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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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2 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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3 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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3 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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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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4 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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4 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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4 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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The year of firsts continues around these parts. The show on Juno News is going well, the public-speaking circuit beckons, Without Diminishment can’t go a day without stirring up coverage (or consternation), and yesterday, I appeared before the House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, to better advocate on behalf of the Canadian worker, and the majority of Canadians who know that revised Liberal targets still amount to north of two-million over three years, with a limited exit plan for the millions from the ‘Fraser wave’ of temps and foreign students.

Those numbers, of course, aren’t good enough, not when our infrastructure is stretched beyond the brink, as you’ll see referenced below, and not when our society continues to Balkanize and turn inward on itself in its hostilities, like a circular firing squad.

A scarcity mindset has taken over, a degree of alienation and fatigue, which won’t improve unless we deal with the principal issue that tipped our housing, employment, healthcare, and identity crises into some five-alarm affair: the Liberals’ plan to break our immigration standard — first dreamed up by Dominic Barton, then of McKinsey, along with the rest of Canada’s worst — and then the implementation phase, starting around 2018, before shifting into sixth gear in 2021.

You’re welcome to join me in my testimony below, and to read my remarks. For viewers, I stick around for a round of questioning before the Bloc moves a motion that sends the witnesses home.

As ever, thanks for being here, and for supporting work, started back in 2022, that’s now finding its way to Parliamentary committee.

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Watch my testimony at 16:46:09 on ParlVu, or clipped on Twitter/X.

Thank you, Members of committee. My name is Alexander Brown and I’m the Director of the National Citizens Coalition, one of Canada’s pioneering non-profit advocacy groups.

Today, there are few issues that animate Canadians more than immigration, a system that worked all but seamlessly into the 2010s. David Coletto of Abacus Data presently has it as the #4 pocketbook issue for young Canadians, and #6 overall.

In a recent study from Environics, A majority of Canadians continue to say there is too much immigration . . . Those who express this view increasingly point to poor government management as the problem.

In a recent poll from Leger, most immigrants want fewer than 300,000 immigrants annually, lower than outlined in the budget.

It’s not hard to see why that concern isn’t going away. Our revised immigration plan doesn’t solve for Canada’s sudden overcapacity problem. What we have in land we lack in basics.

500,000 Canadians walked out of emergency rooms last year without receiving care. That’s data from CBC Marketplace. That’s 5-15% of all ER attendees.

1 in 5 Canadians are without a family doctor, according to the latest from Angus Reid, which is of major concern to the Canadian Cancer Society, who partnered on that poll.

In additional recent analysis, think-tank Second Street has north of 23,000 Canadians dying on waitlists over the past year.

The youth unemployment rate reached 15 per cent in September according to StatsCan — the highest level since 2010, excluding the pandemic years. Over the summer in Toronto, youth unemployment cracked 20%.

According to the CMHC: 2025 is on track to set a 30-year low in housing starts.

I open with facts and figures, with all the requisite ‘experts say’, because we need to avoid disqualifiers, excuses, and mischaracterizations. We need to get this fixed.

To borrow from a terrific Jamie Sarkonak column, turning down the taps won’t unflood the basement. And all we’ve done is turn down the taps.

On the Temporary Foreigner Work and International Mobility Program front, myself and Immigration expert Dr. Michael Bonner, who once worked in service on this file under Stephen Harper and Jason Kenney, we’ve argued in The Hub that: “It wouldn’t be wrong to view these programs as distortionary government subsidies or welfare for unproductive businesses. The effects disproportionately harm younger Canadians who are priced out of the labour market, given that temporary workers overwhelmingly earn less than the median wage. And yet, we’re constantly hectored about labour shortages, Canadians’ ‘unwillingness’ to do certain jobs, and the need for foreign workers.

“It shouldn’t take much intellectual effort to see that the use of foreign labour and the difficulties of employing younger Canadians are two sides of the same ugly coin. Foreign workers are more cooperative because they are bound to their employers like serfs and they face barriers to joining unions…”

The U.N. branded our abuse of those programs as a “contemporary form of modern slavery” for a reason, and downstream from that grotesquerie, our domestic population struggles. If you have young people in your lives, if you talk to students when they visit the Hill, they’re sending out hundreds of resumes and going nowhere -- that means securing stable income later, struggling below the mean, having children later, and they’re unable to afford homes and down payments.

We’re extending their adolescence, and it’s in large part due to blowing the doors off our inflow as of 2021 to grow in numbers but not productivity. 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.

