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There is a type who recurs in political life with such dreary regularity that one begins to suspect he is not an accident but a feature of democratic decline. He appears in different guises—credentialed technocrat, theatrical insurgent, moral lecturer—but is instantly recognizable.

He speaks fluently of justice or grievance, is impeccably networked or artfully anti-establishment, and always arrives wrapped in the reassuring language of public virtue. What unites him is not ideology but insulation. He does not bear the consequences of his convictions.

He is what I have elsewhere called the ‘Revolutionary Gentleman’.

Serious countries make policy from reality.

Declining countries make policy from intention. Canada, with a tone of moral self-congratulation and a frighteningly weak appetite for scrutiny, has begun to prefer the latter. That is the thesis of our current moment. We are increasingly governed by image rather than results, by branding rather than substance, by a political class that performs seriousness while avoiding its burdens.

And because the media and educational institutions now function less as correctives than as amplifiers, the entire system floats free of consequence. Failure is narrated as sophistication. Decline is marketed as maturity. And the public, having been turned from citizens into consumers of political mood, applauds while the national furniture is quietly removed.

The Revolutionary Gentleman can afford to be wrong.

The contractor cannot. The machinist cannot. The small business owner cannot sign both sides of a payroll cheque and then declare arithmetic a social construct.

Risk concentrates the mind. Insulation permits ideology. This is why so much modern political language has the dreamy unreality of a trust-fund manifesto. Economic error, for the insulated, is theoretical. For everyone else, it is dinner, rent, payroll, medication, and a child’s winter boots. The gentleman radical, the polished planner, the moralizing technocrat—all share the same luxury: they can be mistaken at scale without paying for it personally.

One sees this most clearly in the curious reverence recently afforded to Mark Carney’s Davos oration. We were told it was serious, statesmanlike, even historic. But if one asks the most elementary question—what, precisely, was proposed?—the applause dissolves rather quickly. Strip away the cadence, the flattering summaries, the Davos lighting, and what remains is not strategy but atmosphere.

The speech offered the sensation of substance without its burden. It gestured toward Thucydides, toward middle powers, toward shared sovereignty, and toward the collapse of the rules-based order, but nowhere did it name trade-offs, identify enemies plainly, or submit itself to measurable consequences. It was all packaging, but the wrapping covered an empty box.

One left reassured, even impressed, yet strangely unable to identify a single concrete commitment likely to improve the life of an ordinary Canadian.

That, of course, is not a failure of execution. It is the method.

And so we arrive at the modern Canadian absurdity: a political class insulated from consequence, buoyed not by performance but by presentation. We have, quite plainly, a serious accountability problem.

Our current prime minister is a man who inspires confidence with remarkable ease and demonstrates competence with remarkable scarcity. He presides over an economy that, by every meaningful measure, is worse than under his predecessor. Not rhetorically worse.

Not ideologically worse. Empirically worse. Unemployment has ticked upward—though even that flatters reality, because when discouraged workers stop looking for work altogether, they drop out of the labour force and unemployment can perversely appear to improve. Governments, particularly Liberal ones, have long been fond of treating this statistical illusion as a positive indicator. It is not. A discouraged worker vanishing from the data is not a job created.

The deficit has swollen from roughly $45 billion to something near $70 billion. Food inflation—the statistic no citizen can evade because it follows him into the grocery aisle—has risen from roughly 3.2 percent to over 4.1 percent.

And yet, astonishingly, none of this appears to matter. The brand remains intact. The image holds. The narrative persists. One is reminded, irresistibly, of Lenin, who is often credited with observing that capitalists would sell him the rope with which he would hang them. Whether the quotation is authentic hardly matters; the insight is.

Survey the Canadian scene, and one begins to suspect that the rope is not merely being sold, but gift-wrapped, subsidized, and promoted with earnest enthusiasm.

We have built a political ecosystem in which branding eclipses substance, where a figure like Carney can be presented as a technocratic oracle—polished, credentialed, fluent, and yet curiously hollow when judged by outcomes.

This could not happen without a media class that has largely abandoned the adversarial function on which democratic health depends.

The CBC leads this parade with almost devotional consistency, echoed by the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, Global, CTV, and the usual ecosystem of progressive reinforcement. This is not journalism as scrutiny. It is journalism as liturgy.

It does not interrogate power so much as translate it into morally flattering language for public consumption. When Carney treads ground that would, under another name, be denounced as conservative heresy, the metamorphosis is instantaneous. If he counsels restraint, it becomes stewardship. If he nods to private investment, it becomes sustainable. If he dares utter the word productivity, it is rebaptized as morally laundered pragmatism. The substance does not change.

Only the packaging does. What we possess is not a media ecosystem but a pandering pedagogical advocacy machine—one that does not ask whether something works, but instructs the public on how it ought to feel about it.

If Lenin were to rise—still faintly smirking in his Moscow mausoleum—one suspects he would not be alarmed by the Canadian condition.

On the contrary, he might admire it. “You have done splendidly,” he might say. “Your useful idiots require no coercion at all.” That is the truly unsettling part. There is no need for force where illusion is so willingly embraced.

The electorate is no longer functioning in the classical democratic sense as a body of citizens judging performance. It is functioning as a market segment consuming narrative. We do not so much vote now as identify. We do not evaluate so much as an affiliate. The politician no longer leads; he brands. The voter no longer examines; he consumes.

That deformation is intensified by an educational system that has ceased, in large part, to distinguish inquiry from advocacy. After fifteen years inside the university system, I can say without hesitation that large parts of the humanities have become polemical workshops masquerading as scholarship. Disagreement is treated not as the beginning of thought but as a moral defect.

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In some surveys, 90 percent of faculty and students in certain disciplines identify as left-wing. Under such conditions, orthodoxy is not enforced by argument but by atmosphere. Students are not taught how to think; they are taught which conclusions will keep them in good standing.

The results are visible everywhere. Ask for a coherent argument on a contentious issue—Israel, for example—and one is not met with evidence, but with slogans: colonialism, genocide, apartheid, repeated with ritualistic certainty and intellectual vacancy. Press further.

Ask for definitions, causal chains, historical grounding, and competing facts. The argument dissolves almost instantly into faculty-manufactured word salad. The phrases are memorized; the thinking is absent. This is not education. It is conditioning. It produces precisely the kind of electorate now on display: brand consumers, emotionally fluent, morally theatrical, economically illiterate, and easily managed by well-tailored emptiness.

This is why the accountability crisis matters so much. Once a population ceases to demand results, it becomes extraordinarily easy to govern badly and extraordinarily difficult to correct course. The role of opposition is accountability.

Yet in Canada, we increasingly hear the ludicrous suggestion that criticism of the governing party is itself somehow improper, as though the opposition’s duty were to nod solemnly while the country deteriorates. When debates devolve into whether one has the right to oppose at all, the system has begun to eat itself. What remains is not governance but managed perception.

And in such an environment, politicians behave exactly as rational actors would. They cross the floor, shift positions, abandon principles, and borrow yesterday’s heresies so long as the rebranding is clean enough.

Carney now markets sober wisdom ideas that have long been mocked, delayed, or denounced by the Liberal ecosystem. But he does so without admitting error, without reckoning with the consequences of past policy, and without risking the coalition that depends on euphemism. This is not leadership. It is laundering. The bottle is elegant; the water is the same.

The danger, then, is not merely bad policy, though there is plenty of that. The greater danger is civic indifference to bad policy so long as it is attractively narrated.

Fragility in political systems rarely announces itself dramatically. It appears first as a soft tolerance for decline, a willingness to accept worsening outcomes provided they are accompanied by the right tone, the right branding, the right accredited face. That is where Canada now seems to be: governed by presentation, narrated by advocacy, and buffered from revolt by a public taught to consume politics as mood.

The Revolutionary Gentleman thrives in such a country.

