In the political sphere, the arrival of June normally signals the beginning of a “summer slowdown.” And yet, with B.C. having just wrapped its Conservative leadership contest, a continued stream of events and speaking engagements, and with so many key failures across so many key files to continue to litigate, report on, and better communicate to the public, there’s still so much to do, and so little time.

Yesterday, I was pleased to sit down with Michelle Rempel Garner, Conservative Shadow Minister for Immigration, to dismantle the current failed state of Canada’s immigration and labour systems.

In this episode, we tackle some of my reporting on the truth about Tim Hortons’ claims to be suddenly interested in “hiring local,” as well as the continued systemic abuse of the Temporary Foreign Worker Programme (TFWP)—which has locked young Canadians out of entry-level jobs and depressed domestic wages.

The conversation also highlights the urgent need to send the millions on expired and expiring visas home, as well as the simple, common-sense fix the Liberals could choose to enact to expedite the departure of foreign criminal networks.

I was also happy to join Greg Brady last week on this very topic, expanding on these supposed “10,000 local workers” and Tim Hortons’ questionable claims that they’re suddenly abandoning their temporary foreign worker model. Spoiler: They’re not, they’re merely rebranding it.

And on the B.C. Conservative leadership election, I have nuanced thoughts, as an insider-y outsider who has watched many in his sphere recently beclown themselves, but who also understands the dynamics that drive frustrations with certain campaigns:

Alexander Brown: The fix was never in

On a Saturday in British Columbia, Twitter became real life. But was the story that was told any more real than the others?

Without Diminishment

Alexander Brown: The fix was never in

The road on which internet conjecture starts is broad and easy; it is the Coquihalla Highway of inflated crisis…

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11 days ago · 25 likes · 1 comment · Without Diminishment Editor and Alexander Brown

Spend enough time in this line of work and you learn to stop caring about mischaracterisations. Any idea, once you hit send, once you hit post, once it hits a newspaper or the airwaves, it no longer belongs to you; it’s someone else’s to spin, aggregate, and relitigate. The same can be said of a name or the names attached to one’s name.

In the case of the final stretch of the B.C. Conservative leadership race, which wrapped up on a sunny Saturday night at the Rocky Mountaineer in East Vancouver, something funny happened along a road that ultimately ended in a railyard’s event space: the Kerry-Lynne Findlay (KLF) campaign stormed forward from the middle of the pack, unbowed by eleventh-hour scandal, emboldened by a strong organising effort on Vancouver Island, the North, and in the Interior, and unabashed in amassing a veritable Twitter army of independent media, journalists, influencers, and sh*t-posters, many of whom were implying that the fix was in against the ‘grassroots’ of the party.

The win was earned on merit. The result is not in question. That unsanctioned—but not discouraged—communications Potemkin village, hastily assembled on supposed grassroots, leaves something to be desired.

Thank you for your continued support of the Acceptable Views Substack. Conferences and engagements look lighter this month—before a few of us from a Canadian contingent are lucky enough to fly out to ARC in London as guests to end the month—so I’m hoping to join you weekly in your inbox before wheels up.

Editor’s note: I’m featured in The Hub today, as part of their series on the 30th anniversary of the ‘Winds of Change’ conference. It’s been a pleasure to join fellow contributors Preston Manning, Ian Brodie, Tom Flanagan, and many more, as (united) federal conservatives in Canada look to the past—and the future—in the hopes of securing an increasingly-elusive victory in the years ahead.

I encourage you to read the piece in The Hub, where you can subscribe to finish the article for as low as $1.

Alexander Brown: It’s time for young conservatives to once again step up and lead

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the 1996 Winds of Change conference, a formative moment in modern Canadian conservatism. Convened at a time of deep political fragmentation on the Right, the conference brought together a new generation of thinkers and activists to advance both the case for unity and a more assertive conservative vision for the country. Its ideas helped shape the creation of the Conservative Party of Canada and the policy direction of the Harper era. To mark the occasion, The Hub will feature a series of essays from leading voices reflecting on the conference’s legacy—and what its lessons mean for conservatism and Canada today.

While victory for an eventually-united front of Canada’s Right did not come until 2006, the seeds were planted in Calgary in 1996, a stone’s throw from that trio of famous peaks in Canmore, Alberta.

Back then, Stephen Harper articulated his “Three Sisters” theory, arguing that a Conservative majority had to be built on a coalition of Western Canadian populists, traditional Tories in Ontario and Atlantic Canada, and francophone nationalists in Quebec, foreshadowing his later success in merging the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservatives to form the modern Conservative Party of Canada.

A youth movement to recover Canada’s lost future

Just as important as ringing in this pearl jubilee is to remember just how generationally upending this gathering was viewed at the time. A political observer described Winds of Change as “a whole crop of 25-year-olds [stepping] forward to ease their elders aside and reunite divided conservatives.” Out were exclusively grey-haired affairs, in were organizers David Frum and Ezra Levant, and figureheads like Harper, taking the reins in their 30s and 40s, surrounded by collaborators big and small-c alike.

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If you believe yesterday’s announcement that Tim Hortons plans to dial back its use (and clear abuse) of the Temporary Foreign Worker Programme (TFWP) to hire “10,000 people locally” out of the goodness of its heart, I have a below-sea-level basement apartment to sell you in Richmond, B.C.’s peat-based Delta soil.

Let’s start with the obvious: If those 10,000 positions suddenly exist now, they never should have been outsourced to begin with. And yet, Tim Hortons spent the better part of a decade lobbying the Canadian federal government to increase and maintain workforce percentage caps that directly impacted thousands of positions, and influenced the entirety of the Canadian labour market.

Rather than ever lobbying for a specific number of individuals (because, again, they didn’t have an actual need when the market was showing a perpetual 20+ percent youth unemployment rate), Tim Hortons and its parent company, Restaurant Brands International Inc., instead lobbied to manipulate the overall percentage (or cap) of TFWs allowed per restaurant. During supposed “pandemic-era shortages”, they successfully massaged wilful dupes in government to increase that cap, allowing up to 30 percent of a restaurant’s workforce to consist of TFWs.

When the federal government finally cut the cap back down to 10 percent to curb immigration numbers, Tim Hortons heavily lobbied through 2024 and late 2025 to raise the limit back to 20 percent or 30 percent. Up until yesterday, they argued that rural and remote franchises continued to face severe labour shortages.

What they actually face is competition from Dunkin’ Donuts, with the popular American coffee chain set to break ground on its first Canadian locations in 2026, under a plan to aggressively expand to 600-700 locations nationwide.

If one were to charitably take Tim’s sudden shift in labour strategy at face value, this framing of yesterday’s announcement from the Globe and Mail might be enough to let bygones be bygones.

“Tim Hortons was one of the biggest proponents of the TFWP, a controversial immigration stream that expanded in popularity during the pandemic and came to symbolise some of the failings of the Trudeau-era immigration strategy.

“Restaurant Brands International Inc., Tim Hortons’ parent company, is also pledging to stop lobbying the federal government to expand the TFWP, citing the high youth unemployment rate.”

But the devil, they say, is in the details; in this instance, in the lack thereof. That “10,000 people locally” includes foreign students, and TFWs already in the country, with both groups still on active and expired permits in the millions.

And that’s just the start: graduates on Post-Graduation Work Permits (PGWP), and individuals under the International Mobility Program (IMP) do not require a Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA). Meaning a single restaurant could be staffed almost 100% by temporary visa holders, but if those employees are international students or PGWP holders, Tim’s corporate metrics classify them as “local hires,” not TFWs.

That also means Tim’s supposed ‘cap’ on TFWs was never an inherently honest number.

The bigger picture

“We’re still not seeing the immigration exits we are hoping for,” a senior government official for the province of Ontario told me last week. “The data from the feds has been non-existent. Across multiple sectors, we’re seeing temps working illegally through co-ethnic hiring networks, claiming fraudulent asylum, converting to visitor status and claiming benefits not to work, or goal-hanging on expired papers hoping for blanket amnesty from the federal government. The amount of bad faith and scamming continues to be overwhelming.”

“[Tim Hortons] is still asking for TFWs,” say senior federal sources. “Not only is it right there in the article, this is merely an effort to scuttle the hiring pool for Dunkin’ and win back a little goodwill with the public, meaning they always knew these jobs were out there for Canadians. The programme should be abolished entirely at this point; this is more proof of that.”

For those interested in solving for Canada’s generational mass immigration woes, the timing of Tim’s brazenly dishonest comms exercise couldn’t have come on a more appropriate day. On Monday, Peel Regional Police announced the arrest of 17 individuals, the majority of whom have ties to an international criminal network known as ‘For Brothers’, which targeted Indian business owners and community members across the region, Canada, and the United States.