The NCC and its Canadians for Responsible Immigration campaign is calling for the following:

1. Abolish the Temporary Foreign Worker Program for all but the hardest-to-fill seasonal agricultural and construction and engineering roles.

2. Safeguards to prevent the ‘diploma mill’ eruption witnessed post-2020

3. Close asylum loopholes

4. Lower Permanent Residency targets

5. Strengthen deportation policies, and deport all non-citizens convicted of serious crimes

6. Country caps

7. Prioritize high-value students

8. Reform the points system

9. Implement a Canadian Birth-Rate Strategy, and make Canada less reliant on immigration for population growth

10. Extend the time-period to citizenship

And I close with this: our immigration system has never been set by our business lobby. When you go to a barber and ask them if you need a haircut, what do we expect them to say? For everyone in your ear telling you they want to return to the moonshot of the last few years, or who want to amnesty as many from the Covid wave as possible, I implore you to say no.

Say no for the students and grads sending out 100s of resumes. Say no for the 15 foreign students, sold a lie, living in a basement sharing a single washroom. Say no on behalf of the victims of migrant crime.

Canadians are telling you they want a return to responsible immigration, that they’re counting on an exit strategy for millions on set-to-expire status, and that revised targets aren’t yet going far enough. Will we listen?

For more on immigration, read my latest in Without Diminishment:

Without Diminishment

Alexander Brown: 'Maximum Canada' failed miserably, it's time for less

Were you aware that the shattering of Canada’s long-held immigration consensus was first dreamed up behind closed French doors amongst senior Liberals at former McKinsey head Dominic Barton’s lavish Lake of Bays cottage over a weekend in 2011…

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5 months ago · 35 likes · 1 comment · Without Diminishment Editor and Alexander Brown

And join myself and Immigration Critic Michelle Rempel Garner on Juno News:

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Can we fix this great divide? Can we find common ground? Can a nation’s beleaguered, its working-aged and young, downstream from ten years of bad decisions on purpose, can they turn the other cheek as they’re tone-policed and told to sit back and take it, lest they be branded as all but traitors for speaking of the conditions of their captivity?

It’s the challenge right now, but we have to try.

“Talk to your parents,” the host of an event for Pierre Poilievre joked on Saturday in Vancouver — an event I happened to attend. “But be patient. Be kind.” And he’s right.

The cross-talk, the rock’em sock’em robots, the continued slap-fight between warring consultant tribes, it isn’t getting us anywhere, clearly. When the present iteration of the party of the status quo wedges a nation against itself, and denies a reform election after a decade of haphazard redistribution, non-growth, and abject decline, you get a traditional voter-demographic breakdown flipped entirely on its head.

The party of seemingly endless opposition dominated with youth, held strong with the 35-54s, but found itself walloped 52% to 34% among those aged 55+. Since then, those 55+ numbers have only widened, as the ‘safe’ choice, that more stately actor (when he’s not radicalizing those who don’t know any better with claims of false invasion) can do little wrong, even coming out of “middling” budget heading to a vote Monday, and with a nation remaining pessimistic about its future prospects.

If the Liberals are voted down Monday, they would likely relish that opportunity to seize on a majority. The spin is already built in.

The Conservatives don’t want to stand up against Trump!

At a time like this, when we should be coming together, it’s un-Canadian…

We’re supposed to be one Team Canada right now (offer void in British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec), we can’t afford Pierre Poilievre’s divisive Trumpiness.

On and on. Yada and yada.

Nowhere in that comms exercise, drummed up by those who spend more time in America or the Arab Emirates, or meeting with Chinese proxies than they’d publicly care to admit, would there be a defence of younger Canadians, of those still on the launch pad, worried about, say, supposed ‘fixes’ to immigration riddled with creative accounting and more of the same.

Watch myself and Michelle Rempel Garner on the real numbers behind the fake numbers.

Nowhere would they address housing, set to get much, much worse, under both the federal Liberals and targets they’re admitting they won’t come close to hitting, and Ontario’s ‘Conservative’ premier who leads the galaxy in not getting off his ass to get out of the way on starts and lowering punitive development costs.

Nowhere would one find a stout defence against “deconstruction,” or the daily humiliation ritual of flags flying that aren’t our own, or imagined and inflated woke excess meant to sully the memory of our war dead and marginalize normal people.