He can moralize without producing, posture without sacrificing, and fail without consequence. But reality, unlike media ecosystems and university seminars, does not remain suspended in euphemism forever. Debt eventually arrives. Productivity eventually matters. Inflation eventually bites. Investment eventually leaves. Arithmetic, that most unromantic of political opponents, always returns.

And that is the final point. Dreams are not capital. Aspirations are not productivity. Virtue is not an economic strategy. A country cannot redistribute what it does not first create. Ignore incentives long enough, and they do not disappear; they retaliate. Investment hesitates. Talent relocates. Growth slows. Revenues disappoint. And the arithmetic—treated for years as a nuisance, an ideological inconvenience, a dreary interruption to moral theatre—returns with the patience of winter.

Canada does not lack speeches. It lacks truth. Until it relearns the difference between eloquence and thought, between branding and governance, between advocacy and scrutiny, it will continue applauding its own managed decline.

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Thirty years ago, had one risen in a university seminar to announce that biological sex was a provisional label, that an inner feeling could overrule material reality, that hard gender categories were merely a social fiction, and that dissent from this doctrine constituted punishable harm, one would not have been investigated.

One would have been correct…

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This is the syrupy treacle flooding X—funded, naturally, by your taxes. Not merely cloying, but faintly sinister; “cringe,” as the children have it.

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Carney is auditioning for the role of wartime prime minister—trade war, in this case—because nothing corrals a nervous public like a manufactured emergency. Frighten the children, and they’ll run back to their father.

Strip away the theatre and the motive is embarrassingly plain: a trade war is not a policy—it’s a campaign strategy.

As to his “Canada is worth fighting for?”

Yes. No kidding. So is peanut butter. So is cheap internet. So are dog-waste bags that open without a struggle. The fact that something is broadly agreeable does not make it meaningful, though it does make it extremely useful as a slogan.

It is, in fact, a perfect sentence. Not because it is profound, but because it is unassailable. It contains no policy, no cost and no measurable claim. It asks nothing of the speaker and risks nothing in return. It is all tone, all sentiment—language sanded down until it offers no edge to grasp.

And that, increasingly, is the point.

There is something faintly unsettling—call it Big Brother-lite—about this style of politics. Not the crude authoritarianism of Orwell’s world, with its boots and batons, but something softer, more modern, and in some ways more effective. Politics of mood. Of managed feelings. Of language that does not instruct or persuade so much as envelop and pre-empt.

Big Brother, after all, was not merely feared. He was curated. A presence. A face. A steady, reassuring stream of simplified truths delivered in a tone designed to eliminate friction. You did not argue with Big Brother. You absorbed him.

We are not living in that world. But one recognizes the aesthetic.

Watch the language closely. It is broad, emotional, and frictionless. “Worth fighting for.” “Standing together.” “Resilient.” These are not arguments; they are atmospheres. They do not clarify—they displace. One leaves the message with a vague sense that something important has been said, and a distinct inability to recall what it was.

It is politics as ambient sound—pleasant, continuous, and carefully stripped of anything that might interrupt it.

This is not entirely new. Every era produces its clichés. But what is striking now is the degree of refinement. The modern political figure can speak at length while committing to almost nothing, and can occupy space without leaving a trace. It is less rhetoric than presence—the projection of authority without the inconvenience of specificity.

One sees it again in the curious repackaging of “forward guidance.” Presented now not merely as a technical instrument, but as a kind of governing disposition—a continuous stream of calibrated reassurance. There is even, in the telling, a faint suggestion of authorship, as though this were something newly minted rather than long established.

It is not. The concept predates its current custodian by decades. It has been used, refined, and occasionally mishandled by others long before. Its record is mixed. And yet here it returns, polished and reintroduced—not as policy, but as persona.

This is where the unease deepens.

Because the figure at the centre of it all does not argue so much as appear. He cycles through roles with a kind of frictionless competence: technocrat, schoolmaster, national comforter. Each sentence lands softly, like a hand placed on the shoulder. Nothing jars. Nothing commits. Nothing binds him to anything that could later be tested against reality.

There was a telling moment at a recent gathering. Asked what they admired, a young supporter—half-laughing, but not entirely—offered a single word: “Daddy.”

It was received as a joke. It was not entirely one.

Because it captures something that the more polished language obscures. This is not merely a politics of persuasion. It is a politics of reassurance—of managed dependence. The figure is not asked to explain, justify, or even persuade. He is there to steady, to soothe, to occupy the role.

Big Brother demanded obedience. The modern variant is gentler, more paternal. Less a figure looming over the citizen than a presence one leans into. A kind of warm, steadying authority—familiar, undemanding, and carefully curated. For many voters, particularly those who prize stability and calm above disruption, it can feel like a kind of political comfort: a reassuring voice, a steady cadence, a promise—implicit rather than stated—that nothing too jarring will be required.

There is, in this, a quiet inversion of the Churchillian model. Churchill used language to clarify—to name dangers, to demand sacrifice, to prepare a population for the cost of survival. The modern variant uses language to diffuse—to soften, to reassure, to create the impression of resolve without its burdens. One rallies not around a plan, but around a phrase.

Yes. Of course it is. Which is precisely why the line works. It invites agreement while avoiding responsibility. It produces unity without requiring direction.

The unsettling part is not that such language exists. It always has. The unsettling part is how completely it now fills the space where something more demanding ought to be.

Because in the absence of clarity, tone becomes policy. In the absence of action, presence becomes achievement.

And the audience—accustomed now to being spoken to in this way—responds as expected. The message is received, the feeling is registered, the moment passes. Nothing has been decided. Nothing has been risked.

And yet, somehow, it feels like leadership.

That is the craft.

And that is the part that should give us pause.

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I wrote and arranged three songs for this. Plus one for my wife. I am not going to quit my day job (I don’t have a day job, I was fired) for songwriting, no worries. :)

My 19-year-old daughter is unimpressed, but she likes Drake, and that guy is off-key, autotuned massively and uses the F* word and the N* word every third word.

One called “Jerusalem” merges the Blake poem and Psalm 137.

Two, “Stand My Ground” tells the story of being threatened and fighting back.

Three, called “Vultures” (I don’t like the name, but can’t seem to change it.)

This focuses more on the defamation.

Four, called the Girl from Novgorod, when my Russian wife, after years of effort, became a neurologist in Canada; this is for her. So proud of her and love her.

Introduction — Who I Am and Why This Exists at All

Before getting into strategy, it’s worth knowing who this is coming from—and why I’m writing it.

I’m 61 years old. I’m not a professional investor, and I’ve never managed anyone’s money but my own.

At the moment, I’m essentially self-employed. My income comes from three places:

• my Substack (which, realistically, pays about what a part-time job at McDonald’s would)

• the trading I’m going to describe in this piece

• and a farm I own, which produces crop income once a year

That’s it.

I’m not fabulously wealthy. You’re not going to see photos of me on a private jet, in a Lamborghini, or performing success in some tropical setting.

This is something else entirely:

becoming wealthy over time, not trying to become rich overnight

It’s about:

• slow accumulation

• discipline

• avoiding large mistakes

• and building something stable

I live in a normal five-bedroom house in a subdivision that looks like every other subdivision. My wife drives a minivan. I drive an overpriced Mercedes. My daughter drives a 16-year-old car.

We’re ordinary.

A note for my regular readers

If you follow me on Substack, this may feel like a strange detour.

I usually write about:

• anti-Semitism

• history

• cultural analysis

• political commentary

This is different.

Now I’m writing about momentum investing.

I’m not starting a separate Substack for it. If there’s no interest, I’ll stop. If people find it useful, I’ll continue.

A bit of background

Until late 2023, I was a sessional lecturer at the University of Guelph-Humber.

That ended after a controversy tied to comments I made online. I’m not going to relitigate that here.

What matters is this:

I came to this out of necessity—not curiosity.

I’m not under any illusion that I’m going to make millions doing this. But it is contributing meaningfully to my income and helping pay real-world expenses.

