What is this supposed “new right”?

Can we ensure our politics amount to more than “GDP (barely) go up,” at the cost of all else?

Can we afford to keep pretending the problems of today are the same as they were 10-20 years ago?

In an hourlong chat on Sitka Media, I was pleased to sit down with Adam Zivo to answer all manner of questions. We discuss moving past 2014 strategies to address the problems of the day, why I do what I do and why we founded Without Diminishment, and the importance of building projects and the movement at a time in which half-wins can become whole, or just as easily revert back to the failures of the recent past.

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For all the good and bad faith currently taking up oxygen in this blessedly rare moment of mono-culture, let’s make the obvious clear: Nolan’s Odyssey is not Homer’s.

It is, still, a masterful feat of filmmaking. It hits transcendent notes. You can put the sacking of Troy and that third act up against any blockbuster experience.

That the film includes a posthumous dedication to Nolan’s friend and IMAX mentor, Canadian David Keighley, inventor of the film’s “Keighley camera,” is a beautiful tribute to the craft, to pushing the envelope, and to the care that went into its production.

Has the interpretation landed with every scholar, Classics fan, or those on right-wing identitarian Twitter? No. Its themes, narratively, confuse themselves a time or two. There is a tension between pleasing a modern audience and the man Odysseus is supposed to be. Should we be grateful that it exists, that it brings the epics to new generations, and that even the average filmgoer is giving such heady fare an A CinemaScore? Absolutely.

Which leads to another point in need of being made clear.

The digital outrage machine tends to operate, increasingly, on a tireless, Pavlovian schedule. The pre-outrage to The Odyssey, particularly after its more recent trailers, was loud, fierce, and entirely predictable—fixating almost exclusively on the color-coding of the casting choices. To some of the internet’s loudest engagement farmers, it looked like yet another foundational institution of Western civilization was about to be sacrificed on the altar of modern Hollywood sensibilities. “Go woke, go broke.”

However, now that the film is being pulled forward adoringly by the public, like a two-tonne hollow horse across the sand, that hyper-reactive experience in pre-supposition not only embarrassed itself, it embarrasses the political movement associated with the anon accounts most angry with the film, often without having even watched it. An anticipated $1 billion global box-office haul will do that to you.

Pre-release, accounts whipped up a frenzied narrative based on outright falsehoods, claiming that Elliot Page had been cast to play the ultimate hyper-masculine warrior, Achilles, who doesn’t appear in the film.

In reality, Page was cast as Sinon—an important, albeit far lesser mythological figure from Virgil’s Aeneid. Page’s screentime? 5 minutes.

Yet, to stop the analysis there would be to mistake the edge of the wooden horseshoe for the monster-laden horizon.

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15 months ago, a federal election didn’t go the way many of us wanted—or even needed. That was a tough pill to swallow then, but little reason to be ‘dooming’ now.

On our ‘side’ (the more inherently civilizational, good, and truthful; and yes, that can include some decent Liberals when and where applicable), there are half-wins on the key files, there are spiritual wins in having been a part of guiding a majority of people out of the deleterious, gaping maw of 2014-2023 thought processes, social pressures, and political cowardice.

This is no safe space for a rest, nor to set up basecamp. The night can still be dark and full of terrors. But the days are longer and the sun is sitting high in the sky.

Ultimately, for the politically intrigued, the question is this: Do you prefer a party that moves a movement, or a movement that moves a party?

A party may find itself in varying degrees of challenge or disarray. A caucus can kvetch. Consultants can turn petty. Knives can (wrongly) continue to point inward, rather than outward.

But if you care more about the latter, the movement and ideas space, does that not negate some of the importance surrounding apparent palace intrigue, or the ebbing and flowing in the polls?

From filling up rooms of late with our friends at Project Ontario, from having returned from meeting thousands in London, I can tell you, there’s more optimism out there than the Twitter discourse would have you believe.

(A walk and talk from yours truly, if you’re interested.)

Ultimately, we are not short on the people, principles, and ideas that are more than capable of handling this evolutionary political and cultural bottleneck. Meaning, those half-wins can become full, but only if we stay in the fight.

On that front, it’s why I was thrilled to publish this terrific call to action—and for sanity—from the inimitable Howard Anglin, former Deputy Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and an inspiration to many in our space.