Following recent debates sparked by Without Diminishment, where we’ve argued a version of “it’s not just the economy, stupid,” when it comes to what’s animating young people and young conservatives — actually talk to them, and half of them are trending towards fascism with how alienated they feel by a lack of upward social mobility, or a society without rules or those willing to enforce them — it’s been easier for some serving in established camps to mischaracterize these conversations as focusing too much on culture, or, ridiculously, “blood and soil nationalism.” But we’re not. If one is dealing in good faith, it’s plain to see we’re trying to talk about both.

That mythical “fiscal conservative but socially liberal” doesn’t actually exist anymore. There’s a whopping 6% of them. So when younger conservatives, moderates, libertarians, classical liberals, when they want to talk the free speech chill they feel on campus, or their problems with a TFW wage suppression and replacement model that’s hit them like trucker from the ‘Fraser wave,’ we should be listening, but particularly so should our baby boomers and aging Gen X’ers.

-70 percent of Canadians—including 75 percent of adults under thirty-five—believe the next generation will experience a lower standard of living compared to today.

-In 1976, the average price of a home in Canada was about $57,000, roughly three and a half times the median household income. Today, the benchmark home price has soared past $750,000, more than eight times the median income. In cities like Toronto and Vancouver, the gap is even more extreme, with price-to-income ratios exceeding 10 to one.

-Young Canadians have responded by giving up on homeownership. According to a June 2024 Ipsos poll, three-quarters of Canadian adults under 35 believe that owning a home is now a privilege reserved for the rich. The home-buying numbers bear this out. According to the Bank of Canada, in 1981, 55 percent of Canadians aged 25 to 34 owned a home. By 2024, that figure had plummeted to just 36 percent, a stark reflection of how affordability has collapsed for many younger Canadians.

Select quotes from John Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker in The Hub.

Adolescence extends, purchasing power erodes further, our birth rate collapses because how could it not, we band-aid over it with replacement labour and ‘GDP go up,’ but productivity goes down — and that vicious cycle continues.

Where that policy-driven ostracization gets us — where that misbegotten and sudden shift from the old sacrificing for the young, to the young continuously having to sacrifice for the old — is nowhere good.

And yet, and this is a frustrating reality that conservative campaigners and leaders’ offices and communicators must adjust for, to get too angry, to be too blunt and combative, it’s not helping. Our non-self-aware, our former Covid crazies, the present all-in on Trump crowd and “f*ck them kids,” they cannot be helped, but there are those who can be, and those who are undeserving of feeling like they’re being painted with a broad brush.

No one should be asking for Pierre Poilievre to follow a Doug Ford playbook that has more lined pockets than principles, and more conflicts than a North Korean newscaster, but they need to take what they’re good at, keep doing that, and then take what they’re not so good at, which is striking the right tone with some of our militantly stubborn, who occasionally vote on spite, and adjust.

It’s a rigged game, but no fool’s errand, to try and pivot where one can. If the Conservatives don’t, that’s how you end up with more threats of different ways to lose from those who lost second and third last, or who win in Ontario by becoming their opponents, and currently find themselves being investigated by the OPP’s Anti-Rackets branch.

I’m as tired of witnessing bad political advice and attempts at low-cunning sabotage as any, but what isn’t working is the exact same. We had a fake war-time election that set our younger generations back years. In a kind of peace-time, adjustments can be made that don’t throw a young voter coalition out of the tent to appease the conservative movement’s Jean Charests. (*Shudder*)

And it should be the movement that moves the Conservative Party, not the other way around. On this, there’s an opportunity for the opposition to hone its skills, and to stop the slide in suburbs for seniors.

So “talk to your parents,” but with good will. And if you’re a reader who is a parent who’s tired of feeling like you’re responsible — I understand, and you’re not.

There’s no perfect way to go about this bridging this deliberate generational divide, but leaning into the grace and understanding we’re not seeing entirely modelled by our politicians and their camps would be a start.

Allow me to try: If I were a Carney, Trudeau, Ford, or Eby voter, who got into the housing market before the cut off, with assets that have jumped by 30% per year, no recent medical emergencies or delayed diagnoses for my loved ones, I don’t have to commute into a suddenly lawless and dystopian central business district, and I either don’t have kids or that ain’t my problem anymore, I might not want to give it up that easy, either.

Ok, maybe that needed a little work. But hey, it can’t hurt to try. What’s the worst that can happen, more of the same?

Alexander Brown is Director of the National Citizens Coalition, a host on Juno News, the proprietor of Acceptable Views, a co-founder and managing editor of Without Diminishment, and a contributor to Project Ontario.