I have an MBA from Schulich and have passed my Canadian Securities Course 1 and 2. I just picked up the book on those and didn’t take a course. On investing, I am rather self-taught, and I have no credentials as a financial advisor.

A word on results (and expectations)

I’ve been doing this for over two years—this isn’t something I tried last month.

Using portfolio tracking tools like Wealthica, my results have generally shown:

• low risk profiles

• consistently strong performance ratings

In some comparisons, my portfolio has ranked in the top percentile relative to major managers and benchmarks.

That does not mean:

• this will continue

• this is repeatable for everyone

• or that there is any guarantee going forward

But it does mean this:

I’m not guessing, and I’m not completely incompetent at this.

What this is—and what it isn’t

No one is paying me to say any of this.

I’m not sponsored. I’m not selling a course. I’m not managing money.

I started my Substack with 14 subscribers—mostly students, some of whom mocked it.

It’s now around 2,300.

This is simply an extension of that:

what I’ve been doing, plainly and honestly

A simple boundary

I’m not interested in debating this endlessly.

If you think the approach is flawed, that’s fine—don’t use it.

If you think it’s useful, take what you can from it.

If you’re subscribing to my Substack later, it’s about $8 a month. If you don’t think it’s worth it, save your money.

With that out of the way, the only thing that matters is the framework.

Some Definitions

What is Margin Investing?

Margin investing is simply borrowing money from your brokerage to invest beyond your own cash. Your portfolio acts as collateral, and the brokerage determines how much you can borrow based on what you own. Safer, more liquid stocks typically allow more borrowing; riskier ones allow less. The amount available to you is not fixed—it rises when your portfolio rises and contracts when it falls.

This is where the danger lies.

Margin amplifies risk in subtle yet unforgiving ways. When your investments decline, two things happen at once: your equity shrinks, and your borrowing capacity shrinks with it. If that decline crosses certain thresholds, you trigger a margin call—a demand from your brokerage to restore your account by either depositing cash or selling positions. If you don’t act, they will act for you. And they will do so without regard for timing, price, or your long-term view.

This is how losses become permanent. Not because you were wrong—but because you were forced to be wrong at exactly the wrong moment.

Add to this the cost of borrowing—typically 4–6% depending on currency—and margin introduces something most investors underestimate: pressure. It removes your ability to wait indefinitely. It introduces a clock.

Used carefully, however, margin can be a useful tool. It allows you to deploy more capital across diversified positions, increasing the number of opportunities for small, repeatable gains. In a system built on discipline—rather than prediction—it can enhance returns meaningfully. Dividends and realized gains can help offset borrowing costs, and over time, the additional exposure can compound results.

But only under one condition: restraint.

Margin works best when it is available but not fully used—when it acts as a buffer, not a bet. The moment it becomes central to your survival, you’ve crossed from investing into dependency.

What is Momentum Investing?

Momentum investing is the practice of buying stocks that are already moving upward and expecting that movement to continue, at least for a time.

It rests on a simple, observable fact: markets are not perfectly rational in the short term. Investor behaviour—confidence, momentum, fear of missing out—tends to push trends further than fundamentals alone would justify.

Rather than trying to predict reversals or find the “perfect” undervalued stock, momentum investing does something more modest: it joins existing movement.

You are not trying to be early.

You are trying to be aligned.

This is not day trading. Positions may last weeks or months. The edge comes not from prediction, but from discipline—entering without emotion and exiting without hesitation.

What are Limit Sell Orders?

A limit sell order is an instruction to automatically sell a stock when it reaches a predetermined price.

Example:

• Buy at $100

• Set sell orders at:

  • $108

  • $112

  • $118

When the stock hits those levels, portions of your position are sold automatically.

This is the core of a gain-harvesting strategy.

Limit sell orders:

• remove emotion from selling

• eliminate hesitation

• ensure profits are taken when available

Instead of watching the market and deciding in the moment, you decide in advance. The market then executes for you.

You are not trying to catch the top.

You are trying to consistently capture gains.

What are Stop-Loss Orders?

A stop-loss order is the counterpart to a limit sell. It is designed to protect against losses by automatically selling a stock if its price falls to a certain level.

Example:

• Buy at $100

• Set stop-loss at $90

If the stock drops to $90, it sells.

In theory, this limits downside risk. In practice, it introduces trade-offs:

• stocks can briefly dip, trigger the stop, and then recover

• You can be forced out of positions prematurely

• excessive use can reduce overall returns

Some investors rely on them heavily. Others, particularly those holding diversified, smaller positions, prefer to manage risk through position sizing and discipline.

The important thing is consistency:

Either use them deliberately, or accept the risk of not using them—but don’t drift between the two.

How It All Fits Together

The system, at its simplest, looks like this:

• Use momentum to identify stocks already moving

• Use margin carefully to increase exposure

• Use limit sell orders to take profits automatically

• Optionally use stop-loss orders to manage downside risk

• Reinvest gains and dividends continuously

Over time, the goal is not perfection.

It is repetition.

Small gains, taken consistently.

Losses managed, not eliminated.

Emotion reduced, not indulged.

Final Thought

There is nothing magical in any of this.

Margin is not a shortcut.

Momentum is not a guarantee.

Orders are not protection from error.

What matters is the structure—and the discipline to follow it, especially when it becomes uncomfortable.

Because it will.

Chapter I — Structure Before Strategy

Let’s start with what most people ignore:

I am not a licensed financial advisor, and this is not financial advice.

It’s simply what I do.

Step one: get the structure right

Before buying a single stock:

1. Open a non-registered account

   • Not a TFSA

   • Not an RRSP

2. Enable margin (if appropriate)

   • This allows borrowing against your portfolio

   • It introduces real risk

3. Understand taxation

   • Capital gains are taxable

   • You will need to report them

Keep your costs at zero

You should not be paying:

• per trade

• for execution

Platforms like Wealthsimple make this easy in Canada.

Fees quietly erode returns.

One rule that overrides everything

If you don’t understand it, don’t buy it.

That’s why I avoid:

• options

• derivatives

• complex structures

Where I do spend money

I don’t pay for advisors.

I do pay for research:

• Morningstar (primary)

• Seeking Alpha (secondary)

Roughly $150/month combined.

Wealth vs. getting rich

This is not about:

• fast money

• lucky timing

It’s about:

• consistency

• patience

• accumulation

The principle that matters most

Day-to-day movements are noise.

What matters is the trend over time.

THE ELEVATOR

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I remember grade four at Crane Elementary in Fort Garry, Manitoba, when my French teacher, Mrs. Payette, strode into the classroom like a minor emissary of the federal state.

She had a splendidly French name and an uncompromising Scottish brogue.

Her English arrived in sharp Highland cadences; her French followed obediently behind, wearing the same tart…

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There exists a concept in political discourse—bloodlessly termed the Overton window—which describes the range of ideas a society considers acceptable to express. One might think of it more simply as the invisible boundary between what can be said without consequence and what cannot. Outside the window lies the unthinkable; inside it, the merely controve…

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Walk into a toy store with a five-year-old. He sees the electric train set—sleek, fast, glowing under glass—and instantly: I want it. I want it. I want it. Price tag? Five hundred dollars. Doesn’t matter. He has no concept of budgets, trade-offs, or affordability. Desire is the argument.

Now scale that up to a country.

The toy is Alto: high-speed rail fro…

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Is this still a democracy in any meaningful sense? And if it is, why should any Canadian bother to vote?

We already have four MPs who have crossed the floor. Now, according to multiple sources openly discussed, as many as nine more are in conversations about doing the same.

From four… to thirteen.

That is not politics as usual. That is the potential rewriting of an election after it has already happened.

And it sits atop a system that is already stretched thin. In Canada, MPs vote with their party roughly 99.6 to 99.7 percent of the time. Congress in the US? A little over 90%.

So our MPs are not independent actors in any real sense. They are whipped votes. Predictable. Programmed. The PMO’s office has the real power.

So what are you choosing when you vote? A representative—or a relay switch?

