the assaults, which Golinksky said was “due to good fortune, not K.J.M.’s actions.”

At the same time, she said, “violence against the toddler, when he was so young, will have an inevitable and long-term impact.”

“Violence is a known adverse childhood experience,” she explained. “The extent of the impact is unknown, but I have no trouble finding that there will have been an impact.”

At the time of the June 2025 assaults, K.J.M. had been living with the mother of the toddler, then 28 months old, and her daughter for about a year.

“He helped to care for the children when the mother was unavailable or even, as it appears from time to time, unwilling,” Golinsky wrote, noting he told pre-sentence report writers that their relationship was “awful,” largely due to her alleged infidelity, and that he felt she was using him for money and childcare.

The man also complained to the two authors that the child “was difficult to parent,” would beat his sister and “smear his s— on the wall”, often with no behavioural correction from his mother.

On occasion, however, “the child would be locked in a bedroom as a punishment for their behaviour and at night,” so he wouldn’t interrupt them.

K.J.M. “did not express any concern with locking a toddler in a room for extended periods of time while unsupervised by an adult,” they wrote.

So it was on the evening of June 13 that K.J.M. said he had put the child in a time-out while the mother was away.

In the video evidence, the child, wearing only a diaper, is seated on the floor near his bedroom door when it opens, striking him on the shoulder and “rolling him back and away from the door.”

“K.J.M. stepped into the room and used his foot to kick and move the child away from the door, rolling him into the centre of the room,” the judge described.

“He then bent down and pushed his hand on the front of the child’s neck, pressing him into the carpet. He squeezed the child’s neck for a moment while the child was screaming. K.J.M. yelled, ‘Get away from the f—ing door,’ and then released his grip and left the room, closing the door behind him. The child can be heard crying while crawling back to sit at the closed door.”

A video captured two days later showed the second vicious assault on the innocent child.

In it, the boy, again dressed only in a diaper, is seated on his bed crying quietly to himself and flinches as K.J.M. opens the door and strides into the room to stand next to the bed.

“He immediately squared his stance and then kicked the child once in the face or forehead with his bare foot, causing the child to fall onto his back,” Golinksy wrote. “He yelled something at the child, then stormed out of the room and closed the door behind him. The child continued to lie there on his back and can be heard crying until the video ends a few seconds later.”

It wasn’t until the mother noticed a scrape on her son and reviewed the nanny cam footage that she learned of the assaults and alerted authorities.

K.J.M. acknowledged his wrongdoing in both instances, but told the pre-sentence report authors that the child had been “screaming or freaking out” because he’d been punished. Golinsky, however, said the audio from the videos makes it clear the toddler “was doing neither in the seconds leading up to either of the assaults.”

Furthermore, “there is no evidence or suggestion by K.J.M. that he returned on either occasion to check on the well-being of the child or to try to comfort the child,” the judge wrote.

Because his offences were “of such gravity and his moral culpability” was so high, Golinsky dismissed the suggestion of a conditional sentence and ordered jail time.

In weighing the sentence duration, she considered the violent nature of the assaults by a caregiver and the child’s vulnerability, particularly in his own home and bedroom, as aggravating factors. The judge also noted the “assaults cannot be characterized as momentary lapses of judgment” because K.J.M. came from elsewhere in the house and “had at least a fraction of time to measure or consider his response.”

“If he didn’t have the time or wherewithal to measure his response the first time, there is no doubt he would have had that opportunity to do so before the second assault,” the decision reads.

“If he had known the first assault was a mistake, as he stated to the report writers, then it is aggravating that he assaulted the toddler again.”

In addition to K.J.M.’s Indigenous ancestry, the judge said other mitigating factors that supported a shorter sentence than requested by the Crown included his guilty plea, his lack of criminal record, his remorse and the long-term effects of a traumatic brain injury from a 2013 ATV accident.

“With that in mind, I do not find that his traumatic brain injury alone could be determined to be a driving or primary factor in his violent behaviour,” Golinsky said. “As the doctor concluded, it is reasonable for the Court to find that it was the toxic combination of several factors, including the brain injury, that brought K.J.M. to assault the child.”

With no credit for time served, he’ll spend the entire six months incarcerated, after which he’ll face 18 months of probation upon release under various conditions.


We need to elect our judges.


Also:

British Columbia Premier David Eby has backed down again on the pausing of key parts of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, scrapping plans to table a suspension bill this legislative session.

The premier’s office says in a brief statement that it "can confirm that the government will not be introducing legislation on DRIPA during this session."

Instead, it says Eby will hold a press conference Monday to outline next steps.

A draft document provided by a First Nations source says the government now hopes to work with First Nations to come up with a joint approach to DRIPA, under a framework for negotiations.

Eby met with First Nations leaders late Sunday afternoon, one of whom says the suspension law was withdrawn as a result of planned protests.

The premier has said a recent court decision on B.C.'s mineral claims regime that cited DRIPA put the province at serious litigation risk, while First Nations have said the law should not be changed.

