Save young men, save the country

Even still, no issue in Canada is as important as immigration, and no issue has become as volatile.

I too grow old.

Increasingly, I wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Eliot came bearing insights, empathy, and words of warning in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ still seen today as a profound rumination on isolation and alienation, indecision and regret, the passage of time, and the inability to find synchronicity with modern urban life.

A whole century later, I find myself wondering how that poor, beleaguered, out of place, and out of time J. Alfred would have navigated the temporary foreign worker economy.

I wonder about these things — fill my days with them, really — because I now view my job in the political and media sphere as having transformed into something else entirely.

Now too old to be considered young and too young to be considered old, only yesterday did I have my own failures to launch. In my late-teens and twenties I needed to pump gas and detail boats, spend back-breaking hours landscaping, to pile-up more unpaid political internships than Ontario owes in sub-sovereign debt, lose myself being something I’m not on Bay Street, and to bounce off the bottom working lonely nights in telemarketing.

I needed that bounce, to finally use that momentum to achieve enough exit velocity to get back into the orbit of politics, back into writing — and now, increasingly, in front of the camera, and having the honour of an expanded role, expanded work, and an inbox filled with new friends and collaborators far more esteemed and compos mentis than I.

That took time, patience, cheaper rent, and opportunity — over a decade’s worth.

Looking back at that time now, back at Planet Failure to Launch, with all its wasted hours, mawkish displays of self-pity, bad habits, lack of self-confidence, I had no idea how good I actually had it.

Those wasted hours were still a luxury.

I don’t believe the average Canadian understands how bad things now are for our young people.

Let’s assume you didn’t serve in Vietnam or in the Middle East for sake of argument. Take all the growing pains and the self-indulgence we needed to pass through in adolescence and young adulthood in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, even the early 2000s. Blend those together into an Instagram Reel, splice it into an increasingly militantly-offensive algorithm (that’s often also hilarious, who am I kidding), and these kids wouldn’t bat an eye. They wouldn’t relate to it. They couldn’t.

Not only has the modern attention economy and growing up on cheap dopamine dynamics fried the ability to delay gratification or experience novel sensations in far too many, what could they possibly connect to?

Unemployment keeps hitting record highs, without the excuse of a pandemic. Young male unemployment now sits at 22% and continues to climb. When it comes to time, patience, cheaper rent, and opportunity, modern labour market dynamics, and the bane of the common-sense Canadians’ existence, the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (along with similar exploitation and fraud-riddled foreign student and asylum streams), have ensured their time is only being spent on the unemployment line, further delaying those crucial steps into adulthood, and the confidence and social rearing needed more than ever in the context of our increasingly hybrid, android-esque existence, where we spend our days on the medium-sized screen, check the little screen more often than we should, and then return home at night to watch the big screen.

Patience? Both the rise of AI and cheap-labour over-indulgence have suddenly thrown up roadblocks and detours on the pathways they explicitly attended college for. ‘Progress’ is now on fast-forward, and in many ways it feels like anything but.

Cheaper rent? Try living within an hour’s commute of an entry or even mid-level position, suppressed as low as minimum wage thanks to replacement labour dynamics, and paying less than $2000 for a dog-crate apartment. It’s been estimated that to regain the purchasing power of our halcyon days of a country not terrible on purpose, minimum wage would have to be somewhere in the range of $65/hour to keep up with runaway housing costs and inflation.

Liberal-voting boomers may kvetch that the youth they keep pulling up the ladder from just need to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” But what if they’ve been zip-tied around their wrists?

As for opportunity? Not until we send home an estimated 3-5 million visitors — who need to be temporary, as their status explicitly implied — can we offer our present and future any hope of getting a fair shake.

It’s not hard to see why young men in particular are increasingly upset, alienated, and yes, becoming radicalized. Last week, I took issue with a recently-founded organization known as the ‘Dominion Society,’ a group which has set off some red flags behind the scenes in politics among those who see the problem of a group of young and angry men advocating for broad spectrum “remigration.” (They don’t appear to mean just the denizens of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, diploma mill students, or Canada’s asylum claimant fraudsters.)

I don’t begrudge them their hurt. We can all see the conditions that are driving them in this direction. History is littered with lessons that idle hands are the devil’s workshop. The politicians and businesses on the take, who have aided in that tinkering, shouldn’t know sleep or peace until these conditions are ameliorated.

But when the discourse starts careening out of control, and we start blaming, seemingly disproportionately, those who don’t appear as pure as the wind-driven snow, we’re heading for real trouble unless we hold those who are actually responsible — the government, first and foremost — to account.

Here are just a few of the responses I received in my replies for flagging my concerns with this group. (Friend ‘Robin Skies,’ the popular TikTok pseudonym of Canada’s leading young conservative on that app, received a similar litany of barbs, including reprehensible insults about his first-generation fiancé.)