The arrested:

Iqbal Singh Bhagria, 25, of Brampton, ON
Akashdeep Singh, 24, of Norval, ON
Ravinder Singh, 25, of Surrey, BC
Jashanbir Singh, 21, of Surrey, BC
Dilawarpreet Singh, 26, of Brampton, ON
Mandeep Singh, 21, of Brampton, ON
Prabhdeep Sohal, 22, of Brampton, ON
Partapbir Ghuman, 22, of Brampton, ON
Ajaydeep Singh, 29, of Brampton, ON
Navroop Singh, 24, of Brampton, ON
Rajan Singh, 28, of Barrie, ON
Amritjot Singh, 22, of Brampton, ON
Jashanpreet Singh, 22, of Brampton, ON
Guneet Guneet, 27, of Brampton, ON
Sukhwinder Singh, 32, of Brampton, ON
Mohinder Singh, 30, of Brampton, ON
Gautam Gautam, 22, of Manteca, CA

None are Canadian citizens, and according to early reports, it is believed the majority are on temporary status, be it expired, or nearly so.

On the same day, Jamie Sarkonak of the National Post reported on the case of a foreign worker from India, a ‘student’ turned permanent resident, who received only five-and-a-half months of house arrest for abusing her position as a Walmart cashier to help friends steal $7,000 in merchandise.

And this follows a week in which Canada’s newfound problem of low-quality foreign recruits bringing co-ethnic blood feuds and disrespect towards women into the Canadian Forces reached an American audience of millions, and where, back at home, even independent thought-averse legacy outlets such as CTV News have woken up to the foreign narco-trafficking networks that have infiltrated Canada’s airports and baggage handlers under dangerously lax hiring practices.

Not to be outdone, Teamsters Canada has sought to highlight the continued use of foreign workers in a trucking industry now responsible for dozens of innocent Canadian deaths per year, with bridge strikes and jackknifed trailers now a weekly expectation on our roads and highways.

Quite frankly, it’s all the same problem, and the blame lies at the feet of all the usual suspects: from white-collar criminals in government and business, to some of their blue-collar criminal recruits from the dodgiest outskirts of the Global Village.

The real problem is that for every day that we don’t get serious about enforced exits, Canada diminishes itself more than any trade threat or tariff ever could. Countries don’t normally decide to hand-wave in anyone who asks, including scores of sub-70 IQ trigger-men and murder-truckers, who are so hated by their former fellow countrymen, many moved to Canada to get away from them in the first place. Now, all Canadians, new and old alike, suffer the consequences of a decision to pivot our labour force into something cheap, replaceable, and implicitly less Canadian.

As I said on stage at Without Diminishment’s panel that helped kick off the proceedings at Canada Strong and Free in Ottawa, “temporary needs to mean temporary,” and “Canada needs an exit strategy and a reset, back to the Harper years, on an immigration standard that actually supports our young people and their future.” But what it also needs is a reckoning for an entire lobbying model grown so rotten that a government’s own consultants often represent the very clients being brought in to beg for more, more, more, without giving a damn that ‘more’ is the problem.

We need fewer low-skilled foreign workers and temporary residents. We need fewer problems, imported conflicts, schemes and designs. We need fewer networks that have taken food off the table for both Canadians and worthy, talented permanent residents (PRs), by widening price-to-income ratios, further disincentivizing the best and brightest from staking a claim here, or sticking it out.

And for serial abusers of the TFWP, PGWP, and IMP, like Tim Hortons, who helped kick this whole mess off, they need fewer customers—and not just because of the quality of the food in their private equity era.

Beyond the ability of their farmer’s wrap to turn stomachs, this shift is necessary to enforce a basic rule of consumption: if crap goes in, it needs to come out.

The original version of this piece was first published in Without Diminishment.

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

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The original version of this piece was first published in Without Diminishment.

Hope springs when vanguards of Canada’s failed status quo prove they’re not eternal.

After eight years of disappointment—five of which included a boarded-up Sir John A. Macdonald on the front lawn of the legislature—Ontario’s three-term majority ‘Progressive Conservative’ premier has finally been faced with a reckoning of sorts: his purchase of a ‘gravy plane’, and his fight to protect his cellphone records from the public have proven, so far, to be a bridge too far.

Those two wrongs (and the gravy plane is at least semi-defensible given the premier’s travel schedule) are no worse than the last twenty, but they do point to a dynamic that Ford and his inner circle haven’t had to face during Ontario’s near-decade of managed decline: an opposition with a faint pulse, and the end of a stunt-fuelled ‘Protect Ontario’ honeymoon that has produced seemingly few results.

According to some pollsters, Ford is now in a statistical tie with the leaderless Ontario Liberals, who have been aided by the presence of Eric Lombardi, a thoughtful Build Canada and Hub contributor, who has been a vocal critic of Ontario’s back-slide into the “sick man of Canada”, and who codes as a Liberal or a moderate Conservative depending on the topic. For Ford—who has deliberately bear-hugged two consecutive Liberal prime ministers, and who has played a key role in the unfortunate (and ongoing) Machiavellian infighting between consultant camps from Queen’s Park and those friendlier to the Office of the Leader of the Opposition (OLO)—the ‘Diet Carney’ act was only going to work for so long. Even in Canada, apathy has its limits, and premiers tend to wear failures on the ground before their prime ministers, and Ontario premiers in general tend to suffer if one’s mimetic desire also holds power in Ontario.

The federal Liberals under Mark Carney may differ from Ford in perceived temperament, but when it comes to saying and doing whatever it takes to win, staffing up a barrier of yes men and a “circular economy” of conflicts meant to insulate the leader from criticism, the two stand alone, without equal.

It should be of little surprise that ‘Carney-lite’ would eventually start to suffer that problem of incumbency before the genuine article, and it’s not as if that tenure was going well to begin with.

Everything in Ontario has gotten materially worse.

The province’s unemployment rate has increased for the fourth straight year. Record-low family-housing starts are setting off alarm bells. Ontario’s housing market is expected to get worse for both buyers and sellers for the foreseeable future, as sellers hold as prices dip from artificial highs, and buyers and renters are choked off by a limited supply of anything beyond a glut of dog-grate condos, with limited-to-no condo starts scheduled for the years ahead.

“The one thing for sure is that it’s going to get worse in Ontario. There is no possibility of better,” Ron Butler, the Ontario-based mortgage broker and popular, pugilistic political commentator told CTV News Toronto. “Thinking otherwise, it’s entirely based on hopium.”

Almost all of this was exacerbated by the province’s worst-in-the-West participation in a mass immigration moonshot during the Covid years, that rapidly transformed Ontario’s towns, led to the rise and fall of a notorious ‘diploma mill’ industry that sought both willing participants and willful dupes looking for a shortcut to PR, to which Premier Ford and his government participated in.

Building the fake schools was bad. Looking the other way as millions of temporary labourers flooded the marketplace, radically transforming formerly diverse but cohesive suburbs, upending the launching-pad prospects, rent costs, and general morale of a generation of working Ontarians was worse. Keeping up this act in 2026 is downright unforgivable.

Confronted by unruly and entitled temporary residents demanding extensions to their permits last week, Ford kneeled before the braying mob, saying, “I wish I could snap my fingers and say okay, you can stay.”

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Is Canada’s “fourth estate” still acting as a watchdog for the public interest, or has it transitioned into a “fifth column,” actively sabotaging the country’s stability? It’s a provocative question, but looking at the headlines from this past week, it’s one that many are surely asking themselves.

While the country continues to buckle under historic housing crises (soon to get much, much worse), and a domestic order that is crumbling in real-time (borne out, primarily, by the unvetted population moonshot of 2021-2024), our flagship publications have spent the last weeks churning out what can only be described as pro-amnesty propaganda for the millions on expired and expiring visas that, lest we forget, still say “temporary.”

The Star recently ran a piece urging the Carney majority to open a new permanent residency path for every single temporary worker currently in the country. Not to be outdone, Macleans published a sprawling, mawkish, longform act of navel-gazing, framing the struggle of temporary residents as a moral crisis of “almost Canadians.”

Both, of course, are deeply off the mark.

We are currently witnessing a population of temporary workers that has ballooned beyond any reasonable capacity, encouraged by a cheap, exploitable-labour ideology, a fake student and school ethos, that treats the nation like an airport hotel, rather than a distinct society. At a time when common sense dictates that those on expiring permits should return home to alleviate the generational strain on our already-failing infrastructure, the legacy media, at the behest of bad actors such as the ‘Migrant Workers Alliance for Change,’ now demands we formalize that cardinal sin.

This hastily assembled industrial complex lies, but the data does not. Youth unemployment in Canada is surging, hitting levels that threaten to sideline an entire generation of young men and women. Inside everyone point of data is a Canadian kid stuck on the launch pad. I speak with dozens when I’m on the event circuit, it’s no word of a lie, they’re sending hundreds of resumes, and getting absolutely nowhere.

And yet — and quite disgracefully — to read the legacy press, or to witness a Lena Diab fugue state in the House of Commons, you would think the primary victim of this crisis isn’t a Canadian couple disincentivized from starting a family because they’re forced to live in a 500 sq. ft. rental for $2700/month, but the temporary worker whose path to citizenship was never guaranteed in the first place.

Make no mistake, this is also a political betrayal that crosses party lines. Nowhere is that more evident than in the recent comments by Ontario Premier Doug Ford. Ford, a believe-in-nothing people pleaser, who often claims to be “protecting Ontario,” recently bowed to a mob, claiming he wished he could “snap his fingers” and make sure the millions of low-wage labourers protesting to stay in Canada could stay indefinitely if he had the power.