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Thankfully, blissfully, attempts to politicize the Toronto Blue Jays’ historic, viewership-shattering American League pennant win and World Series run never succeeded. Although, returning to the scene of the elbows up seniors’ scam, the Globe and Mail most certainly tried. (The Star surely joined them, but why go hunting for reasons to be miserable on a Saturday and Sunday.)

Now a week removed from heartbreak, and knowing full well that many of us have yet to muster the strength to watch the final outs of a game seven that slipped away, or who don’t feel like analyzing a lackluster secondary lead from third base as if it were the Zapruder film because coulda, woulda, shoulda, there are at the very least sociocultural matters of the heart worth celebrating.

Last February’s ‘4 Nations Face-Off’, culminating in an admittedly epic showdown between Canada and the U.S., was not so lucky. Taking place during the very heart of Operation Tariff the World, politicians who wouldn’t know a shin guard from an elbow pad flocked to make retail-political displays as saccharine as the worst Ron MacLean soliloquy. As a harbinger of the reform election rug-pull to come, modern Canada’s penchant for anti-Americanism as identity was on full display, dusting off the maple leaf to wield it as a political symbol, to its very detriment. (This tends to happen when your nation has divine-right-to-rulers who covet creating political wedges above all else.)

Trudeau preened. Carney circled. Momentum shifted on ice and off. The mood in the sports bars of the nature carried an uneasy undercurrent of bilious resentment and hostility, as if only Canada may harm Canada, and on that we remain peerless masters of our own house.

Permission-slip patriotism, oppositional defiance-oriented patriotism, domestic electoral destiny suddenly pitched into a foreign-focused and pseudo-religious fervour — it was a fickle bitch.

In the aftermath of Mark Carney and Mike Myers cynically donning Team Canada sweaters to ride off the coattails of our national program’s victory, and in arriving at the here and now, the country, as those who can walk and chew gum at the same time predicted, remains pessimistic about its trajectory.

The budget? Not great either, but there are indeed (some) signs of life. (Join myself and Professor Ian Lee to break it down, if one is feeling so inclined.)

And young people were just handed a “disaster” of a housing update, with revised immigration numbers improving but not promising much better. Ontario’s housing starts alone have cratered to just 64,000 this year.

Yet, remarkably. for five weeks this fall, that stench didn’t reach Toronto’s baseball team. Canada’s baseball team.

As a uniquely personable and loveable group, with a plucky playing style and jokes about the “power of friendship” spurring them forward, a high-spending but pre-season underdog cultivated a clubhouse vibe that ended up sweeping the nation.

Even at the lone sports bar in Iqaluit, there wasn’t an empty seat to be found. This writer, no fan of the reserved and detached nature that has taken hold among our pedestrians in once-better Canadian cities, found himself receiving high-fives from strangers walking down the aisle on a flight from Vancouver to Toronto for games one and two of the World Series.

(And let’s just say that after some of the revelry experienced following that thrilling game one victory, there may or may not have been a walk home in the same jersey and cap as the night before, after catching all of one REM cycle on a friend’s couch. Even the city’s tragically swelling itinerant population wanted to converse jovially about the game, as this still hypothetical scenario involved a bleary-eyed stroll from downtown to midtown in the crisp dawn air, born out of the necessity to shake one’s self out of the doldrums. Again, may or may not have happened.)

To highlight the depths of the nation’s dedication, that loving feeling, Mrs. Acceptable Views even hopped a post-work Friday red-eye to catch one game, before heading right back across the country to work. And for a change, to land at Pearson wasn’t just a semi-radicalizing experience, but a moment to witness fans arriving from coast to coast.

There will be some who may reflexively argue that’s just bread and circus. I very much disagree. The Toronto Blue Jays, and for far too short a run, the Montreal Expos, have served as the soundtrack to our Canadian summers. It doesn’t take a die-hard baseball fan, some trained seal clapping when the jumbotron says yes or no, to appreciate the finer things surrounding the Great American Pastime, or to appreciate Canada’s out-sized influence on the game’s decorated and varied history.

These scenes of jubilation alone were a welcome reprieve. Normally embittered and cynical sports journalists teared up in post-game remarks, the young men of the nation went “tarps off,” concierges remarked that “we really needed this.”

Torontonians, Canadian culture-enjoyers, our young, they were most certainly deserving of respite, for this is still a nation where two halves don’t make a whole.

Even in that vacuum of equal parts nerves and exuberance, Canada the Bad attempted to creep in. First in the Globe, then in two offensive, tone-deaf, heritage-mocking, anti-civilizational acts of butchery of our anthem, that wormed their way into the nation’s ears. (The public rebuttal, at least, was swift and unflinching, and the team’s play continued to be the story.)