Without Diminishment

Howard Anglin: I've never been more bullish about conservative politics in Canada

My heart goes out to my disconsolate comrades-in-arms, it really does, but I just don’t get it. My friend and quondam campaign trench mate, Ben Woodfinden, has declared himself ‘more depressed about the state of conservative politics in Canada right now than i think i’ve ever been’ in a…

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16 days ago · 74 likes · 6 comments · Without Diminishment Editor and Howard Anglin

And it’s why I was also honoured to sit down with Stephen LeDrew, former President of the Liberal Party of Canada and a CP24 mainstay in my household growing up, before Stephen joined W.D. Deputy Editor Kate Marland and I over on The Pilot’s rooftop for a pint—along with 120+ conservatives who are interested in better, more principled politics from Queen’s Park.

There was much Western Civilization-‘maxxing’ to be had, and there are more episodes to come, along with an upcoming feature with Stephen for The News Forum.

I don’t care about 15 months ago. I don’t care about the murmurs of a House divided. Conservative politics have always been regional and tempestuous. That tends to happen when you have core beliefs, rooted in more than whichever way the wind blows.

On the movement and culture front, in caring about how we continue to grow and respond in the here and now, I’m looking to enlist your help this summer.

This work takes time, and money, and it’s a labour of love; but a job is still a job.

If you’re able to chip in with a paid subscription here at Acceptable Views, your support would be most welcome.

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If you would consider taking out a free or paid subscription to Without Diminishment, which continues to make cultural waves after just 9 months in operation, I’d be much appreciative.

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And if you’re in a position to donate to the National Citizens Coalition, or to support our friends at the non-profit Project Ontario, thank you kindly.

‘We’ lost. So be it. All that’s left back there—down there—is tattered blue laundry and the remnants of a few alliterative slogans.

In the immortal words of a certain Beatles’ track that now serenades English superstar Jude Bellingham at the World Cup, “take a sad song, and make it better.”

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

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For once, Canada, resist the comforting lie.

Set aside the emotional response to post-national, self-promotional slop about an empty “mosaic.”

Ignore the prisoners of the moment who cast the drubbing of lowly Qatar—on two red cards, no less—as the “biggest sporting event” in our history.

Do not settle for the laughably self-congratulatory quotes of manager Jesse Marsch, who, following Morocco’s 3–0 drubbing of Canada in the round of sixteen, claimed, “I’d rather be us than them; as good as Morocco are, I’d rather be us.”

A deluded, prideful loser is still a loser, even if it wears our inexplicably black-and-cocaine-speckled jersey.

The truth of the matter is this: by no measure did we nail this World Cup. The United States, woefully overrated, turned in one of the worst performances of the tournament against Belgium and crashed out in the round of sixteen. Mexico could not overcome the great Anglo back wall that England were forced to assemble after a costly red card obliged them to park the bus, nor could they compete with the soaring talent and athleticism of 23-year-old Jude Bellingham, nurtured by England’s youth system since the age of 13.

None of the tournament’s three hosts distinguished themselves on the pitch. Canada beat the teams they were supposed to beat. They drew with an underwhelming Bosnia. They could not live with Switzerland or Morocco; the latter was no surprise, given that Morocco are among the world’s ten best sides.

And yet, as a co-host, there was much to be proud of.

Raucous red-and-white crowds marched through our streets, bringing life and patriotism of the non-‘elbows-up’ variety to cities starved of identity, meaning, and shared cultural commitment. Watch parties have brought Balkanised communities together from coast to coast. Toronto’s celebrated and thoroughly integrated Portuguese community won global plaudits for its treatment of the retiring Cristiano Ronaldo, a sporting icon who found himself feted as temporary Toronto royalty.

The total public cost for Canada to host its portion of the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup has been estimated at $1.066 billion. That is, of course, a ludicrous number. When governments attempt to pass that off as an investment, they are lying. There is no world in which you recoup even a fraction of the cost. The tourism figures don’t add up. Nor have the hotel figures needed to match them materialised. And yet, not every expense is purely a matter for the head. Austerity, though too rarely pursued, tends to offer little positive valence or appeal.

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Editor’s note: Join me in Toronto this Wednesday, July 8 for ‘Pints & Principles,’ co-hosted by yours truly, , and .

This column first appeared in Without Diminishment.

How else can we truly believe that we’ll ‘get back to normal’?

In an era of politics as transgression, of elbows akimbo, of ugliness, excuse-making, replaceability, and AI-slop replicability, do we not want fighters for Good? Do we expect the inches given—which quickly turned into miles, oceans, and Arctic archipelagos—to just be given back? Do we expect the anti-Western, anti-civilizational forces, rendered bereft of joie de vivre by an anaesthetising cocktail of subsidies and the perverse incentive to slander the past and loot the future for the sake of their present, to simply detox willingly?