Youth unemployment in Ontario is now permanently fixed between 15-20%. In cities like Toronto, it reaches well into the 20s. In just the past few years, recent Sean Fraser, Marc Miller, and Lena Diab invitees have set up large-scale extortion networks, bringing the worst of the global village, and blacked out Dodge Challengers with AK-47 decals, to once-safe family suburbs, where proud, qualified, and integrity-driven immigrants would put down roots in a country they felt was on the right track.

It was another in a series of mask-off moments for Premier Ford, who was nowhere during Covid damages to the economy, public square, and civil liberties; nowhere when the diploma mill crisis kicked off; nowhere when the Third World’s tow-truck wars or murder-truckers started hitting overpasses, innocent families, each other, and running illegal dump sites and contraband yards next to playgrounds in formerly-pastoral Caledon.

While Ontarians struggle to justify remaining in the sick man of North America, Ford is signalling to Canada’s wayward and deeply infiltrated corporate lobby that he is more than happy to play dumb about suppressing wages and keeping the population taps running at full tilt.

Like the federal Liberals he so often mirrors and prefers, Ford seems to believe that Canada’s sputtering economic engine doesn’t require a functioning border, nor a true gameplan for an exit strategy, a return to numbers we can support, and the productivity we must re-engineer.

To their limited credit as a voting bloc, Canadians and recent-immigrant Canadians feel very differently. There is a growing, barely withheld fury among the public against our poor excuse for elites, who have dismantled the orderly, merit-based system that once made Canada an international success story, and attractive to the world’s talented and upward-oriented.

Recent polling still shows a consensus that immigration levels have moved far beyond reasonable.

Self-respecting adults understand what the media and Doug Ford are incentivized not to: a country is more than a bazaar market, a waystation, a tide that beckons the world’s rudderless young men to wash up on its shores, turning it into Tortuga.

Canada is (was?) a community, a delicate ecosystem, with a finite number of doctors, homes, and jobs, with a story and a purpose in need of protecting.

When you continue to ignore those limits, we call that “managed decline.”

If you have yet to do so, start asking why our leaders are so eager to prioritize the interests of low-skill temporary residents over the future of Canadian youth, and over our needs for high skill, and high morals. Until then, millions of Canadians will continue to look at the news and their politicians and see the same thing: a class of people who have completely lost the plot, pulling the ladder up behind them while the rest of us wonder what ends first — their era, or the country.

Alexander Brown is the writer of Acceptable Views, Managing Editor of Without Diminishment, Director of the National Citizens Coalition, and a contributor to Project Ontario.

You can catch him on stage next week at Canada Strong and Free Ottawa.

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The original version of this column was first published in Without Diminishment, and appears in syndication with permission.

Do you feel like you’ve heard this song before?

The Canadian Press described the weekend’s Liberal convention in Montreal, and Carney’s keynote address, as a “[call] for political unity and for Canadians to dispatch with ‘politics as usual,’ as the country confronts a crumbling international order it once benefited gainfully from.”

Nowhere in that coverage, nor at the conference, was the audience asked to confront Canada’s crumbling domestic order (or who was in charge, despite claims of “just getting started”), nor were they expected to ask follow-up questions of those making grand ChatGPT proclamations of “political unity”, while foraging for floor-crossers and engineering a majority government through non-electoral means.

If a weekend’s worth of bromides and words as light as air remind you of the early days of the Trudeau era, you’re not alone. We were assured then that “Canada is back”, while we waved goodbye to peace, order, and good government. Trudeau’s $53.8 million boondoggle of an Indigenous inquiry, which had limited interest in finding who was doing the “missing and murdering” in that MMIWG acronym, or in exploring how Ottawa’s own Gladue sentencing principle plays an outsized role in placing the killers of Indigenous women back on the street, led to the blood libel that Canada was a nation guilty not of past “genocide” only, but present genocide, too. From that, we lost our flag, cooler heads, and the heads of statues, only to see them artificially return in an anti-American pinch. That pinch cost the federal Conservatives dearly, as their young, diverse, and motivated voting bloc had held out hope for reforms that were by no means radical — merely the return to the country that existed only years ago.

As we know, that was too much to ask of Canada’s electorate in the Donald Trump era. To an increasingly 65-and-over Liberal support base, it is expected that Canada’s identity remains as much who we are not (American), as who we want to be (ourselves; meaningfully and consistently). And that it is better to live in denial, or failure, than to risk even the perception of needing to make this country “great again”.

Judging by the panels and speeches on display in Montreal, the cultivated fiction that Canada’s domestic status quo is one that needs protecting remains alive and well. Replacing a leader, like lancing a boil, doesn’t always deal with the underlying infection.

On housing, one of the chief architects of the Vancouver housing crisis, Gregor Robertson, has already thrown up his hands in his role as federal housing minister, claiming “I can only do so much.”

Robertson, who, while serving as Vancouver’s mayor, “went to China and encouraged foreign investment in luxury housing . . . so that’s what his whipped caucus on council focused on for the better part of a decade”, has quietly walked back Carney’s plan to “build at speeds not seen in generations”, in favour of resolving Canada’s worst-in-the-G7 middle-class housing crisis by 2060. Thirty-four years from now.

On identity, immigration, and a return to cultural cohesion — vitally important pocketbook issues for young voters, integrated immigrant communities, and non-Liberals — Prime Minister Carney played dispiritingly from the Trudeau song sheet.

“Canada is a nation forged through accommodation, not assimilation . . . Through partnership, not domination . . . The founding insight of our country is that unity does not require uniformity.”

Keir Starmer’s belated correction into “island of strangers” territory, this was not.

Most troubling, and garnering much of the bandwidth on X, was the decision by divine-right-to-rulers to platform Patrick Pichette, a former senior vice-president of Google, to trial-balloon a further-country-severing policy framework. He suggested that if young Canadians wish to flee for greener pastures, they need to pay an exit tax of half a million dollars. If that’s not further proof that the nation’s natural ruling party exists in part to pull the ladder up behind it, given that Pichette himself benefited immensely from his time in the United States, what else could possibly qualify?

Canadian net emigration reached record highs in 2024–25. Research into top-tier Canadian universities, U of T, Waterloo, and UBC, found that 66 percent of software engineering graduates and 30 percent of computer science graduates leave for the United States shortly after graduating.

The solution, of course, should be an obvious one: get our house in order; rebuild an immigration standard; send home those on expired and expiring ‘temporary’ status in areas we do not need; borrow from your betters when it comes to layered, nuanced healthcare delivery; reinforce laws, and civilisation itself.

Instead, Pichette went further, doubling down on decline, and arguing for triple the amount of mass immigration, as if millions of potential fast-food workers entering through the TFWP, IMP, or foreign-student stream can replace our problems of top-tier brain drain, and an anemic economy that runs on far too many zombified, unproductive businesses allowed to limp along through subsidisation.

A recent federal Conservative call for a gas tax cut has no answer for this. When your opponent is considering an about-face on a return to forever replacement labour, throwing up its hands on fixing the housing crisis it created, and laying out schematics for a Berlin Wall for Gen-Z and Millennials, it should be of little wonder that concepts such as the “New Right” begin to emerge. New threats require a new response, and the playbook of yesterday isn’t going to cut it — not when a fat, happy, well-heeled, efficient voting bloc turns out in droves to steal from the future, by protecting the delusion that it’s still the 1990s.

While woefully short on action, heading into the weekend the Carney Liberals had at least shown themselves adept at whispering a more palatable brand of learning-language-model-infused sweet nothings to those perjured towards style over substance. Only, at their great Montreal bacchanal, the mask slipped further. It would be the very height of intellectual malpractice to ignore all that felt familiar to 2015.

When a country ignores its border for those coming in, but guards it only for its best and brightest being forced to consider a future elsewhere, it has ceased to be a nation — it has become a prison of its own making.

Alexander Brown is the Managing Editor of Without Diminishment, Director of the National Citizens Coalition, and the writer of Acceptable Views. His work has appeared in the Toronto Sun, The Hub, Juno News, Western Standard, Rebel News, and on Toronto Today AM 640.

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We’re hours removed from longtime Conservative MP Marilyn Gladu officially crossing the floor to join Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal caucus, having cited concerns over national sovereignty and the impact of U.S. tariff threats under the Trump administration as her reasoning.

The Sarnia MP opted to become the fifth MP (and the fourth Conservative) to defect to the Liberals since the 2025 election. Her move leaves the governing party just one seat shy of a majority ahead of three critical federal byelections.

The crossing is marked by significant irony, as Gladu had recently supported a petition calling for automatic byelections for any member who switches parties, arguing at the time that voters deserve a redo when a representative abandons their original banner.

Leaving aside the ocean of cynicism presently running beneath surface-level tides that ebb and flow as additional Conservative MPs consider taking those few short steps across aisle, the rapid response from spinners and capital-C Conservatives to pile on Gladu’s now-abandoned social conservative principles, her past support for the Freedom Convoy, or even vaccine autonomy, serves the situation poorly. More than anything, it’s deeply non-persuasive and unproductive.