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For that brief period, like a cover-band playing the hits from your childhood, both the Toronto — or the Canada — many of us remember from our childhoods felt familiar: we weren’t all strangers; generations were able to share in a project of upward mobility; the streets were alive with post-game mob scenes of the friendly and not terror-supporting variety.

We’re otherwise a Balkanized lot — that’s an order that comes down from the worst of our Machiavellian redistributionists and post-nationalists. But squint while you’re seated among 45,000 friends, have your low expectations met when there was thankfully no anthem booing, give yourself over to the “immaculate vibes” from “one of the great Toronto nights,” use a World Series to catch up with old friends, and it’s harder to notice the decay, and easier to remember the good times, still possible, right there if we’re willing to put ourselves out there and do the work.

Sometimes, all it takes is an excuse to hop on a plane, to share nervous text chains with a friend or parent begging for a different reliever to be warming up in the bullpen, to show up at that sports bar at the top of the world.

A week removed from all that ecstasy and the agony, something shared we didn’t allow to be ruined, look what can happen when our “Want It All,” our fear of missing out, our need to be around one another, is oriented towards a positive, not the sallow-faced hostility of imagined invasion and “break us so he can own us.”

For that, we can thank our baseball team.

For making that reprieve into something more permanent, that’s on us.

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Alexander Brown is the writer of the best-selling Acceptable Views newsletter, a show host on Juno News, a non-profit director and campaigner, a columnist and contributor, and the co-founder and managing editor of Without Diminishment.

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

We’re all but one month removed from the launch of our new publication, Without Diminishment, and last week we had the pleasure of joining the UBC Conservatives for a panel before a packed lecture hall of students and guests eager to feel seen and heard on the issues that matter most to them.

‘An Evening Without Diminishment’ is how we were billed, and on the motivational and non-doomer front, I believe that we delivered. We were blessed to be flanked by the Hon. Gordon Campbell, who opened with august remarks on young conservatives taking back control of their future, lessons from his premiership, and providing a gentle hand in reminding those in attendance that you can fight your culture wars but don’t wholly lose sight of the economy. A firm rebuke of Canada’s failing status quo was on offer, yet optimism was still in ample supply.

Friend ‘Robin Skies’ joined Caroline Elliott, Geoff Russ, and myself on stage as an additional special guest, with words of wisdom on orienting oneself towards the social movements that matter most to young Canadians, and with remarks on the importance of becoming your own broadcaster. Skies, government name Adam Beattie, has quickly transformed from one of Canada’s top behind-the- scenes politicos into one of Canada’s most-popular TikTok influencers, routinely crossing millions in views and engagements with straight-to-camera, no-nonsense lessons to a predominantly younger audience no longer willing to settle for managed decline.

After a wide-ranging discussion on the early successes of the publication, the who we are and why we do it, and policy talk on the concerns surrounding a reconciliation model run amok, an overly permissible government drug culture gone predictably awry, and the need and the want from young people to build and defend monuments of meaning, the Q and A portion and discussions with the crowd afterwards very much reinforced the dynamics we’ve sought to engage with: an audience that hasn’t felt wholly served by its mainstream, or its campaigners.

There were thoughtful questions as to whether woke ‘gotcha’ conservative reporting and soundbites distract from the key issues such as affordability or immigration, concerns about drugs and crime, an esteemed UBC law professor expanded upon his concerns that the profession is being ceded to a group increasingly radical and out of touch with the principles of the profession, with co-founder and Editor-at-Large Geoff Russ encouraging the audience to march their way into institutions, and counter the left’s very own long march through our institutions, to the detriment of them all.

For myself, I was afforded the opportunity to expand on why I do what I do, why I first started writing here at Acceptable Views, why my work at Juno News, why my continued role at the NCC or in contribution with Project Ontario, and why I aided in founding this new publication to begin with: we can lie to ourselves and cast aside concerns of this country being more of a gerontocracy than a generationally cohesive democracy, and abandon our teens, twenties, and even thirtysomethings to further alienation and radicalizing forces that seek to prey upon that animus — yes, the Nick Fuenteses of the world — or we can work like hell to offer them a better path, validate those concerns, and ensure they stay in a tent where light is capable of getting in, and where the radioactive fallout from fed-posting won’t cling to their clothes.