And now we are told that even that switch is portable.

Because after the election, your MP can simply walk across the floor and carry your vote with them.

We are told this is principle.

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But listen to how at least one of these decisions has been described. Strip away the language, and it sounds less like statesmanship and more like a schoolyard - where a kid doesn’t get enough attention in their social clique, so they switch to another.

Indeed, ex-Liberal MP Gladu’s departure was nothing more than a hissy fit with a stench of inducement: “I was overlooked. I deserved better,” she complained.

That’s not a constitutional moment. That’s a playground.

And yet, if four becomes thirteen, that playground logic is enough to reshape who governs the country.

Not through voters. Not through a new mandate. Through movement.

And here is the point nobody wants to confront.

Where is the mechanism to examine what drives that movement?

Where is the mechanism to uncover whether enticements exist—whether access, benefits, future roles, or advantages are discussed, implied, or offered?

There isn’t one. None. No automatic review. No requirement to disclose. No obligation to return to voters.

A system already defined by near-total party control now allows post-election realignment with no transparency at all.

We are told not to speculate. But we are also given no way to know.

And that is the problem.

Because if, in three or four years, these same floor crossers emerge into well-placed, well-paid roles connected to government appointments, positions, influence—what will we be told then?

Is that a coincidence?

Or will we finally admit what it looks like?

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Because at that point, the implication is unavoidable: political appointments may already be for sale. And that should never happen in a democracy.

This is what a weakening democracy looks like. Not a sudden collapse, but a quiet erosion. A system where the voter’s choice is provisional, where outcomes shift after the fact, and where there is no mechanism to examine why.

The alarm bells should be ringing. They should be deafening.

Instead, the alarm bells are muffled—smothered beneath a polite haze of distraction—while the only sound we register is the cheerful ding of the next political toy. A sleek, Euro-chic choo-choo glides in, promising elegance and modernity, quietly demanding massive subsidies per ride.

Meanwhile, voters indulge the fantasy that Canada might somehow “join the EU,” a notion the Liberals are only too happy to encourage. Perhaps Regina, newly imagined as a European outpost, can adopt the hauteur of well-coiffed Parisians, sipping cappuccinos on the Champs-Élysées.

Oh yes, it looks impressive. It sounds sophisticated. It feels like progress.

And all the while, something far more fundamental is being lost.

Because this is not a small thing.

If your vote can be reassigned after the election—if four can become thirteen, and thirteen can reshape who governs—then what exactly did your vote accomplish?

And if the honest answer is “very little,” then why vote at all?

Why participate in a system where the real decisions happen afterward, out of sight, beyond your reach?

We are told the next election will fix it.

But a democracy that only works later is not a democracy.

It is drift.

And that drift is not neutral. It is directional. It is drifting toward one-party dominance, toward a concentration of power that increasingly resembles authoritarianism rather than democracy.

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I’ve said in previous essays that Canada—so rich in agriculture, forestry, minerals, oil, and gas, and blessed with safe borders—is a country with the body of a Ferrari and the brain of a Mattel toy.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the quality of people we elect to Parliament: handsome, athletic, photogenic, good at paddling boats—and apparently un…

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At a recent Liberal Party convention—highlighted by National Post Columnist Terry Newman1—a slide was presented proposing that Canada reduce its trade with the United States to roughly 50 percent.

Not floated. Not debated. Presented.

And in a room filled with the nation’s self-appointed stewards of policy and intellect, not one person rose—politely or otherwise—to observe that the numbers do not, in any recognizable universe, add up.

Let us begin with the charitable assumption. No one, not even in our more experimental corners of governance, is proposing to deliberately sabotage trade with the United States. To do so would be to replace a functioning circulatory system with interpretive dance. Supply chains would snap, exports would collapse, and jobs would vanish with admirable efficiency.

So if the American share is not to be reduced by force, it must be diluted by expansion elsewhere.

And here, regrettably, we collide with arithmetic.

Canada presently sends roughly 75 percent of its exports south of the border. The remaining 25 percent goes everywhere else combined—the vast, teeming remainder of the planet. To transform that ratio into a tidy 50–50 split without shrinking the American side, the rest of the world must rise from 25 to 75.

It must, in other words, triple.

This is not a matter for econometric modelling or the hushed incantations of central bankers. It is not even a problem requiring a calculator. It is the sort of thing that, in a more rigorous age, would have been dispatched by a mildly attentive twelve-year-old.

And yet the slide was shown. The room nodded. The conversation proceeded.

Now, one might forgive an error in calculation. What is more difficult to excuse is the complete absence of that small internal alarm—the one that activates when someone suggests that three times 328 is 4,050 and expects applause for the insight. You may not know the exact answer, but you know—instinctively, almost physically—that something has gone terribly wrong.

That instinct appears to have been retired.

We are not speaking here of marginal adjustments or incremental diversification. We are speaking of taking an already vast export base—hundreds of billions of dollars—and inflating it by two hundred percent, as if markets were balloons and policy makers possessed the requisite breath.

There is no modern precedent for this. Developed economies will not simply will a tripling of external trade with new partners into existence, particularly while maintaining their primary relationship intact. Geography, infrastructure, supply chains—these are stubborn, unfashionable facts.

Yet the idea is offered. It is received. It enters circulation as something like seriousness.

And this is where the problem ceases to be economic and becomes civilizational.

Because this was not a gathering of eccentrics or passersby. This was a room of professionals—politicians, advisors, strategists, and those who intend to govern. And still, no one asked the most elementary question in public life:

How?

At that point, one is no longer dealing with policy failure, but with the quiet evaporation of numeracy. Not advanced mathematics—no one is demanding differential equations—but the basic capacity to recognize when scale has been abandoned and proportion ignored.

You do not need a doctorate to see it. You need only to grasp that if 75 is to become half of something, the rest must grow to meet it.

And if that simple fact can pass unchallenged, then the guardrails are gone. Trade can be “rebalanced” by aspiration. Economic unions to which we are geographically and politically ineligible can be discussed as if awaiting our RSVP. Vast infrastructure projects can be waved through on the strength of sentiment and PowerPoint.

Reality, in short, becomes advisory.

Now let us indulge the fantasy—briefly—that such a transformation were possible. That Canada could, by declaration, triple its non-American trade. This would not be ambitious; it would be miraculous. There is no recorded instance of a developed economy achieving anything of the sort without first tearing down large portions of its own internal structure.

And let us not forget: we cannot even manage free trade within our own borders.

Interprovincial barriers remain stubbornly intact—despite Mark Carney’s confident assurances that he would have that particular nuisance resolved by the summer of 2025.

The deadline passed. The barriers did not.

The press, meanwhile, appears to have misplaced the entire episode—no doubt distracted by more photogenic pursuits: a well-timed jog, a borrowed line from Havel, or another enthusiastic mangling of Thucydides, who by now must be rotating in his grave at a speed sufficient to generate electricity.

One is left to admire the scale of the ambition—if not the acquaintance with reality required to sustain it.

And that, inconveniently, is the point.

Trade is not something governments “do” to one another over canapés and memoranda. It is conducted by private actors—firms, investors, producers—who make rational decisions about costs, proximity, regulation, and profit. The much-advertised memoranda of understanding, which seem to send certain commentators into a state of near-erotic excitement, are, in economic terms, little more than polite letters of intent. They do not compel trade. They do not create markets. They do not cause a Saskatchewan farmer or an Ontario manufacturer to redirect decades-long supply chains simply because a minister has shaken hands in Brussels or Beijing.

If one truly wished to engineer such a shift, one would have to do something far more radical—and far less congenial to the current political temperament. One would have to open the economy. Fully.

Nearly half of Canadian industry remains, in one form or another, hermetically sealed from the vulgar intrusion of competition—cushioned by tariffs, quotas, regulatory hedgerows, and that soft, suffocating paternalism in which the state takes such proprietary pride. Supply management endures like a protected species; telecoms operate as an oligopoly with the manners of a cartel; banking is concentrated to the point of ritual; airlines are insulated from the indignity of real rivalry.