Yes, an MP that vociferously opposed marijuana legalization, was steadfast in her beliefs to break up pipeline protests, promoted alternative medicines and approaches to COVID-19, and who voted against Bill C-6 now shares a caucus with 80% Trudeau holdovers — and, temporarily, even Steven Guilbeault.

Strange? Absolutely. But are these beliefs to now criticize, and will said criticism of these beliefs now land strongly among the Conservative base? Hardly.

It’s little secret Gladu held Poilievre and his OLO in disrepute. This was personal, not business. And yes, this is “all getting ridiculous,” to borrow from retired CTV host and columnist Don Martin. But to check Twitter right now is to witness a group of operators who were publicly O.K. with Gladu’s principles and eccentricities a day ago, and now her support of the Convoy, for example, is being used as some kind of dunk.

Marilyn Gladu may well be the kookiest and most cynical politician imaginable. When big-C Conservatives hammer that point home after a floor crossing, all it begs is the question: so why was she tolerable until now? Why was Michael Ma’s foreign interference act above-board? Why was Matt Jeneroux’s supposedly mangled personal life off limits up until it was fair game?

Hypocrisy rarely rates as persuasive to voters, but particularly in Canada, a nation that defaults to order, even when it’s nonsensical. Doug Ford is actively campaigning for the Mark Carney majority the P.M. will surely receive within a matter of weeks, and Ford’s still able to cobble together enough of an apathy vote from a Progressive Conservative base with little love for his time at the helm, but with enough concerns about the premier being the lesser of evils.

Justin Trudeau survived a personal addiction to donning blackface, even as a P.M. who was passed around as some race-communist trojan horse to burn churches, kneel before imported American social justice causes, and rewrite the land claims beneath our very feet.

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Let’s be clear about immigration fraud.

It started at the top. It was on purpose. And it’s still happening on purpose.

After a week of damning reports, and even a craven disregard for a return to decency, it has become abundantly clear that the government’s much-touted “reforms” are more about managing political perception than fixing a broken system. Behind the rhetoric lies a reality of widespread fraud, a continued lack of oversight, and an immigration department which has lost even greater control of its own bastardized mandate.

One of the most glaring failures has been the confirmed explosion of fraud within the international student program. Earlier this week, a scathing report from the Auditor General revealed that the IRCC failed to investigate the vast majority of cases flagged for potential fraud or non-compliance. Out of 153,000 cases identified in 2023 and 2024, only about 4,000 investigations were actually launched — a measly 2.6%. Even more troubling, 40% of these investigations were simply dropped because the students didn’t bother to respond to emails.

Speak to industry insiders and they’ll tell you that a “pay-to-play” market ran rampant between the years of 2021-2024, almost entirely on the basis of an understanding that fraudulent letters of acceptance, through equally dodgy institutions, would not be investigated through official immigration channels.

Let us not forget, even Ontario Premier Doug Ford touted this unvetted explosion — the worst policy decision in our nation’s history — as a success story. And yes, his office assisted in building for Conestoga, the worst offender of all the nation’s illegitimate institutions.

Reporting on that, from the height of sifting through the rubble:

This culture of non-enforcement extends to the asylum system, which has seen a massive surge in claims. Since 2015, the backlog of refugee claimants has grown by a staggering 2,900%. While the government speaks of protecting the “vulnerable,” critics (read: normal people with morals and scruples) point out that the system is being exploited by those using it as a legal strategy to stall their removal from Canada. International students have spammed asylum claims after striking out in the labour force, making the trend so obvious that even then-immigration minister Marc Miller admitted it “[didn’t] smell good.”

Record levels of asylum fraud, in the six figures, is no mere matter of paperwork. The programme has become the safe haven for serial extortionists, varying degrees of triggermen from the Indian subcontinent, and those who have exploited a key loophole in the Safe Third Country Agreement: Canadian judges no longer care to enforce the law.

Furthermore, the government’s growing approach to “chain migration” — the process by which immigrants brings in numerous family members — has also come under fire for being blown off its hinges, and lacking any checks and balances.

“Under Bill C-3, anyone who can find a Canadian in their family tree is considered Canadian,” writes Jamie Sarkonak of the National Post, citing the case of a person whose last Canadian ancestor was born in 1835, nearly 200 years ago. Their approval took 3 weeks.

But perhaps most concerning is the government’s complete failure to track and plan for deportations. The Auditor General’s report found that the IRCC has no way of knowing how many international students with expired visas actually leave the country.

They haven’t been looking, because they don’t want to know.

Government officials now believe Canada’s undocumented worker population to be in the 500,000s following the worst of the ‘Fraser Wave.’ Speak to policy experts and those deeper in the know, and that actual number is believed to be closer to 1.5 million. It is expected that another 1.5 million + in visas are due to expire by the end of 2026.

That’s three-million potentially undocumented workers. That’s two Manitobas. Does that sound like “taking back control” of immigration, as Carney sniped on Wednesday?

The Liberal government’s response to these issues has been largely defensive, with ministers often dismissing legitimate questions as “ridiculous” or accusing critics of bad faith or bigotry. Meanwhile, the government’s own announced “revised” targets are illegitimate, and deploy all manner of creative accounting tricks.

True immigration reform, re-unlocking the future for young Canadians, fixing upward social mobility for generations denied additional rungs on the ladder for the first time in Canada’s history, will require more than grandfathering-in the scams and scammers of yesterday and today, and claiming we’re even.

There’s no single pipeline this country could build to the Pacific Coast that can solve for replacing and undercutting its labour force, driving price-to-income ratios north of 10-to-1, and walling off the nation’s launch-pad to reserve infinite space for an infinite amount of indentured servants.

There’s no solving for the 30-40% of STEM grads who flee for greener pastures (primarily south of the border), when our solution is to bring in 3-4 day labourers for every one that exits.

After ruining the economy during Covid, after never believing in borders or the nation to begin with, the answer was always going to be an infinite supply of cheap human capital — a “problem” that countries like India will tell you they have just the “solution” for.

Except, the real “problem” is India’s. Demographically, the country is too young, too overpopulated, and too unskilled. Now, its forced to export this problem to willing recipients. But Canada shouldn’t be in the favours to India and the Century Initiative business — it should be in the Canada business.

In a just world, the Sean Frasers, Marc Millers, and Lena Diabs of the world, they’d be hauled in front of a tribunal next week, and made to answer for their willful blindness. But this is the Canada of the 2020s. The poison is in the glass, not the liquid. There’s a newly minted banality to our indifference and our corruption.

But that doesn’t mean we settle for it.

Our politicians were wrong. Our business lobbies have been way out of line. One group of scammers gave an inch, and then another group of scammers took a mile. Only by keeping immigration reform front and centre can we continue to claw back a version of the semi-competent. If it drops out of the top pocketbook issues, expect 25% Canadian youth unemployment within the next election cycle, and a return to sky-rocketing rents.

The only thing worse than what’s been done to this country, the sullying of our oath of citizenship and the disrespect we’ve shown proud Canadians old and new (the majority of whom built here or came here to be part of something more than a safety school run out of an international airport), would be to accept “taking back control” at its word.

Einstein told us that “The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.”

I assure you, there’s been no policy more evil than that which has denied a generation — and counting — a chance at having a fraction of the life once enjoyed by their parents.

That fight continues, because it must.

Alexander Brown is the writer of Acceptable Views, co-founder and managing editor of Without Diminishment, and a director with the National Citizens Coalition.

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They call British Columbia’s 24th premier, W.A.C. Bennett, a populist visionary. Through sheer force of competence, he rammed through megaprojects that dragged a fragmented, slow-growth frontier into the modern era, built roads and ferries, and forged a $200 billion-a-year economic behemoth.

As the province has spent the last few years flirting with de-industrialization, and the return to its origins as some backwater under the mud-hut wing of the NDP, it’s as important as ever to be reminded one can simply do things.

Don’t just sign the pipeline MOU. Build the damned thing.

Don’t just claim private property rights aren’t at risk following secret land deals. Repeal DRIPA. Prove it.

Don’t just say you’re cleaning up immigration while holding deportations on the honour system. Send home the millions on expired visas to re-unlock the future for Canadian under-60s, who have been left to plummet down the social mobility ladder, and forced to grab desperately for 1/5th of the Canadian Dream once on offer to their parents.

In stark contrast to the amorphous status-quo of today, it’s no reason Bennett is viewed as a revolutionary. As a builder who refused to let British Columbia remain a sleepy outpost, that attitude is anathema to everything now embraced by those who revel in managed decline, profit from artificial scarcity, and sit high above or far away from streets now unrecognizable.

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In 2019, at one of the early peaks of ill-conceived, ‘Corporate Social Responsibility,’ ESG mania, Formula 1, the pinnacle of global motorsport, announced its “bold push toward sustainability, aiming for net zero emissions by 2030.”

The sport was already running on a V6 hybrid engine model at the time, in what was known as a “turbo hybrid” and “ground effect” era, which started back in 2014. Already gone were the big, noisy, magnificently powerful, naturally aspirated V8-V12 engines of the past. Efficiency was the new name of the game, despite the fans never having asked for it.

And yet, it worked. For the most part. Despite early domination from Mercedes to start the beginning of those rule changes, the pack eventually coalesced into legendary title fights between Red Bull’s Max Verstappen and Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton, and in two constructor titles for McLaren.