They wanted to laugh and hear references to the memes in their online circles — about the institutional left and the right’s cope that “but the GDP goes up” when every facet of the human experience and our societies have gotten worse. They chuckled at familiar lingo like “based” and rooted for Caroline’s increasingly outsized influence on British Columbian politics — as a kind of “based,” whipsmart, cool professor of a hiking mom, and a sorely-needed youthful face who stands in contrast to a tired and stubborn party apparatchik that’s taking on water at the worst possible time for the province.

Not once did they mention the U.S. president, or the status of elbows up, down, akimbo…

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Things are indeed happening. The Toronto Blue Jays are in the World Series, Not ‘Sorry’ on Juno News just finished its first month expanded to three days per week, Project Ontario is growing (check out its terrific new website), the National Citizens Coalition racked up one-million views over the last 28 days, Without Diminishment has debuted as a Top New Bestseller on Substack and has attracted brilliant early columns and calls to action from , , , and , to name just a few.

Friend and business partner Geoff Russ has launched a veritable cottage industry of well-established conservatives and libertarians who don’t seem to grasp the concept of a ‘new right,’ of minds that stubbornly refuse to be ceded, that seek to reconcile with the election losses of the recent past, who know the pretense of political neutrality is a myth, who would rather get to work on pulling kids back from the brink than walk into the wilderness not to be heard from again until it’s time again to serve as back-drops in stump speeches dreamed up by the ideologically inert who, if they were to upgrade their prescription lenses, would see that incrementalism looks a whole lot like managed decline.

On that front, we are indeed busy. In fact, I have two tabs open at present, one for this missive to readers of Acceptable Views — who I promise to have more time for starting next week — and the other, for notes to the University of British Columbia Conservatives, who we are speaking to this evening.

When I first founded Acceptable Views back in the fall of 2022, with ‘An olive branch for Team Apocalypse,’ I had little notion that it would one day lead to becoming accidentally important at work.

But here we are, and here you are, and, as is the theme around these parts, I remain grateful for your support and for being able to play some part in your reading, listening, and viewing habits, and on that front I come bearing options.

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I had a blast recording in long-form last week with Dr. Shawn Whatley, whose curriculum vitae extends further than Ontario’s Highway 9, and that episode finally dropped today. Shawn is a terrific leader in our space, a warm and engaging communicator with hosting skills I can learn much from, and to be deemed worthy of an hour-long sit-down is a new one for me; up there with speaking in front of 150 people at Project Ontario back in September.

Do join us, if one is so inclined.

In this episode of ‘Concepts’ with host Shawn Whatley, Shawn, an author, MLI Senior Fellow, and former President of the OMA and Civitas is joined by Alexander Brown, a prolific writer, journalist, Director of the National Citizens Coalition, and a show host on Juno News.

Alexander also serves as managing editor, and co-founder of Without Diminishment, a leading new conservative publication founded to better serve culture writing in Canada.

The conversation delves deep into the frustrations of young voters in Canada, particularly focusing on cultural and economic challenges. They discuss the Conservative Party’s past hesitancy to engage in those cultural debates and the significance of leveraging third-party advocacy groups like the NCC, Project Ontario, and platforms like Without Diminishment that aim to bridge the gap between “policy wonks” and everyday Canadians.

Highlighting the growing discontent among working Canadians over issues like home ownership and social cohesion, Alexander and Shawn explore the potential for a rejuvenated conservative movement that does not shy away from third-rails in polite Canadian discourse.

On the Juno front, I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with , he of holding First Principles, being right about most everything, and who served as a shining example of a man who wasn’t afraid to put his neck on the line during our cursed Covid years, and under the worst of the militarized expansion of institutionalized progressivism.

For his insights on the troubling Bill C-9, growing issues of Aboriginal title, our shared experiences at the Freedom Convoy, and a lesson on the Charter codification of slippery-slope DEI practices, add us to your watch-list before game six of the World Series.

And on the Without Diminishment front, we’re holding a launch event in Vancouver on November 13th. If you find yourself out on the left coast, and you’d like to meet some of Canada’s top political minds and special guests, I’d be happy to host you for a free lunch. (Well, mostly free. All it’ll cost you is a paid subscription, starting for as low as $5/month! Click to upgrade at that paywall.)

Without Diminishment

You're invited: Join Without Diminishment on November 13th in Vancouver

You’re in on the ground floor of something special. The launch of Without Diminishment is changing the political discourse in Canada…

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6 months ago · 7 likes · Without Diminishment Editor

I’ll be back next week with more words and columns, but most importantly…