The draft government document says the goal now is to "arrive at a set of recommendations, supported by First Nations in B.C. and the Province of B.C." on how to implement DRIPA.

The document provided to The Canadian Press says there is "no commitment to either a) make amendments, or b) not make amendments to DRIPA."

It is labelled as being subject to an NDA, or non-disclosure agreement.

The document outlines how discussions between the government, First Nations and other stakeholders could take place, and says there will be a "focus on reaching a shared understanding of how legislative alignment (with DRIPA) could most effectively work, in a manner led by First Nations and government but supported by the courts."

It says the first meetings could take place within two weeks of the process being announced.

The now-scrapped plan to table the suspension bill on Monday lasted just a few hours after it emerged Sunday, and was immediately repudiated by First Nations leaders who have also opposed previous plans to amend DRIPA instead.


And:



Your Eminence, you are only inviting Carney to cancel you:

Cardinal Frank Leo, the metropolitan archbishop of Toronto, called on Prime Minister Mark Carney and all his MPs to “choose life” and allow support to a Conservative Party private members’ bill that would stop a planned expansion of euthanasia to those with mental illness.

“I ask you to choose life and not death; to help build a civilization that cares for those suffering and does not eliminate them, but instead surrounds them with dignity, compassion, and love,” wrote Cardinal Leo in a letter released today, addressed directly to Carney and his MPs. 

The prelate said Carney must allow his MPs to”choose life” and allow support behind Bill C-218, which is a proposed bill that would stop the expansion of so-called “Medical Assistance in Dying” (“MAiD”).

“As you know, our Catholic faith opposes the taking of any human life and it is with great disappointment and anguish that we have seen our country expand Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) at a rapid and alarming rate since legislation was passed in 2016, despite the commitments made and the safeguards promised,” wrote Cardinal Leo.

Bill C-218, or “An Act to amend the Criminal Code (medical assistance in dying [i.e., euthanasia]),” was introduced by Conservative Party MP Tamara Jansen and passed its first reading on June 20, 2025, as reported by LifeSiteNews. The bill would ban extending state-sponsored euthanasia to those with mental illness. 





We don't have to trade with China:


Shareholders of Allied Gold Corp. voted in favour of China’s Zijin Gold International Co. Ltd.’s proposed $5.5 billion acquisition of the company last week.

Industry Minister Mélanie Joly reviews all proposed foreign takeovers of Canadian companies in case of national security vulnerabilities. The reviews include assessing how the deals will affect Canada’s defence capabilities, critical supply chains, and the potential for enabling foreign espionage. 

The Canadian government had a 45-day window to raise concerns about the deal, but it did not do so, meaning it was approved by default. The government would still be able to block Zijin’s acquisition of Allied if it fails to pass the ongoing net economic benefit review, which examines the deal’s impact on the Canadian economy, jobs, and supply chains.

Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada said in a statement to The Epoch Times that the government is aware of the transaction, but said it can’t comment on specific transactions due to confidentiality provisions in the Investment Canada Act.

Zijin, which has indirect ties to the Chinese regime through its ownership structure, struck a deal in January to acquire Allied for $44 per share in cash—an all-time high for the stock. Allied operates mines in the African countries of Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, and Mali, and produces around 375,000 ounces of gold a year.

Neither of the companies responded to The Epoch Times’ request for comment.

Under former prime minister Justin Trudeau, Ottawa tightened rules on Chinese ownership in the Canadian mining sector, citing national security concerns over China’s growing control of the global critical minerals supply chain. The Canadian government was particularly concerned about Chinese control of lithium, cobalt, and rare earths.

The Canadian government warned in 2022 that some foreign investments in Canada could be “motivated by non-commercial imperatives that are contrary to Canada’s interests.”

Canada has typically allowed Chinese investment in Canada’s gold sector in recent years, as the metal is not classified as a critical mineral. But in 2020, Ottawa blocked Shandong Gold Mining Co. Ltd.’s attempted acquisition of TMAC Resources Ltd. TMAC’s mine is located near tidewater in the Northwest Passage, which is a strategic shipping route in the Canadian Arctic.

Since Mark Carney became prime minister in early 2025, he has moved to strengthen ties between Ottawa and Beijing in a bit to diversify trade away from the United States. During a visit to China in January, Carney announced he was reducing tariffs on imports of Chinese electric cars, and said Canada was open to more investment from China.

**

Several Toronto-area business people aligned in various ways with the Chinese government were among guests who paid close to $2,000 to attend a Liberal party fundraiser with Prime Minister Mark Carney last month.

The attendees included individuals and groups that have won praise from Chinese diplomats and agencies, echoed Beijing’s talking points on contentious issues and worked with Chinese Communist Party (CPP) organizations.

One guest’s presence evoked memories of the famous “dumpling-making” photo of then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at a controversial fundraiser a decade ago.

Co-hosted by local MP Michael Ma, the dinner attracted attention even before it began. Ma crossed the floor from the Conservatives to the Liberals in December 2025, then drew controversy last month by pointedly challenging parliamentary testimony about the well-documented phenomenon of forced labour in China.