Formula 1’s 2026 regulations claim to represent a bold push toward sustainability, aiming for net zero emissions by 2030 through a rebalanced power unit that splits output roughly 50/50 between the internal combustion engine (ICE) and electric components. However, this shift has drawn sharp criticism for prioritizing corporate environmental targets — such as attracting eco-conscious manufacturers and aligning with global green initiatives (many now defunct) — over the sport’s core identity as the north star of motorsport engineering. After pre-season testing, and just one round on the calendar, it’s clear the rules have diluted engine performance, introduced operational headaches, and ignored prescient warnings from top drivers, all while betting on an electrification strategy that looks increasingly misguided with global EV sales stagnating.

F1 has always been a testing ground for global innovation. It’s as much the world’s great engineering contest as it is a battle between drivers on track. The different manufacturers who line up on the grid are not in uniform cars, and nor should they be. And yet, the concern with the sport’s 2026 rule changes, first dreamt up behind closed doors by its own 50/50 split of corporate interests, “sports washing” Aramco types, and net zero charlatans, is that there’s nothing innovative about a car forced to deploy so much battery now that it’s derating on the straights — like the governor that kicks in on a golf cart.

Proponents have framed the rule changes as being a kind of “road-relevant” innovation, to lure additional manufacturers to the sport. Yet, further highlighting that bad bet made in 2019, global EV sales continue to slide — down to 12% in 2026, and down from 23% in 2025.

Canadian politicians such as Doug Ford and Justin Trudeau, who once celebrated their ability to bribe global battery makers with taxpayer money to come produce unwanted products in Canada, have watched those plans collapse into irrelevance. Even Mark Carney was forced to scuttle GFANZ, in essence a net zero financial extortion alliance, following a number of high profile departures in 2025.

Amid a clear market correction back towards sanity and non-punishment of consumers just for the feels, gone as well is the Liberal carbon tax (hidden carbon taxes are alive and well, and will continue to cost Canadians dearly).

In fact, multiple automakers are scaling back EV plans, pivoting back to hybrids to avoid a costly EV market that offers little incentive without eye-watering government subsidization.

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Brief one from yours truly this week, as the schedule has been a particularly difficult balancing act. But needless to say, there’s been some exciting work going on behind the scenes, some of which I’m happy to be able to share here today, and there will also be more to come. (Along with a return to the regular column next week.)

For starters, I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to invite you to Vancouver on April 24th, as I’ll be a featured speaker on stage at Canada Strong and Free Vancouver.

I’ll also be co-hosting a pub night in Calgary on March 20th, as I’ll be back in Cowtown on NCC and Without Diminishment business. We’d love to have you join, if you’re local.

I may be a recent arrival and a carpet-bagger from Ontario, but for all of the present struggles when it comes to federal conservative fortunes, it’s all to play for out west, the need for MOUs to get out of the talking phase remains of the utmost importance, and conservativism’s “new frontier” on the further left coast offers up opportunities in abundance.

The mud hut wing of the NDP has served Canada poorly, and no longer can one of the world’s most exquisite landmasses be treated like some backwater for grievance and grift. B.C. is uniquely situated to take a starring role in our political fortunes over the next few years, is loaded with young talent, and we’re excited for the opportunity to show that off to the rest of Canada at CSFN Vancouver in April, and through all the B.C. Conservative leadership developments to come.

It’s a time to build, and rebuild, and to refuse to take those who did the breaking at their word. If you’re able to join us, and to see some of this work in person, it would be a pleasure to have you.

Be it in a 1000-person conference room or an Irish pub, frontiers are where you find them.

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Are you familiar with the term “Horseshoe theory”?

First attributed to French philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye in the mid-20th century, it posits that the extremes of the political spectrum, both the far left and the far right, often resemble each other more closely than they do the centre — much like how the ends of a bent horseshoe nearly meet. Proponents have argued this manifests in authoritarian tendencies, simplified worldviews, and intense polarization.

Canada too often feels like a nation off its political axis, and a nation that took apparent leave of its senses in and around the time the clanging of pots and pans echoed through suburbs now for seniors, seemingly never to return. We excused Charter abuse, disposed of our own flag, legalized crime and disorder, saddled the children we’re barely having with unimaginable guilt.

I vividly recall coming across a sign while covering and engaging with the Freedom Convoy that stated, “Our problems aren’t left or right, they’re up and down. And Justin Trudeau is a downer.” That was an imperfect kind of bromide, sure, but that fascinating hodge-podge of truckers, crunchy granola moms, French Canadian musical-festival-enjoyers, and the immigrants who felt a chill in their bones that wasn’t just -30 with the wind chill, they were correct in their intuition that something was rotten in the state of Denmark. They chose to no longer live by lies. We may not like or agree with all who were involved in that madding crowd, but the instincts were there.

It’s in this moment of discourse, in this continued afterglow from denigrating, conflating, and all but radiating our sense of civic nationalism — including years and summers where we even cosplayed a genocide — that I’m not surprised we have yet to firmly return to the political axes that best serve who we once were, and can be again, if we were to just get out of our own way.

That horseshoe may be dangling crooked on the hoof, but that’s little excuse for those in our discourse infrastructure to become all but indiscernible from one another, or to miss the clear and obvious warning signs from movements without foundational principles.

Jason Kenney is not a traitor.

Canada’s former immigration minister was recently pilloried as such, by a group of young men, mentioned here before, who have taken to moderating their views before certain cameras, revealing their baser instincts to others, and who continue to support an open-ended call for “remigration,” while committing a deliberate sin of omission, in that the “who” and “as of when” fluctuate depending on the audience.

I have previously expressed sympathy for the alienation that brought them here. Those Covid years, the “fiery but mostly peaceful” summers, the decision to destroy Canada’s once venerable immigration system to chase low-wage economic replacement, to moonshot real-estate prices, and make it look like Canada’s economy was on anything but life support, it’s the worst policy decision in this country’s history. The bulk of ‘Fraser-wave’ temporary workers, the foreign extortionists who claim false asylum to stay their deportations, they need to go. Temporary needs to mean temporary. There’s no recovery for rents or Canada’s failing infrastructure without it.

If they are children of that atom, of that Trinity Test that was dropped on Canada’s under-40s, we should all be able to appreciate that idle hands, unemployment, sky-high rents, a collapse in social order and public trust, and deliberate government ostracization are the devil’s plaything. But to continue to refuse to come in from the cold deserts of Los Alamos is a destructive choice in and of its own. And it’s getting late in the day to have any sympathy for the black-balaclavas-on-overpasses crowd, and to have much empathy for those unable to spot the spikes on the Geiger counter when they draw near.

There are those doing actual work to fix Canada’s undeniable problems with broken immigration, and then there are those who seek credit for that, and risk becoming both a real problem and the government’s excuse to disregard the supermajority of Canadians who demand reform — and those demanding reform include immigrants.

This is also a movement, while tacitly “far-right,” that appears unmoored from anything resembling conservative principles. Conservative commentator and OneBC staffer Wyatt Claypool has argued the Dominion Society is inherently “woke right,” with its founder having self identified as a “collectivist.”

Be they collectivist, or identitarian, that makes such movements more like ultranationalist football fans — or “ultras” — than anything tied to one party.

Similar problems can be glimpsed, and the same can also be said, over on the far reaches of “elbows up,” after the revitalization of ‘Tru-Anon’ following the black-swan electoral miracle created by President Trump’s interference into Canadian affairs.

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This past weekend marked the 61st anniversary of Canada’s switch from Red Ensign to red and white Maple Leaf. In following a year where Canada’s aversion to the deliberate breaking of our recently proud immigration standard became entirely mainstream among “old stock” and newcomers alike, the occasion was never bound to pass without robust debate, and even controversy.

Friend of the Substack just penned a terrific missive over at Without Diminishment, flagging for concern that what motivated the “eminent Pearsonians” of the day still beats in the hearts of our modern progressives.

Without Diminishment

Michael Bonner: The false premise and promises of the Maple Leaf flag

The Great Canadian Flag Debate was not great, and it rarely rose to the dignity of a debate. It began with a false premise, reiterated ad nauseam in the hope that repetition might make it true. This was the idea that, until the adoption of the Maple Leaf in 1965, Canada had no flag…

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4 months ago · 11 likes · 1 comment · Without Diminishment Editor and Michael Bonner

“The Liberals’ proclivity for effacing our symbols and obliterating historical memory seems to have no limits. Artwork representing Canadian culture and history has been stripped out of the new passports. Statues of monarchs, prime ministers, and other national figures are regularly pulled down without resistance. Streets and institutions have been given new and unpronounceable names so as to ‘decolonise’ them. The cross and the fleur-de-lys have been removed from the crown that sits above Canada’s coat of arms.

“What next? As crazy as it sounds, it has already been suggested that the present flag is inadequate because it does not represent Canada’s Indigenous peoples and should be replaced.”

Bonner closes with, “Ironically, the greatest threat to the Maple Leaf flag is not reactionary conservatives, Red Ensign-loving Tories, Quebec secessionists, or disgruntled truckers . . . The threat rather emerges from the same spirit of progressivist liberalism that created the flag in the first place.”