If one were serious—truly serious—about inviting the world to trade with us at scale, one would have to begin by dismantling this cozy architecture. That would mean ending supply management and, not incidentally, relieving Canadians of the peculiar national burden of paying extortionate prices for mediocre cheese—a culinary indignity elevated, by policy, into a patriotic obligation.

Even interprovincial trade—within the same country, under the same flag—remains encumbered by barriers that would embarrass a minor customs union.

And yet we are to believe that, without dismantling any of this, we will somehow persuade the rest of the world to triple its commercial engagement with us.

Unless, of course, we are contemplating a sudden conversion to a rather Trumpian species of mercantilism—directing trade flows by fiat, subsidizing preferred industries, and compelling outcomes by political decree. One suspects this is not quite what is being proposed. Or, more precisely, not what is understood to be proposed.

Because the alternative is obvious: if you want others to trade with you at scale, you must allow them to compete with you at scale. You must open markets, invite pressure, and accept the consequences. You must, in short, abandon the very protectionism and managerial paternalism that have long been features—one might say comforts—of the Canadian model.

I, for one, would welcome it. Let competition loose. Dismantle the cartels. End the quiet monopolies. If the ambition is genuine, then by all means—let us have at it.

But somehow, one suspects this is not the ambition at all.

It is, rather, the economic equivalent of a child confronted with numbers and deciding—on grounds of pure feeling—that one of them ought to be larger.

No mechanism, no process, no comprehension—merely the assertion, delivered with confidence and received with applause.

And here, dear reader, the fog begins to lift. Is it any wonder that voters, marinated in this atmosphere of arithmetic-free aspiration, now express a touching enthusiasm for joining the European Union? An enterprise to which Mr. Carney, while stopping just short of formal advocacy, has nonetheless attached himself in that peculiarly modern fashion—drawn less by feasibility than by its agreeable aura: aspirational, continental, and, above all, not American. One imagines visions of longer-lasting baguettes dancing in their heads, perhaps even bread that expires at a more civilized pace.

The same instinct produces an eager appetite for grand continental rail schemes—the sleek, whizzy European choo-choo trains—admired for their aesthetics, their symbolism, their promise of arrival somewhere vaguely superior.

What is never asked—what must never be asked—is the vulgar question of cost. How much, exactly, will each journey require in subsidy? (Hint: north of a thousand dollars per ticket.)

And so we arrive at the true difficulty. When an electorate becomes incurious, innumerate, and faintly bored by the discipline of reality—when its highest political virtue is not judgment but enthusiasm—then the field is ceded to those who can best traffic in mood. The successful politician becomes not the master of execution, but the curator of aspiration, the impresario of vibe.

That, I’m afraid, is not much of a democracy.

Canada trades heavily with the United States because it is efficient, proximate, and deeply integrated. That is not a policy error. It is a fact of life—rather like gravity, only with more paperwork. One may diversify at the margins, cautiously and over time. One does not, by declaration, triple non-U.S. trade from an already enormous base.

At some point, someone in the room ought to have said so.

That they did not tells us rather more than the proposal itself.

I confess I come to this as a man of letters rather than numbers—an English degree, followed by the regrettable indulgence of a master’s in the same. I am, by training, precisely the sort of person who should be kept well away from national accounting.

And yet, here I am, obliged to point out that 25 cannot become 75 without consequence.

There is an old Groucho Marx line about declining membership in any club that would have him. One feels a similar hesitation here. When it falls to the literary class to correct the arithmetic of the governing class, it is not a sign of unexpected brilliance. It is a sign that the standard has sunk.

We have, after all, seen this before. Not long ago, an entire Parliament rose in ovation for a gentleman introduced as a war hero who had “fought the Russians”—a detail that, had it been subjected to even the faintest historical scrutiny, would have revealed that the Russians were, at that particular moment, on our side. By a simple process of elimination, one arrived at a rather uncomfortable conclusion.

That episode was dismissed as an unfortunate oversight. But it was, in truth, diagnostic.

And this, I’m afraid, belongs in the same category.

When basic arithmetic no longer constrains political ambition—when scale, proportion, and reality itself are treated as optional extras—democracy does not function as advertised. It becomes something looser, more impressionistic, governed less by fact than by tone.

And in such a system, it scarcely matters what we choose to call it.

Because a democracy that cannot count is, in the end, counting on very little at all.

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Warning: Reading the following slide may have damaging effects on your IQ.

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1) Start with the real capital cost

The headline budget is often cited as around $90 billion.

But large infrastructure projects—especially rail projects—consistently run over budget. A conservative multiplier is about 1.7×.

$90B × 1.7 ≈ $153 billion

Round it: $150 billion total cost

2) Financing the project

Assume:

Interest rate: 3.4%

Amortization: 20 years

Annual financing cost:

👉 ~$10.5 billion per year

3) Ridership (generous assumption)

Current corridor:

~5 million passengers/year

Boost it by 1.5×:

👉 7.5 million passengers/year

This is already optimistic.

4) Revenue

Assume:

$200 average ticket

Revenue:

👉 7.5M × $200 = $1.5 billion/year

5) Operating costs

Using conservative global benchmarks:

~$100 per passenger (a reader more informed than I told me that VIA said in its annual report that its average cost was $193, so I am underestimating).

Total:

👉 7.5M × $100 = $750 million/year

6) Total cost vs revenue

Annual costs:

Capital: $10.5B

Operating: $0.75B 👉 Total: ~$11.25B

Revenue:

$1.5B

7) The subsidy

Shortfall:

👉 $9.75 billion per year

Per passenger:

👉 $9.75B ÷ 7.5M $1,300 per passenger

The Bottom Line

Even with generous assumptions, you don’t get a small gap.

You get a structural subsidy in the range of:

👉 ~$1,000+ per passenger

And that’s before reality pushes costs higher or ridership lower.

What That Actually Means (Put in Real Terms)

For roughly $1,000 per passenger, the government could:

Rent each traveller a Mercedes-Benz

Pay for the fuel from Toronto to Montreal

Let them stop at The Keg Steakhouse + Bar and spend $200 on a full meal

And still hand them the remaining cash

…and the taxpayer would be in roughly the same financial position as funding this train.

That’s not rhetoric.

That’s the arithmetic.

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President Trump is making a big new bet on a dangerous partner: Pakistan. His administration is relying on Islamabad as a behind-the-scenes player in Iran and Gaza diplomacy, even though Pakistan helped build Iran’s nuclear program and long backed jihadist groups that killed Americans.

In January 2026, Pakistan’s foreign ministry announced that the country would join Trump’s “Board of Peace,” originally launched to work on Gaza. Pakistani officials have confirmed they are relaying a U.S. 15-point ceasefire and peace proposal from Washington to Tehran, and they have publicly offered to host direct U.S.–Iran talks in Islamabad.

On the surface, Trump’s move fits a familiar pattern of post-9/11 U.S. realpolitik: lean on “problem allies” such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Pakistan as intermediaries -- with the very Islamist currents they helped to fund, arm, or shelter. But Pakistan is not just another unsavoury partner. It is the state whose proliferation network quietly accelerated Iran’s bomb quest, and whose security services incubated the Taliban–Al Qaeda nexus that drew the United States into its longest war.

How, then, did Pakistan end up as a broker in Trump’s Tehran and Gaza diplomacy? And what does it mean that Washington is again outsourcing high-stakes diplomacy bets to a country that’s shown no signs of reforming?

Any honest accounting has to start with A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani metallurgist who built a clandestine proliferation network that supplied Iran and others with nuclear materials, designs, and expertise. Open-source investigations, U.S. and European analyses, and think-tank reporting have long detailed the Pakistan–Iran connection, from centrifuge designs to sensitive components.