The fact China-friendly figures paid $1,750 each to attend a gathering with Carney is a worrisome reminder of Beijing’s reach, indirectly at least, into federal politics, China critics charge.

“By paying for that expensive ticket, you get the face-to-face acquaintance with the political VIP you like to associate with,” said Gloria Fung of the group Canada-Hong Kong Link.

“There are steps — step by step — how these politicians could be lobbied and lured into the acceptance of the narrative promoted by donors,” she said. “I don’t want any of our government officials to run into this evil cycle again, because it won’t end there. It won’t end with a fundraising dinner.”





Less familiar to many Westerners, though, is the Quebec perspective on the poison pill Pierre Trudeau placed in his new constitution of 1982. That perspective is presented by Laval University political scientist Guy Laforest in his book, Trudeau and the End of a Canadian Dream. In Laforest’s view, Trudeau’s constitutional changes of 1982, especially the adoption of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, ended the possibility of an accord that could keep Quebec in Canada.

The “Canadian dream” in Laforest’s book title would be a country where Quebec’s role as the national state of French Canadians would be recognized while still remaining part of Canada. According to Laforest, what many Quebec nationalists really want for their province is a form of “decentralized federalism, with a new division of powers that would make it fully able to shoulder its responsibilities as the national homeland of French Canadians and the seat of their culture.”

Pierre Trudeau was dead-set against that sort of arrangement. He wanted a more homogenous type of Canada that would substantially diminish the distinct cultures and identities of the provinces and regions, including Quebec. Trudeau saw his Charter of Rights as helping to fulfill this goal.

As Laforest explains, “One of the Charter’s objectives was to diminish the sense of regional and territorial ‘belonging’ experienced by” people in various parts of the country “and to promote among them an unmediated identification with the Canadian national community as a whole.”

Trudeau figured he could defeat Quebec nationalism and therefore also Quebec sovereignty by getting Canadians to turn away from their regional and provincial loyalties, and instead focus their loyalty on a national institution, especially the Charter of Rights.

In this sense, the Charter is “designed to create a homogenous Canadian community in which individuals and groups share the same set of fundamental values. By its very nature, the Charter is incompatible with a concept such as that of a distinct society, and with any idea of particular status for Quebec.”

In other words, the Charter would create a homogenous national community and thereby smother regional identities, particularly the strong provincial identity of the Quebecois.

As a result, “Trudeau’s project collides head-on with any project of a distinct national society and an autonomous political community in Quebec. In Mr. Trudeau’s view of things, there is no Quebec nation or people. There is a single, indivisible Canadian nation, and the people of Quebec are Canadian citizens who happen, more or less accidentally, to live in the territory of Quebec.”

By the same token, in Trudeau’s ideal, people living in Alberta should see themselves as Canadians who happen to live in Alberta, not as Albertans. The point is to eliminate provincial distinctiveness in favour of a national identity centred around the Charter itself.

Quebec nationalists could not stomach Trudeau’s Charter. Indeed, Quebec never signed onto the 1982 constitution. For this reason, Laforest views it as illegitimate, as do many other Quebecers.

In essence, Pierre Trudeau’s 1982 constitution, especially the Charter of Rights, ended the possibility of accommodation between Canada and Quebec. Therefore, if Quebec truly wants to defend its unique identity, it must become its own country.

This is the inevitable result of Trudeau imposing his vision of Canada in 1982.

In other words, Pierre Trudeau planted the seeds of Canada’s destruction. He completely changed the country with his new constitution. As Laforest aptly points out, “To change a constitution is to alter the nature, the very being, of a political body.” Therefore, it is true to say that Trudeau “is the true founder of the political system under which we have lived since 1982.”

Pierre Trudeau was not just another prime minister like the others. He is the one who founded modern Canada and established the patterns of political life that currently threaten its existence.

Laforest writes that by the time Trudeau died, he “could boast about his stature as the most important political personality of twentieth-century Canada.”

Indeed, Trudeau “could pride himself on having succeeded in what is, according to Machiavelli, the most difficult and perilous of political undertakings — the radical transformation of his country’s constitution. To this extent, we must see him essentially as the new founder of Canada.”

Yes, Pierre Trudeau is “the new founder of Canada.” His changes to this country — especially the Charter of Rights — are the source of many significant problems. His legacy is a major factor in the current efforts of people in two provinces to leave the country. The failure of Canada can be laid at the feet of Pierre Trudeau and his vision for the country.





Tuesday, April 21, 2026

Enjoy the Decline

Don't take my word for it.

I'm not the one saying it:


(Sidebar: more here.) 

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Mark Carney – the world’s leading corporate promoter of carbon taxes before becoming prime minister who scrapped Justin Trudeau’s unpopular consumer carbon tax on his first day as PM – acknowledged last year that Canada was always going to fall far short of Trudeau’s 2030, 2035 (and thus, logically, 2050) emission reduction targets, despite committing more than $200-billion of federal taxpayers’ money to the effort in 149 government programs administered by 13 federal departments.