As witnessed in additional corners of the discourse sphere, particularly on X, this writer is of the opinion that the “greatest threat” may also be shared by those described by Ray Bradbury in The Martian Chronicles.

“There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.”

In this instance, and without relitigating my concerns from months past, there are those who tend to latch onto these symbols not just out of historic reverence, but for the purposes of something darker. In that shadow, in the potential for allowing our great symbols to fall into the wrong hands — such as a flag that bore three separate designs in 1868, 1921 and 1957, and under which our nation was first forged and the majority of our war dead fought under and died for — we risk serving our past as poorly as anything coming out of the Trudeau years.

Ottawa’s phantom-honking, ‘Battle of Billings Bridge’-holding, outdoor N95-wearing purple-hairs were wrong to imagine the red maple leaf as MAGA-adjacent protest art during the Freedom Convoy, so we can all be keenly aware of the problems with painting our national symbols and their associations with a broad brush.

The worry, however, beyond the obvious, is that when immigration reform tips into “remigration” talk that regulates itself before the camera, but then not on Twitter, in message boards, or in balaclava-laden protests along highways or the Rideau Canal, the productive becomes thoroughly unproductive. If I were a Canadian mass immigration lobbyist, like those at the Century Initiative, or a disloyal private-equity backed employer who cares only for replacement cogs for $10 less an hour, further wrecking a country be damned, such lack of tact would present itself as manna from Heaven.

Diefenbaker fought hard against the Great Canadian rebrand. It’s not hard to see why. But he also understood that “partnership of races,” and that within that coat of arms existed nations within nations. We can ditch our existence as a multi-hyphenate people, and that would surely be for the better, but we can’t whitewash those reds, golds, and deep blues.

For more on a career update, and event invitations, join us beyond the paywall.

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Howard Anglin — previous Deputy Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Principal Secretary to the Premier of Alberta, Jason Kenney — is quietly considered a north star in our industry, and is known to be right about a great many things.

Like many of you, I’d imagine, I found the weekend’s opening ceremonies in Italy to be refreshingly highbrow, blissfully light on progressive bacchanal, and largely free of the kind of globo-slop messaging that has come to define the past decade of festivals of sport and entertainment too often hijacked into the kind of propaganda exercise we can do without: the kind that doesn’t seek to inspire, but to divide and shame.

How unfortunate, then, that Canada was the stubborn outlier in appearance; seemingly clinging to its recent post-national history, with an outfit that’s launched a cottage industry of hot takes, but at the very least discourse capable of bridging divides that only ever seem to widen.

In pillorying those making excuses for the mediocrity of Canada’s failed avant-garde opening ceremony experiment, Anglin was again on the mark, serving as a reminder that, no, we weren’t overreacting. Bad is bad. And when it comes to matters of reclaimed nationalism and national symbolism, “There are no big things and little things in life or in a state: it all matters, the details as much as the direction.”

My friend and colleague Kate Marland was also all over the target. Weeks ago, she flagged Lululemon’s “post-national collection” as a culture war yet to come:

Lululemon claims this kit is “familiarly Canadian”. But a quick browse does not trigger any familiar Canadian emotions. Long in the rearview mirror are Hudson’s Bay’s iconic flag mittens, which sold over 3.5 million pairs. If you want to keep your hands warm while supporting our athletes in 2026, your only option is a pair (priced at $98) available in “Medium Forest” or “Black Garnet”, no flag or national colour in sight.

If the goal of this collection is to eradicate any connection between the wearer and the traditional symbolism of our country, then I think it is safe to say, mission accomplished. There is no better physical representation of the sorry state of our national pride than this collection.

The post-national devil, it appears, is in the details.

Defenders of the status quo in legacy Canadian media have launched a half-hearted defence, claiming, “a certain gaggle of folks are absolutely losing their minds over a puffer, crapping on a proud Canadian company to prove some kind of esoteric inane point. Relax.”

But if you’re onside with Howard, and Kate, two thought-leaders on the right and ‘new right,’ who love their country, not for what it pretends to still be, but for what it was, can, and should be again, there’s nothing “esoteric” or “inane” about flagging matters of wrapping Canada in pantones that do not fit or flatter.

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I was ten years old when my father offered Stephen Harper a job.

Little did I know at the time, but while I was up in the computer room prompting eventual cease-and-desist letters from Napster, or pretending to be Sergei Berezin while roller-blading around our midtown Toronto driveway (now a luxury and an impossibility for the hyper-majority of working families), that the two young men who would swap political war-stories over a beverage in our backyard would end up holding such an outsized influence on Canadian conservatism.

In the case of my father, Colin T. Brown, a true throwback who ran out to qualify for his pilot’s licence the second he turned of age, it would be of little interest to him that he’s never received more public credit for his work behind the scenes. He has dined with presidents, sat on the country’s top boards, and been approached a fair share of times to run, but never lost sight of his priorities. Those who know, know.

Like my grandfather, Colin M. Brown, who founded the National Citizens Coalition (NCC) in the 1960s – effectively launching the third-party non-profit political advocacy model in Canada that’s now such a mainstay – the two were often told by premiers, MPs, MLAs, that they were “worth more on the outside” than they were if they ran as capital-C Conservatives. Every few years they would be asked, some senior official or politician would rush to warn them that they would lose their ability to help shape movements and expand what we now refer to as “social licence,” and they would respectfully decline.

We’re conditioned to believe that all those working in the supposed ‘shadows’ – in the shadow of the birch tree in the backyard of my childhood home, in this case – are working against us. In the case of the Liberal decision to break immigration, legitimately dreamt up over a weekend at Dominic Barton’s cottage, that is one such example.

In the case of Stephen Harper, now the Right Honourable, now having been deservedly feted at ‘Harper20,’ or ‘Harperpalooza,’ as was the popular moniker at convention week in Calgary, this was a man who stubbornly kept it above-board, and against all odds turned defeat into an opportunity for enormous growth.

Harper took that job from my father in 1998, graciously served as a caretaker for my grandfather’s legacy and as a bulwark against the worst of big government excess, and in 2002 knew that it was time to venture back out to unite the right, and to set this country up for a dearly missed nine-and-a-half years of blissful competence, that was so unfortunately followed by a decade of antithesis.

Consider it deep personal bias if one must, but it would take a particular brand of cynic to continue to hold any form of animus towards those Harper years. Liberals will quietly tell you they “had no idea how good we had it.” Mark Carney privately admired the man, and both his remarks and general decorum in celebrating the Right Hon. this week are to be commended. The results with Carney may be lacking, he may not be the best team player, he may speak fluent ChatGPT, but he holds himself with a grace and dignity that was sorely lacking in He Who Shall Not Be Named. Carney is legitimately charming as any portfolio manager must be, and he’s good at being prime minister. And he should be, he’s been training his entire adult life for this moment.

It would also take a particular brand of cynic coming out of Pierre Poilievre’s leadership address to the Conservative convention to suggest that wasn’t enough. As I stated in a walk-and-talk on the convention-room floor in the immediate aftermath, it largely struck the right notes. Poilievre rightly did not abandon the culture wars, but there was also an attempt to show a hint of contrition for mistakes made, and moments that were perhaps missed.

I’m very much of the opinion that both black swan bad luck, and the total collapse of the NDP, do not a failed Official Opposition make, but there are lessons in defeat that Mr. Harper would go out of his way to learn. Poilievre must show himself capable of doing the same. His team understands this, it’s another thing to show that to our electorate, who, as we know, are quick to judge, and startle easily. ‘Reform’ scares them, even when it’s to make Canada more like the 1990s, not the 1990s some pretend still exist. My advice is don’t dump the young, working class coalition (and they won’t). But, we need a kind of counter-elite, to scale back on some of the “boots not suits” rhetoric, to not “axe the tax” for longer than is necessary, those are all adjustments that can be made.

And say the ‘T-word’ more often, even if it’s performative. On Monday, I was on the radio with Greg Brady bright and early following the return flight from Calgary, and I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn by saying the two of us were of the shared mindset, along with a few other prominent party figures, that you have to meet portions of our electorate where they are, not where you wish for them to be.

No leader inside that inner circle wants to take their eyes off domestic issues, but Carney’s entire voter bloc prioritizes Trump over acknowledging that the kids have had the ladder pulled up from over their heads, and have been tasked to live in dystopian, post-national, anti-abundance. Find five minutes of twenty-five for the American president. Speak a full-hearted defence of those who make their final journey down our Highway of Heroes. That was a missed opportunity, not deliberately so, but a missed opportunity nonetheless.

It’s in this moment in the media, advocacy, third-party, non-profit, big tent space, that we’re very much trying to not miss our own opportunity. In growing and expanding within whatever our spheres of influence may be, like working private salons, holding our own events, and having our own versions of back-yard powwows, if these end up being ten-percent as impactful as those shared by my father and Mr. Harper, I’d consider that a success.

With no discernable path to federal Conservative results on the horizon, it would be easy to go negative, and easiest of all to give up. It’s harder to build, to put oneself out there, and to accept wins or losses, no matter which comes first. Stephen Harper had to lose to win. In that gulf between defeat and success, where far too many turn back, turn sour, or harden around the absence of what no longer is, he built relationships, bridges, an entire political movement.