Islamabad insists Khan acted alone. Yet U.S. and European assessments, as well as work by the Washington Institute and the Institute for Science and International Security, strongly suggest that elements of Pakistan’s military and nuclear establishment almost certainly knew of, and in some cases facilitated, his activities. The problem was not just a rogue scientist; it was a state ecosystem that tolerated and exploited his proliferation side hustle.

Washington never forced real responsibility.

The United States accepted a finagled “confession,” allowed Pakistan to keep tight control over access to Khan, and effectively shut the case.

The nuclear file is only half the story. Pakistan also spent decades incubating jihadist actors such as the Taliban and the Haqqani Network inside a broader Al Qaeda–Taliban nexus, that took root in Pakistani tribal areas after 2001.

As analysts at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and others have documented, Islamabad’s long-standing ties to these groups, and its use of militant proxies in Afghanistan and Kashmir, did not evaporate after 9/11.

A 2002 Cato Institute analysis argued that the Bush administration effectively traded Pakistan’s selective cooperation in the “War on Terror” for a “see-no-evil” approach to Islamabad’s dealings with extremists. The United States received some targeting and intelligence against selected groups, while Pakistan preserved its jihadist infrastructure.

A decade later, a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee report in May 2011 was still flagging live connections between Islamist networks and Pakistani military and intelligence services. Three weeks earlier, U.S. Navy SEALs had killed Osama bin Laden in his walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan—an operation that humiliated Pakistan’s generals but never triggered a deep public house-cleaning over how the world’s most-wanted terrorist lived for years under their noses.

The pattern persisted well into the 2010s and 2020s. Cato and Brookings analysts in 2018 described Pakistan’s “double game,” noting its persistent acquiescence to safe havens for the Afghan Taliban and its Haqqani branch. The Council on Foreign Relations’ Global Conflict Tracker has likewise highlighted ongoing Pakistani military support for the Haqqani network, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and other militant proxies.

UN Security Council monitoring reports and UN-linked field analysis suggest these jihadist and insurgent networks were not dismantled after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, but instead shifted across the Afghanistan–Pakistan frontier, re-establishing sanctuaries under Taliban rule.

In February 2026, however, Pakistan suddenly declared “open war” on the Taliban regime, after lethal cross-border attacks, launching airstrikes on Kabul and other provinces. That escalation was less proof of a cleansed security environment than evidence of blowback from years of double-dealing. It certainly, though, could have been sold to U.S. policy-makers as “progress” or a “good step forward,” at least optically.

All of this intersects with the nuclear file. The joint U.S.–Israeli strikes that “decapitated” Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025 disrupted infrastructure and timelines. They did not, however, erase in its totality Iranian nuclear expertise, documents, or potential covert stocks of material.

Here Pakistan matters again. A state that once helped midwife Iran’s bomb program, and whose own strategic community has learned how to exploit proliferation grey zones, now sits at the centre of Trump’s informal diplomatic architecture for dealing with Tehran. The obvious question is what happens if any surviving Iranian know-how, designs, or material is resuscitated—with quiet Pakistani assistance—under the cover of a “peace process” that Washington is too invested in to scrutinize hard.

Given this record, why has Trump decided to trust Pakistan with such a sensitive role? Some possibilities might be:

1. Guilt-shaming.

The U.S. could have couched it as “you helped make the problem, now you help fix the problem.”

2. Transactional realpolitik.

Pakistan has channels into Tehran and Islamist networks that Washington either lacks or has allowed to atrophy. There’s also the idea that Pakistan, Gaza and Iran are, in essence, fellow Islamist travellers, and if you can “speak” the language of the negotiating partner – through a proxy – you’re in better shape.

On this reading, Pakistan’s past as the Ayatollah’s nuclear enabler and incubator of jihadist proxies is not forgotten, so much as conveniently put aside. It is the same logic that in the early days of the “War on Terror” drove Washington to rely on Pakistan for access to Afghanistan, while quietly shrugging at the Islamism festering in their backyard.

3. The “reformed Pakistan” illusion

A more optimistic possibility is what might be called the “reformed Pakistan” facade. Islamabad’s oh-so-recent declaration of “open war” on the Taliban, its desire to be seen as a responsible stakeholder, and its participation in Trump’s “Board of Peace” are read in Washington as signs that it wants to be taken seriously as a global mover and shaker.

The problem is their still-existent jihadist networks in their midst. It is politically convenient to pretend that a serial offender has turned over a new leaf, but wishful thinking dressed up as strategy is not a sound basis for nuclear and counter-terrorism policy.

4. Domestic optics and burden-shifting

Putting Pakistan on a diplomatic pedestal creates the image of muscular burden-sharing and international goodwill. Trump could tell the public and the press: “Hey, look, we’re bringing in all kinds of allies here, even people and places that I wouldn’t really agree with politically. They said they wanted to help, so let’s let them help. They might have something special to offer...”

It’s also pure optics: “we’re not anti-Muslim – we’re anti-Islamic Republic.”

5. A risky “4-D chess” gambit

A more cynical kind of long game. Washington may be consciously testing whether Pakistan can demonstrate “proof of concept” as a diplomatic broker. It’s to preserve a “working relationship” ahead of the next crisis... whether inside Pakistan, in a fractured Iran, in Afghanistan or perhaps elsewhere.

In other words: Flatter Pakistan in public – then hopefully reap a future defensive lineman.

In the end, the effect is the same. Washington is once again staking global security on the assurances of a state with no banked trust. President Trump has taken a lot of foreign policy gambles, some unpopular – and this one is a mystery that has yet to unfold.

— Dave Gordon

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The Liberal Party of Canada does not survive despite voter ignorance. It survives because of it.

Ignorance is not an unfortunate by-product of modern politics; it is the enabling condition that allows branding to replace evidence, slogans to replace substance, and moral exhibitionism to replace outcomes. As voters become less informed and less willing to check claims against numbers, half-truths become electorally sufficient.

Stupidity is the Liberal Party’s secret sauce.

Consider the ritual boast that “GDP is rising.” This line is delivered as proof of prosperity and received as reassurance, even though it proves almost nothing. What matters is per-capita GDP. If population growth exceeds economic growth, living standards fall. Canada’s per-capita GDP has been stagnant or declining for years, meaning Canadians are getting poorer even as headline GDP numbers rise. This is elementary economics. Yet Carney dissembles on this; deceived voters are encouraged to applaud aggregate figures that conceal individual decline, because asking what is being divided by what would require thinking.

Stupidity is the Liberal Party’s secret sauce.

The same pattern governs taxation. We are told the “middle class” received a tax cut. What actually occurred was a small reduction in the lowest federal marginal tax rate, from 15 percent to 14.5 percent, applied only to the first tax bracket. For someone earning $35,000 a year, after the basic personal exemption, the annual savings amount to about $100. That works out to roughly $0.27 a day. A quarter. Two bits.

And yet you have a prime minister crowing about cutting taxes and helping the middle class. This is not spin. It is not an exaggeration. It is simple dishonesty. The only reason it works is that the Canadian public is too incurious to check the math.

Stupidity is the Liberal Party’s secret sauce.

Carbon taxation supplies a more elaborate illusion. The Liberals removed the visible levy at the gas pump while leaving intact the industrial carbon tax imposed upstream on production. This was politically clever and economically evasive. The central fact, which no serious school of economics disputes, is that taxes raise prices and higher prices reduce consumption. This holds whether the tax is applied downstream to consumers or upstream to producers, and it holds even when the taxed goods are exported.

Export markets are not immune to price effects. When production costs rise due to taxation, firms competing globally cannot simply pass those costs on without consequence. Margins compress, investment falls, output declines, production relocates, or some combination of the above occurs. Consumption falls because competitiveness falls. The effect is real, even when indirect.

Stupidity is the Liberal Party’s secret sauce.

Upstream taxes are politically attractive precisely because their effects are harder to trace. Costs do not appear as a neat line item on a receipt. Instead, they show up as weaker wage growth, reduced investment, slower productivity, and fewer opportunities. The harm is no less real for being less visible. In many cases, it is worse.

