If you believe in free speech—not the bumper sticker, but the unruly, rabid mongrel that snarls at polite society—then you can help keep it alive here. Every paid subscription buys me time to write without kowtowing to the kind of people who think “problematic” is an argument.
It’s five dollars a month. Canadian dollars. Which means it’s even less than you think—practically pocket lint if you’re south of the border. For that, you’ll get at least three heretical essays a week.
People always say, “Oh, it’s just a cup of coffee.” True. However, when you reach the Substack counter, please select my coffee. I guarantee it’s cheaper than Starbucks, and it comes spiked with the bitterness of reality—foam-free, censorship-free, and worth every loonie. Cheers.
There was a time—not long ago—when a man who killed four people would be treated as precisely that: a killer. Today, he is as likely to be treated as a casualty of circumstance, a passive sufferer in the melodrama of systemic oppression. The pendulum of compassion has swung so far that it now strikes the very notion of responsibility in the face.
A Canadian judge, Russell Wood, recently sentenced Manpreet Gill—a multiple offender and illiterate Punjabi student—to five and a half months in jail. Gill, who should never have been allowed into Canada and certainly not allowed to stay after his prior convictions, robbed an LCBO, fled police, drove the wrong way down a highway, and caused a multi-car crash that left four dead, including a baby and a grandmother. His partner in crime also perished.
Judge Wood’s reasoning? He kept the sentence under six months so as not to jeopardise Gill’s immigration status. The immigration standing of the dead, one notes grimly, is no longer in need of judicial protection.
This is not justice. It is a travesty to wear the powdered wig of compassion. It is the sort of moral inversion that has infected Western jurisprudence, where pity is enthroned above judgment and the criminal is baptised as a victim.
The rot, like dry wood tossed on the fire, emits a telling stench. It is the new philosophy of “duelling victims”—the notion that both parties in a crime are equally aggrieved by the mysterious workings of fate, society, or “systemic conditions.”
The Canadian Department of Justice’s own research indicates that ordinary citizens reject this idea in its entirety. Yet our judges and academics, comfortably insulated from consequence, press on. To them, we who object are moral illiterates, unable to grasp the nuanced complexity of “structural forces.” They see themselves as philosopher-kings dispensing wisdom to the mob, convinced that they can reform the world by sparing its malefactors.
The result is an ethical junk-food diet—quick, sweet, and ruinous.
The philosophy of leniency may feel good in the moment, but it rots the civic body from within. Gill’s case exemplifies this. Four corpses on the asphalt, but the priority was not justice for the dead; it was preserving the prospects of the living offender.
This moral confusion has metastasised through the Canadian legal system in the form of the IRCA statement—Impact of Race and Culture Assessment—a bureaucratic indulgence that functions like a pre-paid discount card for jail time. Its message is unmistakable: your misdeeds are not your own; they are the inevitable products of your melanin, accent, or childhood.
It is, ironically, racism disguised as empathy—a soft bigotry of diminished expectations. The white addict is depraved; the brown addict is “traumatised.” The white thug is a menace; the non-white thug is “reacting to intergenerational pain.” Thus, we are invited to construct a new hierarchy of innocence, with pigmentation as penance.
The logic of this creed, once imported into universities and bureaucracies, is that guilt itself must now be distributed along the lines of a diversity chart. The brown man cannot be held to the same moral standard as the pale one, for to do so would be “colonial.” Thus, institutional cowardice dresses itself in multicultural vestments.
I saw it first-hand. At my own university, a Muslim colleague whose conduct would have seen any other man dismissed on the spot was instead canonised as a victim—his tantrums reinterpreted as trauma, his open bigotry recast as “context.”
Skin and creed became absolution. This was not fairness; it was fear with a moral vocabulary. The administrators, those nervous priests of equity, could not even imagine judging him by the same standards they used to destroy me. They knelt before the idol of identity and called it justice.
This is how civilisation decays—not with mobs and torches, but with committees and caveats, all humming the same bureaucratic psalm: We must understand him. The medieval inquisitor at least believed he was saving souls. Our modern ones only hope to save themselves from a bad headline.
For the apostles of this thinking, human agency is an inconvenient relic—an embarrassing leftover from a time when people still believed in sin and its consequences. They prefer their humanity deterministic, programmable, and thus comfortingly guilt-free.
Man, to them, is a marionette jerked by the twin tyrannies of genetics and social conditioning. John Calvin, that lugubrious sixteenth-century divine who saw the universe as a celestial sorting hat of the damned and the elect, would have felt right at home among these modern determinists. His doctrine of predestination has merely been reborn with secular trimmings: no longer God pulling the strings, but “social forces.” The new Calvinists wear cardigans, quote Foucault, and have replaced salvation with therapy.
In this inverted gospel, prison is not punishment but pilgrimage; the burglar is a misunderstood pilgrim on a journey through trauma. The handcuffs are metaphors, the victims are props, and accountability is rebranded as “healing.” The result is a theology of excuses—piety without penitence, virtue without responsibility. And like all bad theology, it’s absurdly self-flattering. If no one is to blame for anything, then everyone, conveniently, is innocent.
Living in a world where nobody is responsible for anything is rather pleasant—until one of these blameless marionettes kills your family on the highway.
And here lies the irony. In our therapeutic age, the punishment of the guilty is seen as an act of cruelty, while indulgence is regarded as a virtue. But to rob a man of responsibility is to rob him of dignity.
Viktor Frankl, who had more moral authority than all of Canada’s law faculties combined, wrote: “When we can no longer change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” Accepting guilt is the first step toward redemption.