We were in sweltering London last week, with a Canadian contingent of colleagues and friends of Without Diminishment, NCC, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI), the Free Speech Union of Canada, and Cardus, to ruminate on these very questions, but, more importantly, to work on their solutions.

The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), co-founded by Dr Jordan Peterson, has quickly become a kind of counter-Davos for the intellectual but not elitist, and for the heterodox by the standards of warped modernity. Flanked by partners Kate Marland and Geoff Russ, we were met by soaring convention halls (with intermittent air conditioning), an army of hundreds of volunteers, art displays and classical music, and salon-style dinners under stained glass.

No one had to say the word ‘conservative’. It was redundant—largely a given. It was also entirely unnecessary. Whether you were seated next to a sculptor, poet, astronaut, soldier, pastor, politician, musician, actor, educator, or writer, attendance was predicated on believing in civilisation and wanting to take part in its reconstruction following decades of managed decline.

For all the incongruity of being fêted with high-minded ideals and treated as members of a kind of counter-elite while being unassailably downwardly mobile in an era of replacement, declining birth rates, and the soaring social costs of ‘GDP barely inches up’ politics, it was an honour to have been invited as guest delegates and to have been joined by thousands viewed as men and women ‘in the arena’.

It is in that arena—civil society, the court of public opinion, and the Overton windows we seek to expand and replace with stained glass, giving life, beauty, and the permission structure for the anything-but-ordinary citizen to join in saying and doing what is true, and no longer to live by lies—that we and the others in attendance understand that the key to that work lies in being radical but not extreme. We have enough darkness; enough Machiavellian climbers and borderline personality disorder (BPD) types; enough engagement farmers.

‘Slopulism’ may trick the heart, but it poisons the mind. It’s a spent persuasive force. It is, ultimately, a lie. And human beings, for all their fallibility, are inherently oriented towards the truth.

For civilizations now to be rebuilt, defended, and advanced, we must offer young men and women more than economic outcomes. This has been a central thesis of our work at W.D., sometimes drawing the ire of certain Harper-era success stories who would rather stick to the safety of pretending the key issues at the doors relate solely to the bad news that greets many when they open their banking apps, or that any small-c conservative rebuke of that formula is socialistic in nature. And yet, that is a straw-man excuse. There are ways to communicate being pro-growth, pro-worker, and pro-family all at the same time; ways to make your case for reconstruction and renewal that are coded for your audience and won’t scare the normies.

Because our problems run much, much deeper. We see the inherent social costs of GDP-maxxing through thoughtless, low-skilled, poorly integrated immigration. We see the perils of having torn up the social contract, offering instead a simulation of, and poor substitute for, a life. Young men are meant to be ‘boisterous and tactile’; young women are meant to be attachment-driven and nurturing. Neither group is served by broader market disloyalty, and a secondary me-first, feelings-driven attention economy, which seeks to devour one’s frontal lobe, like the tamping iron that was driven through Phineas Gage’s skull, leaving him profoundly changed.

There is, indeed, more to life; our march back through institutions and halls of power is essential, and the best preparation for a future in need of change—an inherently alienating and digital one—is an analogue, hyper-focused present. Canadian conservatism, in its present form, offers no answer to this—just a vague tapestry of free market slogans, while being too frightened to take on actual free market issues such as supply management. A column penned by A.I. slop, for which any human should feel ashamed to attach their name to, would surmise ‘those aren’t principles; they’re excuses to avoid meaningful change’.

American author and conservative columnist Ross Douthat told the audience at the soaring Olympia cultural hub: ‘Substitutes for real life are always inferior and distracting. Conditions of agency and conditionality, and the basic continuity of human existence, won’t happen under digital conditions; they’re driven by faith that human life is worth living and that we have a destiny to fulfil.’

For all the challenges of the day, this should be viewed as fundamentally good news for people of faith, whose beliefs, Douthat believes, are ‘selected for the challenges of the era’ and for the ‘evolutionary bottleneck’ of the age.

In essence—and I say this as an imperfect Anglican who often struggles to find a service not adorned with Current Thing memorabilia, nor presided over by pastors who view their pulpit as personal and not liturgical—at a time when not enough churches are houses of prayer, gatherings like ARC read as an attempt to reclaim God and first principles in the aggregate. It’s macro work that’s ultimately about the micro, about what is most meaningful: family, faith, freedom; acts of personal ownership that, when shared writ large, make up what we call a life, and that put the civil in civilization.