At this point, we encounter the exemplar voter: affluent, insulated, morally animated, and economically innumerate. Figures such as Rod Vanier and Laura Babcock embody this type with almost clinical clarity. When Vanier declares that opposing Canada’s industrial carbon taxes is equivalent to loving hurricanes and climate catastrophe, he is not making an argument. He is issuing a moral threat designed to short-circuit analysis.

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Two Versions of Justice

The first version—the one we’re taught to believe in—lives in the courtroom. It insists that a biased jury or a prejudiced judge should not judge anyone.

The second version rules the universities, the unions, and the bureaucracies. Here, the same people who chant slogans in the morning preside over disciplinary hearings in the aft…

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It begins, as these things often do, not with a riot or a revolution, but with a sermon. A quiet Sunday morning at a church in Calgary.

A congregation gathers, the songs and welcome are over, and the sermon commences. A minister stands, not as an agitator but as a custodian of something older than the room itself. He knows—because one would have to be wilfully blind not to know—that what he is about to say is out of step with the present age.

“I know this is not popular,” he says. “But this is what the Word of God says.”

He proceeds carefully. He speaks about conduct, about sin, about moral order. He refers to passages that describe certain acts as wrong, perhaps even “abominable.” He touches on roles—men and women, authority and submission. There is no call to violence, no incitement, no theatrical rage. Only the stubborn articulation of a belief system that has declined to modernize itself.

But somewhere in the pews, someone is recording.

And then, the doors open. The police are here.

The interruption is not dramatic in the cinematic sense. No shouting, no chaos. Just the quiet intrusion of authority. A complaint has been made. Words have been spoken. A threshold—somewhere, in someone’s judgment—has been crossed. The minister is politely informed that he is now part of a process. He is taken away.

Yes, in Canada.

This scenario will be dismissed by many as exaggerated. It will be called alarmist, hyperbolic, perhaps even paranoid.

But the question is not whether it is likely.

The question is whether it is possible.

And under Bill C-9, the answer is yes.

To understand why, one must begin with what the bill actually does. It has passed the House of Commons and now sits before the Senate. It has not yet completed the legislative process, but there is no indication that its central change will be reversed. And that change is not obscure.

The Criminal Code once contained a defence—narrow, qualified, but real—that allowed a person to express, in good faith, an opinion based on a religious text without automatically falling into the machinery of hate speech prosecution.

It did not protect against threats. It did not excuse violence. But it acknowledged that religious traditions contain judgments—about behaviour, morality and human roles—that do not always align with contemporary norms.

Bill C-9 removes that defence.

It does not replace it. It does not refine it. It simply removes it and leaves nothing in its place.

There is no clause protecting sermons. No provision shielding religious instruction. No protection of prayer. No recognition, anywhere in the text, that speech occurring within worship occupies a distinct legal category.

The law does not exempt churches, mosques or synagogues.

It says nothing at all—and in law, silence of this kind is not neutrality. It is exposure.

It is the siren call of a capricious nymph—deciding, on a whim, which ships glide by untouched and which are pulled in and shattered on her jagged rocks.

From this, the consequences follow.

If the standard remains the “wilful promotion of hatred” against an identifiable group—and it does—, and if there is no longer a religious defence, then the rule applies everywhere. It applies to newspapers and podcasts, to classrooms and street corners, and, yes, to places of worship. The law does not recognize sacred space as a boundary.

Which means that there can be illegal sermons. A minister can be arrested mid-sermon; an imam mid-prayer; a rabbi mid-instruction. Not because religion has been outlawed, but because it has been stripped of any explicit protection as religion.

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The question is not what will happen in the best case. It is what the law permits in the worst case. A mature legal order does not rely on goodwill to prevent misuse. It relies on clear boundaries.

And here, the boundary has been removed.

There is no indication that the state intends to monitor sermons or plant officials in places of worship. But it does not need to.

In a complaint-driven system, enforcement requires only a listener. If an individual chooses to attend a service, record what is said and file a complaint, there is nothing in the law's structure that prevents it. No clause that says, “this context is off-limits.” Once the complaint is made, the machinery begins to turn.

Nor is this an entirely theoretical concern.

In other liberal democracies—most notably the United Kingdom and Ireland—there have been cases in which individuals have been approached by police over speech, sometimes at their homes, sometimes at points of entry.

One widely discussed case involved an Irish writer being met by multiple officers at an airport over remarks deemed offensive. The specifics of such cases may be debated, but the underlying lesson is not difficult to discern: once speech becomes a matter for policing, the threshold for intervention tends to drift.

Canada is not identical to those jurisdictions. But the logic is not foreign.

And the process itself does not begin at the highest levels of government. Hate propaganda prosecutions may ultimately require the Attorney General's consent, but the earlier stages—the complaint, the investigation, the visit—can begin without such oversight. It is not a system of centralized restraint. It is a system of distributed discretion.

Which is to say: a system that depends on judgment.

And judgment, in practice, depends on people.

This is further complicated by the direction of Canadian constitutional reasoning. In Quebec (Attorney General) v. Kanyinda, the Supreme Court emphasized that the law must consider not only intent, but effects—whether a rule or expression contributes to disadvantage.

Once that lens is applied to speech, the inquiry shifts. It is no longer simply what was meant, but what is perceived to be done.

And once that becomes the governing question, the origin of the speech—religious or otherwise—offers no automatic protection.

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Religious traditions, across Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, contain passages that, when translated into modern statements about identifiable groups, can be read as exclusionary or offensive. Historically, the law acknowledged this reality and allowed a narrow defence. Under Bill C-9, that acknowledgement is withdrawn.

Yet any system that relies on discretion will, inevitably, be applied unevenly. Not because the statute commands it, but because human systems are not perfectly neutral. They respond to pressure. They reflect incentives. They act where it is easiest, least costly and where the resistance is lowest.

This is what is meant by capricious law—not law that is random, but law whose application depends on shifting conditions rather than fixed boundaries.

And if one doubts that political considerations enter into such processes, one might recall the candid observation of Liberal Minister Mélanie Joly: “Have you seen my riding?”

(She was implicitly saying that she had many Arabs in her riding and she was not able to take a pro-Israel position)

It is a revealing remark, because it dispenses with the fiction that policy is always driven by abstract principle. It acknowledges, instead, that politics—like all human systems—responds to incentives.

If enforcement follows incentives, it will not be perfectly even. It never is.

Which is why this change is not only unnecessary but unwise.

Canada already has laws against incitement to violence. Those laws are clear. They are sufficient. They draw the line where it matters—at the point where speech becomes action. If someone calls for harm, prosecute them. If someone threatens violence, stop them.

What is not required is the removal of a longstanding protection in favour of a system that says, in effect, “We will decide later.”

Because that is what this becomes.

Speak, if you wish.

Preach, if you must.

Quote, if you believe it to be true.

But understand:

Whether you were permitted to do so will not be decided in advance.

It will be decided afterward.

And if you believe that such a system will be applied with perfect neutrality, untouched by pressure, politics, or human inclination, then you possess a faith far greater than anything expressed from the pulpit.

My prediction is not dramatic. It is cautious.

This will not end well.

These texts are not crimes. But under a regime without a religious defence, their direct modern application to identifiable groups is no longer buffered by statute—it is judged, instead, after the fact.

This law is written in bad faith. It is a sop to the Muslim electorate and the ‘progressive’ illiberal left and will be selectively enforced against Jews and Christians to gain electoral Liberal advantage.

Already, I have friends who have seen signs that proclaim “All Jews are Pedophiles” put up by known offenders at Bathurst and Sheppard.

The police in this case declined to follow up. It was Hate Propaganda - a criminal offence. But Muslim agitators once again have been implicitly granted a hate crime exception clause. Why would C-9 change this?

Last week, police escorted a violent pro-Palestinian mob through a Jewish neighbourhood in Toronto.

