In 'Downtown Canada,' where everything is broken, Conservatives preach to the converted

On leaders in wait.

It’s the day after ‘Canada Strong and Free’ in Ottawa, which has slowly morphed into Lollapalooza for blue-suited GR professionals and small-c campaigners and writers who wish to put faces to names off Twitter, and I’m making plans to talk shop (but mainly, Wrestlemania XL) with a pal and principal strategist whose work you’ve likely seen, enjoyed, and voted for.

“*Name redacted* are you downtown? That’s easiest for me, or I can come meet you in some hip enclave I’ve never heard of.”

“Hah, it’s the latter. Do you mind leaving downtown?”

“I’ll miss the nuclear proliferation of crackheads, and the migrant gang at my doorstep, but no, I don’t mind at all.”

“Downtown Canada is just f*cked everywhere, to be honest.”

“That’s going in the title for the next column.”

The level of f*cked that I witnessed, or “shittification” (to borrow a term from Chris Selley) shouldn’t go understated here.

On nights out with friends and colleagues in the once-safe ByWard Market, I’d witness a, shall we say, “morally inconsistent and conflicted” Liberal MP meet up with a conservative-leaning crowd, as a gang in the background stalked a young couple heading back to their parked car.

Open-air drug deals were going down on the corner of Rideau and Sussex, just steps from where Canada’s real leaders in wait were gathering for the week. Little did the ‘tranq’d out’ crowd know, if one looked closely enough, they could spot the immensely kind and compassionate Adam Zivo in the lobby next door, clacking away on his latest column that doubles as a public service, working tirelessly to better inform Canadians on the dangers of a government drug supply than the Liberal and provincial governments combined.

Ottawa’s professional protest circuit showed up too. When word leaked that former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett would be added as a special keynote speaker, dozens of masked, purple-haired, and keffiyeh-clad future employees of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network materialized on command, as if beamed down by Montgomery “Scotty” Scott himself. (And much to the amusement of former Poilievre spox Anthony Koch.)

To be in Ottawa during the latest peak in Israel-Hamas tensions, and with Iran’s proxy role now firmly (and expectedly) revealed, was to bear witness to Canada’s utter lack of foreign policy. Once a security council member, now the most middling of middle powers, many Canadians can find faults with governments such as Israel’s, bemoan the humanitarian toll on both sides of an armed border, but acknowledge that when supposed allies to the lone Jewish State, surrounded on all sides, speak out of both sides of their mouths and ignore the tried, tested, and true doctrines of “peace through strength,” additional acts of radicalization and post-national decline are bound to mount and multiply in that vacuum of leadership. This is in Toronto, for goodness sake:

To add to the absurdity and incongruousness of the weekend, while amongst colleagues and Karsh portraits at a historic club overlooking Centre Block, this writer realized that even in an establishment where Jean Chretien is still hosted for lunch, by 9 pm on a Thursday evening, the clientele had been replaced entirely by professionals who supported and attended the Freedom Convoy, and who had no qualms about speaking frankly on the failing Liberal status quo.

All of this is a way of saying, or trying to make explicit, that while the immense disconnect between those in power and the problems they have inflicted upon a once non-terrible nation remains, another phenomenon is now plain to see: the ‘common sense’ conservative dye is firmly in the wash.

Last year while in attendance at CSFN, I wrote about the “right adults in the wrong room”:

Since then, it’s less a question of our better and brightest being displaced, than it is of fresh-faced leaders in wait, who have already been given their marching orders, and who are acting accordingly, and, in some ways self-censoring, knowing that it’s time to manage mistakes, and to not fan any wind into the sails of a Liberal ship that broad-sided an iceberg coming out of its beloved Covid years, flooded its watertight compartments, and has since split in two.