To move any further away from that essential relationship and those essential guardrails is, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali also shared from stage, to ‘stamp misery on ages yet unborn’.

To continue to cut ourselves loose from all restraint is not true freedom. Infinite migration; the rule of law as a suggestion rather than a rule; the devolution of expectation in the public square; mothballing symbols of meaning, the finer things, and the finer details in favour of the antiseptic and monolithic—there is no future there worth living in.

Grateful we should be, then, that we have fighters in the present: the kind who cross oceans to learn and plan, or even drive across countries in the dead of our COVID-response winters to lean on their horns, dance, provide for homeless people, shovel snowy sidewalks, and make merry while all around them is drab and grey.

An astronaut without a tether can only tumble hopelessly into the full dark. To believe in—to work in, and on—that which is Good, True, and Beautiful, is the only solution to that endless, aimless spiral.

Leaving ARC and leaving London—which is far less depressing than posts from Visegrád 24 would have you believe—I was struck by an assembly of thousands who were left with the assignment to give back and not take: an assignment antithetical to the anti-civilizational homework one would normally associate with opulent European conferences that seek to influence the politics and culture of the day.

The bad news: events like ARC and publications like this have to exist in the first place. But here’s the good news: we have our fighters. We’re not alone in knowing this isn’t good enough. If you’re here, chances are you were never any good at living by lies, either.

And if you’re here, chances are you understand that to return to the ‘politics of normalcy’, first, there are battles to win; battles that were lost, for decades, on ground ceded to, then fortified by, those with a vested interest in anything but normal.

To care only about the pocketbook, to pretend the 2015 playbook still works, when it lost to begin with, is a luxury most of us can no longer afford to believe in.

We tend to live in the spaces those unaffected travel through. Our parks, festooned with fentanyl-made schizophrenics, the shoebox apartments where we struggle to convert the energy from our hamster wheels into professional and personal inertia, they are but specks through a passing windshield for the ‘my politics are leave me alone’ jet-set.

I challenge anyone to fully engage with Zohran Mamdani’s embittered, resentful, Third-Worldist July 4th remarks, and to come away with anything but the understanding the wolf is at the door, and will not leave willingly. And why won’t it leave willingly? Because nature abhors a vacuum. Mamdani was created by the Big Sleep, our ‘culture war’ slumber, where too many played nice with that which is inherently anti-Western Civilizational, to squeak out lesser governments, and to cling to pieces of what once was, in the hopes that this was all just a fad. It wasn’t. It isn’t.

Transgression is here, whether we like it or not—born of bad leaders, non-participants, failed liberals and conservatives alike. This time, surely, it’s better to fight. This time, surely, it’s better to win.

Only then can we embrace, fully, a return to the ‘politics of normalcy’—with trench lines dug and sentries placed in high towers, having learned, hopefully, that all wins are temporary; even our civilization, if we’re again so careless.

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

His writing has appeared in publications such as The Hub and the Toronto Sun, and he has been a speaker on stage at two Canada Strong and Free Networking Conferences.

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Without Diminishment

Alexander Brown: The necessity of transgression

How else can we truly believe that we’ll ‘get back to normal…

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21 days ago · 15 likes · 1 comment · Without Diminishment Editor and Alexander Brown

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The institutional memory of the Canadian electorate is famously short, yet even a goldfish should be able to recall the acts of structural white-collar criminality that got us here.

For more than a decade, the Canadian domestic real estate market has been treated less as a foundational social good and more as a protected financial asset class. First came the deliberate Trudeau invitation to his backers—the foreign speculators and mainland Chinese mega-players—through a policy that effectively opened the floodgates to capital influx and global wealth looking for a safe, wilfully-blind harbour, with a promised high rate on return.

Then came the era of deliberate and unprecedented population growth, which added layers of artificial gains to an already bloated system. The result has been Generation Screwed, who have been priced out of stability amidst a landscape of hyper-inflated evaluations, and a shadow economy that the feds now deem too big to fail.

The latest project from Managed Decline Inc. just unfolded in Vancouver, where former central banker Mark Carney ludicrously scaffolded a lump payout for ‘struggling’ dog-crate hustlers, insultingly disguised as benevolence. To anyone watching the political circuit or who understands the depth of the ‘Vancouver model’ of institutionalized real estate f*ckery and de-facto money laundering, the move felt entirely predictable, as it arrived on the heels of high-dollar, cash-for-access fundraisers hosted by prominent industry charlatans such as Bob Rennie, the contemptible owner of ‘Piss Christ.’