Which ones worked and which ones failed? Which were duplicates of other programs resulting in the double counting of claimed emission cuts?

Who knows? There’s never been a comprehensive audit of the feds’ climate strategy.

What we know is that whenever the auditor general, parliamentary budget officer and federal environment commissioner examine a sampling of these programs, they find widespread examples of incompetence, mismanagement and conflicts of interest.

Add in 364 provincial programs – which still excludes municipal ones – and a rough estimate of the total projected cost to taxpayers is more than $500 billion, or $12,000-plus per Canadian.

Today, governments constantly cite “climate change” as the source of the damage caused by every conceivable natural disaster.

In reality – since there has always been severe weather – the culprit in many cases is government negligence over decades to properly maintain public infrastructure such as roads, highways, bridges, sewers and dikes, as well as to update fire suppression strategies and building codes, while allowing massive developments on floodplains, in coastal areas and in forests prone to wildfires.

**

Canada has seen the largest capital outflow in the nation’s history over the past decade with more than $1 trillion in investment leaving, according to a new report by RBC.

The report released April 14 by Jordan Brennan and Farhad Panahov of RBC Thought Leadership details how for every inward dollar of foreign direct investment between 2015 and 2024, two dollars in investment left the country, leading to “the largest capital exodus in Canadian history.”

The extended period of investment leaving Canada has created what Panahov and Brennan describe as an “unprecedented capital recession,” which they say has been defined by “weak business investment, stalling productivity, and stagnating living standards.”

Brennan and Panahov identify structural and policy obstacles as the main reason that investment has left Canada.

“The barriers are execution, predictability, and risk tolerance,” they write, adding that regulatory delays, changing policies, and uncertainty about approvals have caused an increasing number of investors to stop investing in Canada.

While risk is a given in most investments, Brennan and Panahov say investors “flee when hemmed in by vague rules and shifting frameworks” to go to jurisdictions that are seen as more stable and predictable.

**
**

Higher prices for energy due to the conflict in the Middle East—particularly for gasoline—drove prices higher, StatCan said in its April 20 report. Excluding gasoline prices, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose by a slower rate of 2.2 percent, compared to 2.4 percent in February.

(Sidebar: don't we have our own oil?) 

The statistics agency said that overall energy prices rose by 3.9 percent on a year-over-year basis in March after falling by 9.3 percent in February. Compared to the previous month, energy prices rose by 13.1 percent.
**
A one-time top-up will be distributed to millions of eligible Canadians in June, marking the launch of Ottawa’s new grocery benefit that will take the place of GST payments for the next five years.
Prime Minister Mark Carney announced in January that the Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit (CGEB) would increase the financial support provided to families and individuals through the Goods and Services Tax (GST) rebate.
The benefit boost will begin with a one-time 50 percent top-up on June 5, followed by a 25 percent increase to the standard quarterly GST rebate in July under the new grocery benefit, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) said in a post on its website. The grocery benefit will replace GST credits through the summer of 2031.
**

In Canada the last 10 years, the Liberal party, particularly when led by Justin Trudeau, reasoned that its judgment was not just better, but far superior, than the market’s judgment, by which we mean the countless decisions made by people every minute of every day. The damage done to Canada’s economy has never been clearer.

An RBC report released Tuesday confirmed that new investment in Canada has completely collapsed during the Liberals’ tenure in power. “Between 2015 and 2024, more than $1 trillion of investment exited Canada — the largest capital exodus in Canadian history,” the report says. “For every dollar of inward FDI, two dollars exited.” Partly as a result, GDP per capita growth, the best indicator we have of standard of living, has been less than one per cent the last decade, by far the lowest of any period since the Great Depression.

The reason for this, the same reason why another $1 trillion in corporate capital is sitting idle, is what the RBC report terms “burdensome regulatory, permitting and project delivery barriers.” In other words, the Liberals introduced regulations on top of regulations and endless processes, in the name of fighting climate change, thus choking off investment.

The clearest examples are the introduction of the Impact Assessment Act, the government’s cancellation of the Northern Gateway pipeline, the carbon tax, the industrial carbon tax, the clean fuel regulations, and the constant atmosphere of uncertainty as Liberals kept promising new regulations, such as the emissions cap on the oilsands. If you want to achieve an environmental objective, the options are regulation or taxation. The Liberals opted for both, which was incoherent overkill, even from the perspective of centre-left environmentalism.

Some 10-20 years ago, Canada was teeming with proposals to build pipelines in every which direction, LNG terminals and oilsands mines. There was also tremendous investor enthusiasm in Ontario’s Ring of Fire mineral deposits. And then the Liberals came along and subjected everything to multiple reviews.

When for instance, the private owner of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion pulled out, the Liberals did not take that as evidence that project reviews needed to be streamlined. They took it as evidence they needed to buy the pipeline, expending taxpayer dollars that would have never been spent if Canada had a functioning infrastructure assessment regime. By 2020, in all, about $150 billion in energy projects were cancelled or delayed.