Conduct that, under existing law, should already have triggered scrutiny was instead facilitated. That alone should give pause to anyone who believes new discretionary powers will be applied evenly or cautiously.

C-9 will not operate in a vacuum. It will be interpreted, enforced, and—inevitably—selectively applied by institutions that have already shown a willingness to look away in some cases and intervene aggressively in others.

That is not speculation. It is a pattern.

And behind it all lies something even more troubling: the astonishing hubris. Judges and politicians now position themselves to sit in judgment over what millions regard as sacred—texts, traditions, and convictions grounded in the divine—subjecting them to standards that shift with politics, pressure, and fashion.

What is held to be eternal is weighed against what is plainly temporary and found wanting.

Such power will not remain neutral. It rarely does. It will be used—sometimes to punish, sometimes to signal virtue, sometimes to appease constituencies—but always with consequences that extend far beyond its stated purpose.

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History offers a consistent warning. When a society becomes comfortable applying its laws unevenly—when certain groups are exposed while others are shielded—it is not long before that imbalance spreads.

The erosion does not announce itself all at once. It begins with selective enforcement, quiet exceptions, and the belief that this time will be different.

And yet this motion will pass—carried along by a compliant, ideologically aligned Senate—with scarcely a blush.

Those who have shown so little restraint, so little consistency, now step forward draped in borrowed moral authority—assuming trust where none has been earned, claiming discretion where none has been demonstrated. They do not persuade; they presume.

They do not earn judgment; they assert it. The arrogance is not incidental—it is foundational. And in a system that will depend entirely on their judgment, that arrogance is not merely troubling. It is oppressive.

A preacher once told me that even Satan has the good sense to dress as an angel of light—and that his followers, naturally, come dressed as servants of righteousness.1

Maybe I could be prosecuted for that statement? But not today, the bill has not passed.

Illustrative passages that could create legal exposure if asserted as present-day prescriptions about identifiable groups:

Torah / Old Testament (Judaism & Christianity)

1. Leviticus 20:13 — punishment for homosexual acts

2. Leviticus 18:22 — “abomination” language

3. Deuteronomy 20:16–17 — commands to destroy populations

4. Exodus 21:20–21 — treatment of servants

5. Psalm 137:9 — violent retribution imagery
   

New Testament (Christianity)

1. Romans 1:26–27 — “unnatural” relations

2. 1 Corinthians 6:9–10 — exclusionary moral lists

3. 1 Timothy 2:12 — limits on women’s authority

4. Ephesians 5:22–24 — hierarchical marital structure

5. Revelation (various passages) — judgment and destruction themes
   

Quran (Islam)

1. Surah 9:5 — fighting polytheists (context-dependent)

2. Surah 8:12 — wartime violence language

3. Surah 4:89 — apostasy-related language

4. Surah 2:191 — conflict directives

5. Surah 4:34 — discipline within the household
   

   
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Moore's Article Suggesting Banning Dogs

The…

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Fourteen Months. No Results. Just Words. How Long Will Voters Keep Buying It?

Mark Carney’s popularity is one of the strangest illusions in modern Canadian politics. Fourteen months into his tenure, the ledger is remarkably thin: no major nation-building projects underway, no visible acceleration in growth, no breakthrough on interprovincial trade, no meaningful expansion of Canada’s energy capacity. And yet the brand holds. The speeches land. The tone reassures. The promise of competence lingers, even as the substance fails to appear.

At some point, a country has to ask a very simple question: how long will voters support a leader who delivers words without action?

Carney promised to tackle interprovincial trade barriers—one of the most obvious, solvable drags on the Canadian economy. Nothing has changed. He spoke of restoring growth, of unlocking productivity, of making Canada competitive again. The numbers do not reflect a turnaround. He invoked the language of an “energy superpower,” suggesting urgency, scale, ambition. And then, in the middle of an energy crisis, he raises the carbon tax.

That is not a contradiction by accident. It is a contradiction by design.

Because the reality is this: Carney cannot do what he says he will do. Not because Canada lacks resources. Not because the economics do not work. But because delivering on those promises would require him to confront the very coalition that put him in power.

You do not build pipelines, LNG terminals, and export capacity while governing alongside a political ecosystem that has spent a decade opposing those very things. You do not suddenly accelerate approvals when your regulatory culture has been trained to delay, expand scope, and litigate. And you certainly do not dismantle that system while relying on the support of those who built it.

No leader governs against his base for long. And Carney will not be the exception.

This is why the “energy superpower” line has the feel of advertising rather than policy. It is a slogan designed to reassure voters who sense decline, not a plan grounded in political reality. Because the same government that claims urgency continues to signal hesitation. The same leadership that invokes growth continues to impose costs on the very sector it claims to want to expand.

It is not seriousness. It is performance.

And the performance extends beyond energy. Carney’s much-discussed foreign policy framing—“middle power unity,” a kind of rhetorical embrace of solidarity among nations uneasy with American unpredictability—sounds impressive until one asks what it actually produces. A speech filled with borrowed gravitas, references deployed more for effect than clarity, and a familiar conclusion: we must come together, we must stand firm, we must be serious.

Fine words. But what followed?

No shift in Canada’s economic trajectory. No surge in investment. No visible change in the country’s strategic position. The gap between tone and outcome remains intact.

Meanwhile, the underlying problems worsen quietly. Younger Canadians struggle to find stable work. Housing remains out of reach for a growing share of the population. Productivity stagnates. Investment hesitates. And yet much of the electorate remains curiously untroubled.

Why?

Because politics, increasingly, is not about outcomes. It is about atmosphere.

If you are employed, if your mortgage is manageable or already paid, if your immediate surroundings are stable, the broader decline can feel abstract. Someone else’s problem. Someone else’s child living at home at twenty-eight. Someone else’s graduate sending out résumés into a void. The system, for now, still works well enough for enough people that urgency never quite takes hold.

And so the performance continues.

Carney speaks of ambition while governing within constraint. He promises transformation while preserving the structures that prevent it. He signals urgency while implementing policies that move in the opposite direction. And through it all, the brand remains intact: competent, serious, reassuring.

But a country cannot live indefinitely on tone.

The Hormuz crisis, and the broader instability it represents, has exposed something deeper. Canada is not constrained by geology or by lack of demand. It is constrained by its own choices. Projects cancelled. Timelines stretched. Capital discouraged. A decade spent treating energy as something to be managed rather than developed.

And now, faced with the consequences, the country is offered words.

How long will that be enough?

Fourteen months have already passed. There is no evidence, yet, that the next fourteen will be any different.

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I arrived in Winnipeg for the NDP convention expecting a political convention and instead found a loyalty program for grievances—complete with tiers, upgrades, and endless bickering about what rung everyone stood on the growing grievance ladder.

This, I was assured, was the New Democratic Party—though the branding now feels off.

The New Democratic Party has become the New New Democratic Party.

The central innovation was the equity card: a colour-coded credential functioning less as identification than as a points engine.

Green for this, pink for that, yellow for the richly intersected—each colour having a value, a multiplier in a system where fairness had been translated into arithmetic.

Not crude arithmetic. Moral arithmetic.

Delegates did not so much line up as run the numbers. Phones came out—not for texting, not for news—but for calculators.

“I’ve got ten points.”

“Have you added intersectional carryover?”

“Only partially.”

“Well then, you’re undercounting.”

A pause. A recalibration. A faint sense that one’s position in line might be improved by a deeper reading of the loyalty program fine print.

Then came the promotions.

“Wait—there’s a bonus this afternoon.”

“What bonus?”

“Non-binary gets double credit after 2 p.m. Plus a coupon for an upgrade to a frap at the coffee bar.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“Yes, it does—it was announced earlier.”

“That was amended.”

“No, the amendment was referred to the non-binary committee.”

“Well then, what about the racialized weighting?”

“That only applies regionally.”

“What region?”

“Anyone with ancestors - maternal line only - from North Africa, I think.”

“No, that’s not right. Nigeria was reevaluated. Lagos only.”

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