Such lessons aren’t just for Pierre Poilievre. Losing isn’t a choice. To live in loss is. Movements can grow anywhere, even out your back window. But you have to move.

This column originally appeared in Without Diminishment, and is running here with permission and attribution.

Alexander Brown is the Managing Editor of Without Diminishment, Director of the National Citizens Coalition, a host on Juno News, a contributor to Project Ontario, and the writer of Acceptable Views.

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Parliament is back in session (*throws rotten produce*), every day is being met by more elite panic, and the “elbows up” crowd, when they’re not too busy making claims they’re assembling curling-club suicide squads, have taken to outright displays of stolen valour.

In short — and I’m sure you feel the same — it’s all so very tiring.

Thankfully, what has been generative are the people: Good ones at that, who are working hard behind the scenes to pry Overton windows, draft social licenses, and who often go uncredited for doing so.

I’m bound for Conservative convention in Calgary this week, and it’s those ‘movement’ types I’m most interested in liaising with. Canadian conservatives have been so often defined by the party apparatus itself, that there’s been a kind of push-pull of late in media and online circles, decrying the apparent lack of thoughtless jingoism in the Big Blue Tent. We can pretend to blame low-information ‘influencers’ for that effect, or run back the slander of Covid mandate protests as some foreign op (they weren’t), but the small-c’s are asserting themselves in new and often interesting ways, and there was always going to be natural tension between explicit partisans, the old stock and the mushy, transactional, ‘go along to get along’ crowd, the well-meaning partisans, and the indies.

As a kind of independent, a purveyor of alternative programming, I have little interest in pretending the federal Conservatives are still on the ascendancy — they’re not. But they’re also in much more of a holding pattern than they’re being given credit for.

I think it’s fair to assume that Elbows Up 2: Electric Mobility-Scooter Boogaloo is on the horizon, just as it’s fair to afford some grace to an opposition, wholly trapped in not being able to out anti-American its incumbent opponent, no matter how in lockstep their approaches on Trump end up being. He’s wreaking havoc on right-wing change elections across the West, and we’re not special on that front. But he won’t be president forever.

Professional contrarians, bad-faith Tru-anons, and those lobbying for contracts won’t like to admit it, but there’s not a whole lot another campaign manager can do about that. Even Harper, O’Toole, and Scheer were cast as radical reformers when needed. (Remember the “14 words” O’Toole thing? F*ck that was dumb. And now Tru-anon pretend to like him.)

If a year gets tacked on to the reign of Team ‘Don’t ask us about our youth wing, housing, affordability, where we put our flags until now, or crime,’ that just kind of is what it is at this point.

I’d rather see the Official Opposition continue to build what they can for the short and medium term, even if that 38-41% are shamefully labelled as traitors the whole time.

Why would anyone go out for Diet Carney when you have the real thing at home? And as for that sugar-high offered by the genuine article — be it from antagonistic speeches scripted in “ChatGPT-ese”, ever-moving goalposts on tariff deals, or returning to the most Trudeau-y of grocery store ‘rebates’ (a sure-fire admittance our domestic economy remains in self-inflicted crisis) — no one is safe from the crash.

To further expand on the nutrient-deficiency of social panic, and with an eye towards rebuilding a hierarchy of needs — or a food pyramid, if you will — that offers something more substantial for all members of a nation capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time, I was pleased to sit down with friends and colleagues Kate Marland and Cole Hogan ahead of our travels to Calgary.

Without Diminishment

Watch: 'Davos Man did Davos things for Davos people; that doesn't work for everyone else'

It’s Conservative convention week in Calgary, and the entire Without Diminishment masthead will be in attendance…

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5 months ago · 6 likes · 5 comments · Without Diminishment Editor, Alexander Brown, Kate Marland, and Cole Hogan

And over on Juno News, a few weeks back I had a wonderful conversation with Stephen LeDrew, former Liberal Party president and Toronto-media mainstay in the 2000s and 2010s. Stephen's wit and candour shine through, and it meant a lot to get to sit down with a man who was so often the soundtrack of trips home from college, or work days in my 20s, given his omnipresence on CP24.

I’ll be back with what I learn in Calgary, and if you’re in and around convention do say hi. Just be forewarned: I am just as interested in spending a few days in the home of Stampede Wrestling as I am in serving as a media observer. Conversation mileage may vary.

It was a perfectly fine Davos speech, delivered by a Davos man, that continues to ignore our own record on hanging signs in place of handling meaningful business.

Michelle Rempel Garner

Havel would have demanded more from Mark Carney. Canadians should too.

Today Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered a speech at the World Economic Forum which rightly named the hard realities of a fractured geopolitical system, and the urgent need for middle powers like Canada to step up with resolve and realism…

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5 months ago · 1 comment · Michelle Rempel Garner

And how fitting that, in the same week the federal government lost again in pleading its case that its invocation of the Emergencies Act crackdown on the Freedom Convoy didn’t violate the Charter, Canada’s pollsters with burst capillaries, and its most vicious media defenders of a failed and failing status quo, are back to ‘push’-polling and wedging Canadian against Canadian, not to create unity, but to sow deliberate disharmony for their own gain.

The last time this stunt was truly attempted, such establishment hacks launched a Covid election on the faulty data and failed presuppositions that only backwoods, anti-vax yokels would fail to reward Justin Trudeau with a majority. They were wrong then, just as they were wrong about the efficacy of mandates, just as they are wrong now to plumb the depths of depravity to wedge the independent-minded against the status quo, or young against old.

Ekos’ latest, concocted to go out of its way to again define conservatives as disloyal, monster-truck-driving bigots, finds that a more robust percentage of those sampled who identify as Conservative would prefer not to engage in outright war with the United States, and would be more reluctant to hypothetically fight to the death in a still-very-much-imagined conflict. The headline there is the point. And words like “traitor” and “quisling” have flown around X, and surely BlueSky, as intended.

Missing in both that analysis and unthinking salvo is, of course, who votes for what party, and why. For that, we turn to better data from Abacus.

For all of Trump’s increasingly disordered global tactics, and all the frustrations of an approach now brashly picking on Greenland, this should not be a moment where we give ourselves over to absolutes. Neither a maximalist nor minimalist approach to understanding Canada’s present dynamic serves real truth. These are times not of black and white, but grey, and there are those of us, thankfully, who appear capable of holding conflicting thoughts and truths in our heads at once.

Black-bagging Maduro can be good, just as Canada sticking up for its canola farmers can be good. Further bending a knee to China, giggling while we do so, and working to expand a shared partnership in media and security, when the PRC and its proxies already lean on our elections, threaten our citizens, commit rampant real estate fraud, and operate foreign police forces on our soil, that too can be bad, even if we need to diversify our global trading partners.

Fattening ourselves up for QIA, one of the world’s largest state sponsors of terror, who sources tell this writer have been eyeing our decline for some time in the hopes of buying the dip, that can be equal parts passably pragmatic and deeply worrying.

In response to evolving threats, even our own eerie quotes of “new world orders,” and the groundwork clearly being laid for an “elbows up” 2.0 election, Conservatives do indeed need to define their foreign policy, and carve out more space to meet the wholly Trump-obsessed where they are. They also cannot join the Liberals in pure fantasy. If they are to lose for telling the truth, that we have no realistic replacement for our economic and social relationship with the U.S., and that our young and working-aged can’t keep getting hosed and need to be a priority, so be it. It’s better to lose with honour than to die without dignity. If Trump is going to continue to sabotage aspects of the globe’s populist conservative moment, you do your best to get your house in order, and you accept that the next three years may not be yours to own federally.

And make no mistake, our house is not in order. It’s even split right down the middle. Conversations tend to have a familiar rhythm these days, if you find yourself in the weeds with the average “break us so he can own us” believer.

“Did you see what Trump just did?”

“Yes, it’s concerning. I am similarly concerned that I can’t afford a home, adolescence is being extended, we threw open our borders to anyone with a pulse, we’re woefully short on First World healthcare delivery, we legalized crime, we don’t deport, we tore down our flag and our monuments, and we harmed our own economy and set our future generations up for failure far worse than any American president ever could.”

“…Did you see what Trump just did?”

Can you find the “quisling” in that response? Neither can I. Yet carving out the necessary space for a myriad of domestic crises, and not losing sight of the fact that those being set up as disloyal are anything but, continues to be met with threat and hostility. To exist in our media sphere these days means a harem of ‘Tru-anon’ characters threaten to put you up against the wall for crimes against the state, each and every day.

But let’s not stand on imagined ceremony, and the wishes of that firing squad. Canada has live-action role-played (LARPed) every American social justice trend in the modern era.

We LARPed fiery but mostly peaceful summers.

We LARPed our pandemic response, with Ford, Legault, and Trudeau running a Wuhan-esque, authoritarian issues-management model which has failed every audit of every evidence-free abuse.

And now we appear to be rhetorically LARPing invasion, as we aren’t preparing in any meaningful way, the over-60s in Ekos polls aren’t joining the reserves, we’re already failing on defence spending promises, and we continue to seize guns from law-abiding, salt-of-the-earth Canadians under threat of kicking down their doors.