Similarly, the Liberals were dismissive of the Ring of Fire because of the peat moss in the area. Former environment minister Jonathan Wilkinson complained in 2023: “I actually bemoan the fact that everybody goes right to Ring of Fire.” After the project was subjected to a regional assessment by Wilkinson, his successor Steven Guilbeault launched another review, further duplicating processes already completed by the Ontario government.

The RBC report makes some useful suggestions around corporate tax reform and streamlining foreign investment approvals. But it is clearly a document written to appeal to the central planner currently in the prime minister’s office, Mark Carney. RBC devotes much of its recommendations to how the government itself should invest, encourage private investment or otherwise leverage “state capital.”

It even includes lines like this, which could have been written by Carney himself: “State capital could be deployed at scale, not to replace private capital but to catalyze it.” The recommendations are thus best left ignored because they do not properly address the severe capital shortage that the report so astutely observed, and the reasons behind that shortage.

Canada needs new thinking, quick.

Canadians are poorer than they otherwise would have been had the Liberals permitted business proposals to advance normally. These were choices made by Trudeau and his cabinet, choices driven by the belief that they were smarter and more wise than all Canadians put together. It is a mistake that will hold this country back for years.









Wednesday, April 15, 2026

Mid-Week Post

Your middle-of-the-week thought-of-the-day ...



Prime Minister Carney's arranged election victories signal (at least in his mind) the time to get to work ... removing Canada from the American sphere of influence and jet-setting around the globe.

He'll take a moment out of that schedule to placate the morons who voted for him.

To wit:

A day after sweeping three byelections in Ontario and Quebec that gave him a majority in the House of Commons, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that he is temporarily removing the federal excise tax on gas and diesel.

The move means that the cost of gas will drop by 10 cents on a litre of gasoline and four cents per litre of diesel starting on Monday and lasting until Labour Day.

The fuel tax holiday, which Carney said would also see the four cent per litre excise tax removed on aviation fuel, is expected to cost an estimated $2.4 billion.



Now, about that:


The Trudeau/Carney government as it stands (in case one had forgotten):


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The gap between Canada's richest and poorest grew last year as financial markets gained, interest payouts declined and the job market softened, said Statistics Canada on Monday.

The agency says the income gap — measuring the difference in the share of disposable income between households in the top 40 per cent and those in the bottom 40 per cent — reached 46.7 percentage points in 2025.

The result compared with a gap of 46.4 percentage points a year earlier.

The wider gap came as the lowest-income households saw wages rise slower than the overall average and saw their investment income fall because of lower interest payments on savings, the agency said.

Meanwhile, Statistics Canada says the top 20 per cent of the wealth distribution accounted for 65.7 per cent of Canada's total net worth at the end of 2025, averaging $3.5 million per household.

In contrast, the bottom 40 per cent of the wealth distribution held three per cent of Canada's net worth, averaging $81,650 per household.

The gap in wealth between the top 20 per cent and the bottom 40 per cent was 62.7 percentage points at the end of 2025, up 0.6 percentage points from a year earlier.

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Ontario is overhauling its body that reviews complex medically assisted deaths, narrowing its membership, scaling back its scope and shifting its role away from independent oversight toward supporting the system it is meant to scrutinize, according to documents obtained by The Globe and Mail.
Two former members say the proposed new version of the committee is designed to be less rigorous and to provide less oversight.
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Four provinces and the federal government are dialling back their freedom-of-information (FOI) laws, moves that ominously mirror one another.

British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, Nova Scotia and Ottawa are tightening transparency legislation, or proposing to do so, to make internal government documents harder for citizens, journalists and others to obtain. 

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Canada’s dominant Liberal Party has introduced legislation that may soon make Christian speech illegal.

In March, the Canadian House of Commons passed Bill C-9, also known as the “Combatting Hate Act.” The bill was introduced under the guise of mitigating antisemitic attacks in the wake of Hamas’ violent attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Liberals claimed it was developed to protect religious communities, but C-9 eagerly expanded to prohibit public displays of “hate,” including “Islamophobia, homophobia, and transphobia.” The Canadian Liberals have used so-called hate speech as a Trojan horse to enact censorship laws — the same thing American Democrats are trying to do here. 

C-9 intentionally uses vague language, allowing “hatred” to be determined on a case-by-case basis. Canada’s DOJ has admitted as much, stating, “The penalty for the new hate crime offence would reflect the harm caused by the illegal act.” Under C-9’s broad definitions, public prayers and Bible recitation could conceivably be prosecuted as criminal offenses if they’re determined to be “hateful.” Violators could face up to a decade behind bars.

The “Combatting Hate Act” reportedly removes a portion of the religious defense previously found in section 319(3)(b) of the Canadian Criminal Code, which states, “No person shall be convicted of an offence under subsection (2) if, in good faith, the person expressed or attempted to establish by an argument an opinion on a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text.” The “good faith” was protection for religious principles. 