When greedy developers overextend themselves on overpriced, single-bedroom ‘investment units,’ primarily for foreigners to then overcharge Canadians to rent, the natural course of a market economy dictates that they bear the losses for their skullduggery, and for choosing, again and again, to ‘build,’ barely, for those who they perceive as chattel. Instead, and like many of Liberal Canada’s failures, we are witnessing a concerted effort to socialize those losses, shifting the burden from the well-connected back to the already-struggling broader public.

To attempt to pass off this natural order-defying favour under the banner of housing affordability is a profound insult, particularly to our world-beating number of young and middle-aged workers on the hamster wheel. Subsidizing developer losses does nothing to lower the entry floor for first-time buyers; rather, it ensures that prices remain artificially high. True affordability requires a downward adjustment in pricing, a correction that the experts of “experts say” will tell you will never happen if the state keeps guaranteeing the bottom line. By protecting the current price floor, policymakers are actively incentivizing a permanent class of lifetime renters, ensuring that ownership remains an elite privilege, primarily to those who were born before price to income ratios of 10-to-1.

To make matters worse, there are looming indicators that the current ban on foreign buyers may be quietly rolled back or amended to backstop these exact projects, confirming the growing suspicion that Canadian real estate is increasingly designed for international capital rather than its citizens. That lingering feeling of modern Canada feeling more like an airport Hilton than a functioning, integrated society? That’s a feature, not a bug.

Slop like “Fortress Canada,” “Protect Ontario,” and “Build Canada Homes” has always been purely cynical political performance: fictions designed to placate an aloof public while a non-loyal central planning machine grinds onward.

In this environment of deep, justified public anger among the have-nots, the duty of Pierre Poilievre and the Official Opposition becomes doubly important. Parliament may be in its summer recess, but egregious late efforts to ram through the problematic Bills C-9 and C-22, and now the presentation of a manila envelope to the friends of Gregor Robertson, mean there can be no vacation for the team in blue.

On this issue, Poilievre’s tone police can kick rocks. His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition’s sworn obligation is to aggressively scrutinize and criticize a system when its mandate is abused, and the House of the Common People acts for everyone but.

Canada must be more than that airport hotel; more than a safety school for a global hyphenate class and its co-conspirators who would pull up the ladders on their own children if it meant securing an infinite supply of Mainland Chinese investors and dirt-cheap workers from the subcontinent.

For those who care to notice, this is now a nation of shadow consulates that dot half-empty, silent suburbs, where foreign police services roam with impunity, and where political leaders are allowed to mimic the hubris of Arab strongmen, without possessing any of the competence required to generate genuine economic prosperity.

Voters in this country can drive you mad, but I tire of the rebuke that “Canadians get what they deserve.” There are enough Canadians—in the tens of millions—who are deserving of a better class of criminal than this, and the continuation of Liberal Canada’s housing Ponzi remains entirely unworthy of our home.

Socialized loss makes it ours, but it was largely out of our hands. That game was always rigged, by players well-versed in feeding the selfish beast that is gerontocracy.

A refusal, now, to not raise holy Hell, would be our mistake, and ours alone.

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

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Editor’s notes:

• I’m honoured to have been invited as a guest to ARC in London this coming week. If you find yourself in and around the conference, please say hi. You can reach me on the ARC app, here, or in my Twitter DMs.

• Toronto: Interested in sharing a pint together in July? Join myself, contributors from Without Diminishment, and our friends from Project Ontario for a special collaborative pub night, “Pints & Principles.” RSVP today.

• As some of you are aware, W.D. co-founder, collaborator, and friend Caroline Elliott ran for the leadership of the B.C. Conservatives, narrowly missing out on the final ballot. I was not involved in the campaign, but we held a little debrief over on YouTube. She has a bright future ahead of her in politics and policy, no matter what she chooses to pursue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alexander Brown: The fix was never in

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

Without Diminishment

Alexander Brown: The fix was never in

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

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2 months ago · 25 likes · 1 comment · Without Diminishment Editor and Alexander Brown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A youth movement to recover Canada’s lost future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bigger picture

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

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

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

The arrested:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything in Ontario has gotten materially worse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Both, of course, are deeply off the mark.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Let’s be clear about immigration fraud.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But that doesn’t mean we settle for it.

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

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

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

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

That fight continues, because it must.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Are you familiar with the term “Horseshoe theory”?

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

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

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

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

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

Jason Kenney is not a traitor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Without Diminishment

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

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

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5 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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