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Ontario Premier Doug Ford is back to splattering the pavement with Canadian rye to open 2026, leaving it to the principled and accountability-minded to prepare the province for a painful year ahead.

Meanwhile, the irony should not be lost on the Canadian public, that, at present, 1,114km northwest of Queen’s Park, a kindred political spirit of the Canadian premier, Tim Walz — who shares all the requisite fake-folksiness used to mask a deeply cynical, calculating, allegedly* criminal operator — has been rolled up for an unprecedented American scandal Ford might only bat an eyelash at.

Walz, first outed by Country Highway, then Chris Rufo, and finally 23-year-old Nick Shirley, and who is no longer seeking reelection, is believed to have served in willful idiocy, as “a decade of Somali fraud schemes stole billions of taxpayer dollars, some of which ended up with Al-Shabaab terrorists back in Somalia. These were sophisticated criminal enterprises that exploited Minnesota’s generous welfare state, deployed accusations of racism to deter scrutiny, and looted the public treasury until local prosecutors did the hard work to bring them down.” (City Journal.)

At last blush, Since 2022, almost 90% of people charged with felony fraud in Minnesota are believed to be Somali, per Fox.

75% of all American Somalis are believed to be on “full welfare benefits,” per Congressman James Comer.

This is a story of how mass immigration, ‘antiracism’, and a welfare state inexorably lead to fraud.

This was “looting, pillage, theft, billions in disbursements, and all on the honor system.” (Country Highway.)

If this all sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because it’s routinely Canadian, and entirely Ontarian.

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Get more from Alexander Brown in the Substack app

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Happy New Year, all. Parliament may not be resuming for a few weeks, Ontario Premier Doug Ford may not be returning from a self-appointed Christmas break until March 23rd (!), but the need to drag this country, kicking and screaming, out of a decade-plus of denial waits for no man.

We’ve stayed busy around these parts, and I wanted to highlight in particular a chat I just had with friend, collaborator, and “Ralph Lauren nationalist” , where we get into detail on what we’re hearing from Canada’s conservative youth movement, and how we’re hoping to help better represent generation(s) who can’t afford to be left behind any longer.

Watch embedded below. (And remember: subscribers can take advantage of my promo code for 20% off.)

And, if you have yet to subscribe to Without Diminishment — where myself and fellow co-founders Geoff Russ and Caroline Elliott are lucky to have Kate joining us as a contributing editor — we just opened the year with Geoff Russ on David Eby:

Without Diminishment

Geoff Russ: Don't tell British Columbians to not worry about property rights

What do you do when the rules you were taught to live by no longer matter? Most people become frightened, at the very least, especially when their homes and family wealth could be on the line…

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5 months ago · 49 likes · Without Diminishment Editor and Geoff Russ

As well as with yours truly, on the selfishness and astonishing hypocrisy behind the Canadian left’s response to “black-bagging” a ruthless dictator:

Without Diminishment

Alexander Brown: ‘Black-bagging’ a communist narco-terrorist who steals elections is not bad

Let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way: American regime-change efforts, on occasion, tend to age like oxidized guacamole. The teenage version of this writer remembers well the empty sugar-high of “Shock and Awe…

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5 months ago · 37 likes · 5 comments · Without Diminishment Editor and Alexander Brown

In addition: Over the Holidays, I was thankful for the opportunity to again get to sit down with Conservative MP and Shadow Immigration Critic Michelle Rempel Garner, to talk the Official Opposition’s efforts to right the ship on the policy disaster that sits upstream of nearly all other policy disasters.

It was an honour to join the House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration to end 2025, but I can’t pretend I liked what I heard from the other members who don’t call the riding of Calgary Nose Hill home. There is much more to come in the fight for Canada’s record youth unemployed, as TFW and IMP (International Mobility Program) addicts jockey shamelessly for more cheap and exploitable labour, to the detriment of our workforce, existing historical crises to infrastructure, healthcare, and housing, and to our very social cohesion.

Regular posts at Acceptable Views resume this week, with a missive on the way for paid subscribers.

As ever, thanks for being here.

Here’s to making change in 2026, and to the pursuit of what is good, and true, for a country that used to believe in both, and believe in itself.

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Winter has arrived, carrying on its back a GDP per capita growing for the first time in years.

The polls have stayed largely the same, as “our children beg to go back to the way it used to be.”

The Liberals continue headlong in their backroom quest to lure floor-crossers for hire, and a majority by other means should be expected come end of January and the Official Opposition’s Calgary convention. And yet, such dealings do not unmake a movement. There are still green shoots for those with eyes to see.

British Columbia is poised to play spoiler for those hoping to pretend these are still the Trudeau years, with Mainstreet polling already showing a B.C. Conservative Party under interim leadership having surged back ahead of the mud-hut wing of the NDP.

No matter who that leader will be — and if it’s Aaron Gunn, there’s a very real chance that protracted courtship ends in a byelection loss federally and a cemented Carney-Liberal majority — no province would gain more than Alberta, who would suddenly find a key ally willing to move their pipelines to the coast, avoiding the potential need to detour through Montana. (Some ‘Team Canada’ we turned out to be.)

On immigration, the federal Liberals, to their credit, are saying some of the right things, but those words are slippery. Numbers are improving, and yet “it’s going to take ages to bring them down.” Worse, still, there are limited plans to enforce deportations for the millions coming up on expiring visas from the Sean Fraser and Marc Miller waves of foreign-student fraud and rampant TFWP abuse.

As I highlighted before Immigration Committee weeks ago, “Our young and working aged are in direct competition with north of three-million visitors, many in the low-wage and low-skill stream, and we need an outflow plan beyond just the honour system.”

Credit to Michelle Rempel Garner for her dogged work on that file, credit to the Jason Kenneys, Howard Anglins, and Michael Bonners of the world, who once so strongly shepherded that file, and who witnessed first hand the early problems with the TFWP and its potential for exploitation. Ten years into Official Opposition, and while that modern apparatus hasn’t always gotten the file right, they’re again on the right track, and there are powerful lobbying forces a mass-immigration-weary public likely takes for granted as an adversary. We give out safe supply to lesser addicts than our business lobby now addicted to cheap and exploitable labour. Nevertheless, they must be cut off cold turkey. If non-competitive businesses who refuse to compete for Canadian talent have to go out of business—so be it. Tough. Try being one of Canada’s record youth unemployed.

And on the momentum front — the movement front — Canada’s common-sense oriented should take solace in the fact that even if federal fortunes are years away from absolution, following the rug-pull that was “elbows up” (and, yes, some teachable lessons for a CPC inner circle), Canada’s unique-to-the-G20 youth movement isn’t going anywhere.

Some in conservative circles have recently argued that recent efforts from publications such as Without Diminishment, where I am a co-founder and managing editor, amount to little more than young people being “bored with liberal democratic capitalism.” Perhaps we’re talking past each other, but this isn’t the kids acting out because they’re not getting attention from mom and dad. If you’re a twenty or thirtysomething hoping to one day own a home in a country with a thirty-year low on housing starts, or you’re hoping to start a family at price-to-income ratios of 10-to-1, you haven’t experienced a whole lot of wins of late.

These aren’t excuses, but these concerns are far from trivial.

My favourite thread of the year, from someone who has fairly quickly become our most important journalist and columnist:

On more of that “new right” front, and apparently just being “bored” with witnessing lives made needlessly meaningless and replaceable, the Without Diminishment team and yours truly gathered for a special Christmas roundtable discussion on the early days of the publication, and what’s coming next.

Without Diminishment

Watch: 'It's about finding a new equilibrium between all the institutions that shape us'

Join co-founders Geoff Russ, Caroline Elliott, and Alexander Brown, along with contributing editors Kate Marland, Étienne-Alexandre Beauregard, and senior adviser Margareta Dovgal, for a special Christmas roundtable discussion on the launch of Without Diminishment, what’s animating this “new right” movement, and what’s in store for the New Year…

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6 months ago · 8 likes · 2 comments · Without Diminishment Editor

There’s much to come there, and as a big-tent professional with increasingly busy days, I’m also happy to announce the Juno News show will return in the New Year, and I have four Christmas episodes airing before we get back to a full recording schedule on January 5th. You’re welcome to take advantage of my promo code for 20% off a subscription.

All these projects — our very acts of Canadian renewal — are not dimmed by federal fortunes. We cannot control the weather, but we can work with its winds. It’s no “cope” or act of delusion to suggest that we shouldn’t lose faith in our attempts to make a difference. Change is underway, but the mistake would be to take it at its word.

Look to the last ten years for where abdication on the key issues gets us. Look where taking this dominion for granted got us. Look how “go along to get along” ended up.

We’re not doing that again—younger conservatives, in particular. Build a movement strong enough, and you can withstand any Laurentian Nor’easter. Restore enough monuments of meaning, give back jobs, homes, and hope, and there’s your shelter from the storm.

That work continues in 2026, and I look forward to seeing you then.

Alexander Brown is the writer and editor of Acceptable Views, a political best-seller on Substack for over three years. He is a director with the National Citizens Coalition, a host on Juno News, and a co-founder and managing editor of Without Diminishment.

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