C-9 creates a gaping loophole for anti-religious lawfare. The bill explicitly aims to “streamline” judicial “hate crime” proceedings by removing the requirement that all “hate propaganda charges” first be approved by Canada’s attorney general. This strips any semblance of law enforcement oversight, empowering individuals to inflict their anti-religious dogmas on anyone they deem “hateful.”

Canada has a history of legislating away its citizens’ freedoms. In 2017, Bill C-16 made “hate speech” against transgender-identifying Canadians a crime. Criminal complaints can be filed against someone who repeatedly uses biologically correct pronouns for a person who claims to be the opposite sex. 

Canada’s weak protections for speech and religious exercise have diverged from the United States’ historically much stronger safeguards, but today’s Democrats threaten to take America down the same dangerous path. In the 1970s, Canada introduced laws barring people from using telephones and later the internet to promote so-called hate speech. Though some of these laws have since been repealed, the country’s mission to counter “hate” is still in motion. In 2019, Canada’s then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau urged Cabinet ministers to crack down on online “hate speech” in reaction to the political right.

In just a few decades, Canadians’ freedom of speech and religious liberties have declined dramatically. While both C-9 and C-16 might sound extreme and far from home, American politicians have pursued similar legislation under the guise of safety, social stability, and inclusion.

In 2025, the California Legislature introduced SB 771, which would have targeted social media companies for “acting as algorithmic accomplices” to content leading to a “hate crime.” Tech companies thought to be amplifying “hate speech” could have faced millions of dollars in civil penalties for each infraction. The governor vetoed the pro-censorship bill, but it passed through the state Senate and Assembly, meaning a majority of lawmakers endorsed the legislation. 

In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a bill into law forcing social media companies to allow users to report online “hate speech.” Further, the tech companies were required to respond to each report or pay fines. The New York Legislature also introduced bills that would require the tech giants to enable users to report so-called misinformation about vaccines and elections — aka, information that threatens Democrat narratives.

U.S. leaders have also attempted to prevent Christian worship services. During the 2020 Covid shutdowns, many churches were forcibly closed. In March 2020, Florida Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne was arrested for violating a stay-at-home order and was shamed for holding regular church services. Several Christians in Idaho, including a church deacon, were arrested after singing psalms in public without wearing masks. It wasn’t until years later that the victims sued the city. The era of Covid lockdowns has passed for now, but the muscle the government flexed against Christians hasn’t atrophied.





Frances Widdowson, who launched a legal challenge against University of Lethbridge (UL) in July 2023, had her arguments heard by a Court of King’s Bench judge on Friday. Widdowson, a former Mount Royal University professor, is arguing that the University of Lethbridge restricted her right to free speech when it cancelled her talk in February 2023.

Blackfoot First Nation protesters and other demonstrators pressured the university to cancel the event, and then-president Michael Mahon consented to their calls amid what the school describes as security concerns. Widdowson — who has prompted similar protests at two other Canadian universities — said the cancellation mirrors a worrying trend of campuses restricting precisely the sorts of open debates they are meant to encourage. 

“People need to take this seriously, because universities are incredibly important institutions in a democratic society,” Widdowson said. “They let knowledge be disseminated, they’re important in the training of professionals, and are also a bulwark against authoritarianism. All of those functions now are under threat, because you have institutions like the University of Lethbridge, which is not academic at all anymore and has been completely captured by Indigenization activists.” 

Court hearings have focused on whether the university had an obligation to protect free speech in the face of the alleged “very real harms” of hosting the event, according to a legal brief filed to the court by Widdowson’s lawyer, Glenn Blackett. Following Friday’s hearings, a ruling is expected in the coming months.

Widdowson has attracted opposition primarily for work in which she has doubted the claims put forward about Indigenous unmarked graves in Canada, with a focus on Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc, previously known as the Kamloops Indian Band, which has claimed that 215 “missing children” are buried in unmarked graves on the site of a former residential school. 

Nearly five years after the initial claim, however, the First Nation has not exhumed the remains of any children. In a February update, the First Nation said its investigation using ground-penetrating radar is ongoing. Widdowson has made a point of emphasizing this current lack of evidence, including in a 2025 YouTube documentary called “What Remains: Aftermath of the Kamloops Mass Grave Deception.” (A 2021 Assembly of First Nations resolution referred to the Kamloops claims as an example of “burial sites or mass graves.”)

Widdowson said it was an “open question” whether any children were secretly buried on the Kamloops residential site, but said that those allegations need to be properly scrutinized and supported. The graves are regularly cited as evidence of Canada’s alleged genocide against First Nations. 

“Claims should be asserted on the basis of reason, evidence and logic, not the basis of a prescribed doctrine,” she said. 

The planned February 2023 event was about how “wokeism” was undermining academic freedom. Widdowson agreed to the talk on the invitation of Paul Viminitz, a professor who the university later fired in 2024. (Viminitz was previously a party to Widdowson’s Court of King’s challenge, and Jonah Pickle, a former student, is currently an applicant). 