(Tell my second-generation Canadian wife, more hard-working, conscientious, and patriotic than any Brantford Boomer, that she deserves to be “remigrated,” or that she’s “not Canadian,” and I’ll commit one of those “Wild West,” catch-and-release felonies Liberal ‘Justice’ Minister Sean Fraser has been so flippant about.)

• “No surprise, Juno News lol. Right wing has been subverted by Jewish donors, the same ones who pushed mass immigration on western countries. They sent their paid mouthpiece to run cover.”

• “Auslander Raus.”

• “Only traitors help invaders.”

• “Physiognomy checks out.” (Posted my photo.)

• “Who founded Canada, Alex? Heritage Canadians! Not some workers from Asia! With all due respect!” (Hey, at least the due respect was appreciated.)

• “You must address your antiwhiteism. Westernkind exists, as do our nations. Canadians are a nation of Westernkind, the White race.”

• “You’re a traitor Alexander, and I think one day you’ll have to answer for it.”

• “Shut the fuck up you cuck. We need total remigration and only allow white people to migrate here.”

• “Is your thin facial skin from meth or veganism?”

• “We don't want to return to 2014 levels of immigration reform, we want to entirely reverse immigration to the point where we don't have to LOOK at a fucking BROWN ever again. No wonder you are retarded when you literally have BROWN in your name.”

• “All the browns will never been Canadian. We will accept a handful of Chinese that worked through the prairies to the coast but that's it.”

• “We actually want more like 1930s immigration standards. No browns and no fucking jews.”

• “You sound like a rabbi chewed off your foreskin.”

There were hundreds more of these.

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(My latest rant on behalf of our abandoned Canadian workers, at 22:05.)

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If we’ve learned anything from Charlottesville or January 6^th, these words and these coalitions of the easy to rile up and easier to throw the book at, almost always end in half their numbers being feds (if they aren’t already), and become a kind of honeypot for lost souls.

Instead of encouraging the recruiting drive, the urgency has to be to return to something achievable and familiar. That will of course disappoint the extremes of the “remigration” crowd, who increasingly resemble that other end of the horseshoe on the far-left, who also enjoy blaming groups like Jewish cabals for the sins of the world, when the obvious guilty party right now, again, is government, first and foremost.

We’ve never experimented before with so callously leaving two entire generations on a hamster wheel, and now we’re beginning to see where it gets us. When the scraps in the cage are that sparse, “remigration” bilge that ranges beyond clearing out the excess of the last few years — including all to most temps, and our bustling foreign criminal enterprises — risks putting all common-sense changes to immigration at risk.

Those in my replies won’t be getting Cold Rhodesia, let alone even a best-in-the-G7 solution. This is still easily-startled Canada. What we can hope for is the relative 2014 success of the immigration system of Harper, Kenney, and the good doctor Michael Bonner. The latter even advised on the abolition of the very TFWP program he worked on, to his immense credit, after witnessing its potential for future abuse. If only we had heeded his clarion call.

This essential moment to right clear wrongs, to wrestle our population growth back to the ground, to reestablish points, skills, and shared values as non-negotiables to get you into Canada, in reasonable numbers we can support, cannot be co-opted. It’s too important to fail.

There may be those who wish to raid Canadian Tire — yet another ravenous TFWP employer — for tiki torches, but this has to be about nuking a newly-minted exploitation economy from orbit, and having those embers light the way back to the sensible system that existed before he who shall not be named threw it all way.

That’s the job. That’s the fight this September, and beyond. Not just against our enemies, but against the shadows of ourselves.

A non-terrible minister like a Tim Hodgson could help get a single solitary pipeline to market, and that would be much-appreciated by diminished Canadian standards.

But if we don’t dig in on responsible and urgent fixes to immigration, if we don’t launch these kids, and give young men back their upward social responsibility, that’s being shot down by a hail of TFW-militia bullets, fired in freaking Muskoka of all places, bad doesn’t just get worse; this gets downright ugly.

I know that I would have failed under these conditions. I struggle even now with our path forward. Achieving inertia used to mean something more than, “Maybe in a few years we’ll get that family doctor; maybe the housing market will crash for us; maybe they’ll start keeping criminals in jail again.”

We can be honest about how bad this is, or we can continue to lie. Either way, that reckoning is coming. But we get to choose how this ends.

If you share my alarm, if you want to be a part of getting this back on the rails and driving sensible change, your support is most welcome.

The fight never ended, but with September’s arrival it begins anew. Our youth are in crisis. Young men in particular.

Will you help them?

Alexander Brown is the Director of the National Citizens Coalition and its ‘Canadians for Responsible Immigration’ campaign.

On Juno News, he recently hosted shadow immigration critic Michelle Rempel Garner, as well as author, columnist, and trucking expert Gord Magill, to report on the dangerous, immigration-connected fraud networks inside the North American trucking industry.

Over the summer, his immigration and employment advocacy efforts appeared in The Hub, on the airwaves, back in The Hub in collaboration with ‘Project Ontario,’ and in the pages of the Toronto Sun.

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