The trouble, of course, runs deeper than any one bill. What we are witnessing is the legal codification of moral relativism—the bureaucratic laundering of guilt. When the state begins to view the criminal not as an agent of choice but as a “context,” as a mere echo of poverty or trauma or chemical imbalance, then crime ceases to be an act and becomes a condition.
Responsibility evaporates, and the law itself becomes therapeutic theatre. The entire machinery of justice turns from deterrence to indulgence, from accountability to apology. This is not mercy—it is a quiet form of nihilism, an abdication dressed as compassion. When we no longer believe people can choose between right and wrong, we no longer believe in people at all.
The rot, of course, did not begin with Judge Wood—it began in Ottawa. In 2019, Trudeau’s government, in one of its trademark spasms of self-congratulating virtue, rewrote the country’s bail system through Bill C-75. This was not “reform”; it was moral acupuncture for the criminally inclined. The new gospel of “restraint” and “least onerous release” treated repeat offenders as misunderstood social experiments rather than predators.
It was all very enlightened, very Charter-compliant, and very stupid. Violent reoffenders now circulate through the system like blood clots through an artery, briefly detained, then discharged to offend again, with the courts nodding in therapeutic sympathy.
After a string of blood-spattered reminders that this utopia was not working—murderers on bail, police officers killed, entire families crushed by repeat offenders—Ottawa tried to patch its own bleeding conscience with Bill C-48, tightening the screws ever so slightly. But the damage was done: on the streets, bail had become a joke, a punchline, a revolving door through which career criminals swaggered, confident that their next “release hearing” would be as forgiving as their last.
Modern jurisprudence has turned this on its head. To punish is to oppress; to excuse is to heal. In this brave new world, even God would be summoned before a Human Rights Tribunal for “insufficient empathy.”
The data are unambiguous. Violent crime in Canada has surged by over thirty percent in the past decade. Seventy-eight percent of Canadians say the courts are too lenient; seventy-nine percent fear violent offenders on bail. One-third of murders are now committed by people already on release. Yet our judiciary remains obsessed with the feelings of the criminal and the hypothetical shame of the state.
This is what happens when the jargon of sociology replaces the moral vocabulary of civilisation. Crime becomes “harmful behaviour,” guilt becomes “trauma response,” and punishment becomes “systemic reparation.”
In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s Ivan warns: “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” It is not a plea for religiosity but a warning that without an inner moral compass—call it God, conscience, or reason—law itself collapses. Morality precedes legality, not the other way around. When you remove moral agency, laws become mere administrative obstacles, like traffic lights in a riot.
Our institutions, having traded theology for therapy, seem to believe that every sin can be psychoanalysed into innocence. In their zeal to understand evil, they have forgotten to condemn it.
Michel Foucault—patron saint of the modern faculty lounge—anticipated this transformation, though not quite as its champion. In Discipline and Punish, he observed that society had replaced divine judgment with bureaucratic surveillance. The priest yielded to the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, and the social worker-judge. Each presides over a small fiefdom of moral relativism, adjusting the standards of right and wrong to fit the prevailing political fashion.
From there, the slide is inevitable. First, we say that crime has “context.” Then we say it has “causes.” Soon, we say it has “justifications.” Finally, we say it has none at all—because crime, like morality itself, becomes merely a construct.
Once this reasoning takes root, there is no logical barrier to declaring the criminal a protected identity group. The next step is absurd but predictable: to deny them that victimhood will be deemed discriminatory.
We are not far from the day when parole hearings begin with land acknowledgements and end with apologies to the offender for society’s failure to love him enough.
In this moral farce, punishment itself becomes suspect. If “you can do what you decide, but cannot decide what you will do,” as Sam Harris argues, then all evil is biochemical, all virtue accidental.
The murderer becomes a neuron with bad timing. The thief, a dopamine malfunction. The rapist, an “unfortunate case of trauma projection.”
This deterministic fatalism, dressed up as compassion, is the most dangerous doctrine of all. For if none of us is truly responsible, then none of us is truly free. A society that abolishes blame abolishes liberty.
I remember, as a boy in Winnipeg, being struck across the hand with a leather strap for throwing a mudball. It stung like hell, and I may have deserved it, but maybe the belt could have been a little narrower, and Mr Smith didn’t need to enjoy it so much.
Today, some tribunal would no doubt declare it a “cultural trauma,” but the memory has served me well: actions have consequences. It is a primitive but indispensable lesson in civilisation.
Yet our new secular clerics have decided that consequence itself is oppressive—that morality is a bourgeois construct, that guilt is violence, that justice is a social illusion.
And so we drift toward the absurd—the successful become victims of privilege. The failures become victims of oppression. The murderer becomes a victim of circumstance. The only non-victims left are the actual victims—because they are dead.
This worldview is not compassion; it is cowardice masquerading as kindness. It is the abdication of judgment by those too vain to admit they are afraid to judge.
A civilisation built on this foundation will not stand. Without moral agency, there can be no justice. Without justice, there can be no freedom. And without freedom, all that remains is sentimentality—an empire of excuses presided over by fools who mistake pity for virtue.
If human beings are merely the sum of their influences, then no one is guilty—but neither is anyone good. That is the quiet horror of our age: a world where even evil has been exonerated by empathy.
Civilisation rests on one simple premise: you did it, and you are responsible for it. Tear that up, and the rest of the social contract follows.
Judge Wood, in his genteel mercy, may have thought himself humane. But the true cruelty lies in a justice system that comforts the criminal while abandoning the innocent to the grave.
We are fast becoming a nation where no one is to blame for anything—except, perhaps, those who dare to say otherwise.
If you found value in this article and wish to support my ongoing work, please consider leaving a tip. Your support helps me continue producing uncensored content on critical issues.