Widdowson has since called on the Alberta government to intervene in her case against University of Lethbridge due to her claims about the threats to academic freedoms at stake, but the government has thus far declined. 

Elizabeth Harper, spokesperson for Advanced Education Minister Myles McDougall, said the province’s universities are obligated to report on their free speech policies, adding that “the University of Lethbridge has been asked to review their policies to ensure that they support free speech.”

Matthew Woodley, a lawyer at Reynolds Mirth Richards & Farmer LLP who is representing the University of Lethbridge, was occupied with separate court proceedings on Monday and was unable to schedule an interview, according to his assistant.

In a statement, University of Lethbridge spokesperson Trevor Kenney said that the same week of the cancelled talk in February 2023, Widdowson led two other lectures at the university that passed without incident. 

“The University cancelled a room booking for an event involving Frances Widdowson as the result of concerns relating to possible harms raised by members of the University community, including safety risks,” Kenney said. 

On May 27, 2021, the Kamloops Indian Band, or Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc, claimed that it had located the remains of 215 children — “some as young as three years old” — in an apple orchard at a former residential school site. The claims were based on the results of ground-penetrating radar, which is capable of detecting ground disturbances but does not confirm the presence of bodily remains. 

The next month, the Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan said it had found potentially 751 potential unmarked graves at a cemetery near the former Merieval Indian Residential School. (The Cowessess chief emphasized at the time that they were not mass graves, but unmarked ones.) 

Some cities including Victoria cancelled their Canada Day celebrations that year, and The Canadian Press named the Kamloops “unmarked graves discovery” as its newsmaker of the year. 

Widdowson said that until the evidence of graves are verified, it is intellectually unhealthy to assert that they do. That is also true for Canada’s First Nations, she said, who deserve to have their many struggles addressed on a foundation of truth. 

“If we don’t have the truth, we will not be able to figure out the best way to organize society,” she said. “That’s what’s happened to Aboriginal people now, is that they’re being fed a whole bunch of falsehoods which are making it impossible for Aboriginal people to thrive and live full lives in modern society. 

In December 2021, Mount Royal University, Widdowson’s former employer, terminated her over allegations that a series of tweets she had posted were a form of harassment. In 2024, an arbitrator found that Widdowson’s dismissal was unwarranted and that, despite her controversial views, there had “never been a complaint about the quality or ethics of her scholarship.”

 





Something feels off about Canadian public policy. Governments at every level seem perpetually busy announcing new agencies, launching new programs and carving out new tax measures. They are drawn to the new and visible, while the core of their responsibilities — the services people currently depend on — quietly deteriorates. There’s a name for this: “policy adventurism.” It’s a distraction we can no longer afford.

Toronto City Council recently voted 21-3 to launch a pilot project establishing four city-operated grocery stores. The goal is to make food more affordable for residents struggling to make ends meet. Food insecurity in Toronto is real and Canada is the food inflation capital of the G7.

But consider the proposal. This is a municipal government that cannot reliably fill potholes, has presided over a transit system in chronic dysfunction, and has seen housing affordability collapse on its watch. Now it intends to enter the grocery business. As food economist Sylvain Charlebois notes, modern food distribution is “incredibly complicated.”

Because grocery retail operates on notoriously thin margins, the Daily Bread Food Bank finds that even if the city eliminated those margins entirely, the maximum theoretical saving to households would be around $40 to $73 a month. The underlying drivers of food pricing would remain completely untouched, while taxpayers would be left subsidizing a permanent municipal loss leader.

The grocery pilot reflects a broader governing reflex: when confronted with complex, systemic failures, governments are often tempted to launch new initiatives rather than fix the machinery they already have. At the federal level, this dynamic has driven a steady expansion of new agencies.

Ottawa created the Canada Infrastructure Bank in 2017 to catalyze private investment in public infrastructure. It spent years failing to move money out the door. Rather than reckon with that reality, the Carney government doubled down. It added the Major Projects Office, Build Canada Homes and a Defence Investment Agency.

As Shannon Proudfoot recently wrote, this is a workaround rather than a public service overhaul. And it mistakes the rhetoric of urgency for the reality of delivery. Starting up a new agency generates a press release. It does not generate the structural regulatory reform or procurement capacity that determines whether things get built.

The recent Ontario budget shows similar adventurism. It includes a new $4 billion Protect Ontario Account Investment Fund — on top of the recently established Building Ontario Fund, with funding now at $8 billion — to leverage private capital to grow certain sectors. Missing from this conversation is why pension funds and private capital are choosing to invest abroad rather than at home in the first place.

As governments expand into dubious new areas, existing responsibilities get shortchanged. A March 2026 Auditor General report found that Ottawa identified over 153,000 potentially non-compliant international students but had funding to investigate only 2,000 cases a year. The ArriveCan application — a simple digital tool for border management — ballooned to an estimated $59.5 million with costs the Auditor General described as impossible to determine due to poor record-keeping.

Millions of Canadians do not have a family doctor, and they now wait a median of 28.6 weeks for medically necessary treatment — triple the wait in 1993. Student math scores have been falling for over two decades. Violent crime has surged. And serious concerns remain about the quality of Canada’s infrastructure.

