No country for young men?

Liberal convention plays the gerontocratic, post-national hits.

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.