These outcomes are striking because they occurred precisely at a time that governments dramatically expanded payrolls. Real institutional capacity is built through focus and clear mandates. Policy adventurism destroys the discipline of doing defined things well over time.

Some of it is well-intended. But the political reality is hard to ignore. New agencies and pilots generate headlines today with ribbon-cutting opportunities. Fixing a complex regulatory apparatus or reducing surgical wait times takes years, with diffuse credit and no guarantee of political reward.

And once government signals it is open for business in a new domain, stakeholders mobilize, lobbyists identify opportunities and pressure mounts to add more — each addition drawing staff, budget and ministerial attention away from the functions that were already failing. Every hour a deputy minister spends starting up the latest adventure is an hour not spent on restoring the integrity of the immigration system or managing the hospital capacity crisis.

A similar dynamic plays out in the tax system. Every budget seems to produce questionable new carve-outs, each justified in isolation, collectively producing what might be called the Swiss-cheese effect: a base riddled with holes, increasingly difficult to administer, eroding the fiscal foundation that existing public services depend on.

Governments do face genuinely new demands, from regulating artificial intelligence to navigating shifting trade relationships and managing demographic pressures. These challenges require immediate attention and institutional bandwidth.

But a state spread thin on redundant agencies and municipal grocery stores cannot manage these modern imperatives. Fiscal room, bureaucratic capacity and public trust are scarce. We cannot afford to spend them promiscuously on elective adventures while the foundations of public policy continue to crack.

The moment demands a rigorous return to prioritization. Governments must perform well in the core duties they have already promised before borrowing resources from the future to invent something new.



But make-work projects give the impression of solid action, so ...





Given how prevalent diversity, equity and inclusion ( DEI ) has become in recent years — notably in the federal government — it’s important to state some facts.

For example, according to the federal government’s anti-racism strategy , “Systemic anti-Indigenous racism accounts for the fact that compared to non-Indigenous People, First Nations, Inuit, and Métis experience poorer social, economic, and political outcomes than their non-Indigenous counterparts.” But according to the data, factors such as education and geography largely explain the differences in average incomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians.

In fact, as noted in a new study by the Aristotle Foundation, when Indigenous Canadians have a trade or university degree, live near a major urban centre and work full time, they have similar — or sometimes higher — incomes than their non-Indigenous counterparts.

Consider the latest census data, which measured incomes in 2020. Among Canadian workers who worked full time for the full year and have a bachelor’s degree or higher, the median employment income was $5,000 higher for Indigenous workers than non-Indigenous workers in Calgary, $4,000 higher in Toronto, $4,000 higher in Vancouver, $500 lower in Montreal and $2,000 lower in Ottawa-Gatineau. (All geographies refer to Census Metropolitan Areas).

Among Canadian workers who worked full time for the full year but have no certificate, diploma or degree, the median employment income was $5,600 higher for Indigenous workers than non-Indigenous workers in Toronto, $800 higher in Vancouver, $400 lower in Montreal and Ottawa-Gatineau, and $1,600 lower in Calgary.

As the data show, at higher levels of educational attainment (university certificate or diploma, a bachelor’s degree or higher), Indigenous workers actually slightly outperform their non-Indigenous counterparts on average. At lower levels of educational attainment, their median incomes are slightly less. It is difficult to conclude from these statistics that Indigenous workers’ incomes are negatively impacted by systemic racism.

Overall, the median employment income in 2020 was actually 15.7 per cent lower for Indigenous workers compared to non-Indigenous workers, but much of that is because a lower proportion of Indigenous workers obtain university degrees than the general population. Another major reason is that only 50 per cent of Indigenous workers worked full time for the full year compared to 54 per cent of non-Indigenous Canadians.

Incomes also tend to be higher in large cities where there’s more economic opportunity, and living and working in a federal or provincial capital provides more access to government jobs where pensions and job security tend to be much stronger. The data show that Indigenous workers are less likely to live in or near major urban centres — another reason for the income disparity.

So, what’s the main takeaway?

The data suggest that despite historic wrongs, Indigenous Canadians today are not hostages to a systemically racist economic system — they can and do prosper. When Indigenous Canadians obtain the same level of education and work the same number of hours in the same city as non-Indigenous Canadians, their incomes are broadly similar.

 Notably, any remaining income differences cannot simply be attributed to “systemic racism.” It would be silly to conclude that systemic racism causes full-time Indigenous workers with bachelor’s degrees to earn less than non-Indigenous workers in Ottawa-Gatineau while also causing full-time Indigenous workers without any certificate, diploma or degree to earn more than non-Indigenous workers in Toronto.

The bottom line is that hours worked, geography, and education largely explain the employment income disparity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous workers in Canada. The evidence does not support the claim that “systemic anti-Indigenous racism,” as the federal government might suggest, is to blame. Therefore, any policies meant to address systemic racism should be reviewed with a skeptical eye.