When the major parties are wings of a uniparty intent on destroying the nation, as in Britain and, quite possibly, Canada, reducing the major parties to unelectable basket cases is the only possible way forward.
I wish Canadian voters and MPs were as bolshy as the Brits.
There's a lot more daylight between our Liberal and Conservative parties than there is between UK Labour and Tories, or between Australian Labour and Liberal-National. This is thanks to the PC/Reform merger in the 2000's for the most part.
The thing that makes our CPC "unacceptable" to so many pearl clutchers and our state owned/supported media is that they want smaller government and more individual freedom, unlike the supposedly right leaning parties in these other Commonwealth countries.
We have a real alternative already but we are too scared and mentally captured to take it.
I'm not sure there is any persuading anyone on this anymore. The nation failed a crucial test of intelligence and maturity in 2025 and shows no indication of any correction.
Politics is finally succumbing to the numbing history of do-nothingism. Do nothing Europe, do nothing England, do nothing Canada...are all in decline...while an excellent case can be made for a do-something Trump administration and US performance.
This is, of course, red meat for all you TDSers. But voters want plans, performance and action. Trump is the only one deliverying. I hate how he does some things. You can shoot at him, swear at him, denigrate him and protest all you want but but, by God, he's getting things done.
The mid-terms will validate either us or them. Voters around the world will not be sucked in by do-nothingism much longer.
Action by itself is not governance. A guy swinging a hammer wildly is “doing something” too.
The real question is whether the action produces a durable consensus and functioning institutions afterward or just more fragmentation and backlash.
People are clearly exhausted with managerial drift and do nothing politics. Fair enough. But “at least he’s doing stuff” is a pretty low civilizational standard.
You know who else "did stuff"? Justin Trudeau. Messed with everything. Attempted to fix what wasn't broken. How did that work out?
Wisdom is knowing when to make changes, knowing whether you have the competence to make those changes without making something else far worse, and knowing when to leave things alone. Neither our past PM nor the current US President has any of that wisdom.
"pretty low standard". Only if you disregard the "small things". This just in this AM: "Thousands of parents owing more than $100,000 in child support who started losing their passports on Friday under a new State Department effort to enforce a 1996 law. The department plans to lower the threshold to $2,500."
Note JC...the law wasw implemented in 1996. Trump 1; Doing nothing 0.
Permanently destabilized international relations by repeatedly threatening to militarily invade an ally to get concessions he could have had just by asking for them: 2
Incredibly niche policy on child support probably not convincing many to pay a gazillion dollars in arrears because they are likely already bankrupt: 1
Geez, don't make me make common cause with annoying American leftists and elbows up morons.
lol, yes, and we're all so much better off hahahahaha, especially his own country.
Among SO MANY benefits, his country is now saddled with a record amount of debt, and climbing, (when the circumstances suggest it might be time to put a little hay in the barn), but hey, patterns of behaviour are always reliable and we might have looked at the shambles of a company his daddy left him for a preview... his success speaks for itself!
Are you saying I need to go along to get along because there may not be a candidate I like?
Patent bullshit.
If you're saying he's doing a better job than any Democratic candidate... as time goes by, I'm more and more convinced a mildly retarded chimp would do a better job. If Delirium Tremens stayed home, stuffed his hole with big macs and watched tv we'd be better off financially, at the very least.
Dude, anything positive that Trump does, which you often have to look at sideways and in the best possible light to even see, is drowned out by two or three objectively batshit crazy things he also does.
How's annexing Greenland going? Illegally sanctioning all of his allies? Disrupting global energy supply to go to war with Iran for... reasons? Did we not have a crisis for a few months and it was getting boring? Inflation not high enough? Not to mention ruining Canada's politics with his ridiculous threats.
And even where there is a rational goal - removing illegals or getting other NATO members to contribute more for example - those could be accomplished without 95% of the negative side effects by not acting like a total unhinged psychopath while pursuing them.
TDS is a real problem but there is no world where you can justify a really disproportionate amount of the shit he has done.
What's truly amusing is that so few leaders have made so few mistakes. And the best protection from criticism for making errors is...(wait for it)...doing nothing.
You can shoot at [Trump], swear at him, denigrate him and protest all you want but but, by God, he's getting things done.
END QUOTE
Getting things done. Hm.
You know, there are some things that need doing, and other things that, if done, end up undermining shared interests.
For the President of the United States to incite racism, all the while claiming that he is "fixing" problems with US immigration policy, is surely not a thing that should have been done.
Nor, on the face of it, was it a great idea to launch a war that has actually made things much worse in the world, by shutting down trade flows to and from some of the world's biggest producers of helium, artificial fertilizers for use in agriculture, sulphur and other chemicals crucial to the manufacture of semiconductors, and so forth.
A war, by the way, that seems to have solidified the grip on power of Iran's self-serving and pernicious theocracy, and in particular its "praetorian" Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps.
It surely was also unwise to "do things" that have essentially severely undermined the USA's closest allies, and threatened Canada and Mexico with severe economic damage?
Your assessments are held post-action... 20:20 hindsight. The inclination to act--without clarity is the element under discussion here. Unlike The Line, I favour it...knowing full well that intelligent aforethought works more in favour of better outcomes than nothingism most of the time.
As a post script, I believe that voters, globallyl, are well and truly fed up with it. Time--and elections--will tell.
I see Carney (a Progressive Conservative prime minister, wearing Liberal red out of convenience) as an almost-unique beacon in the world right now of how managerial centrism _can_ still succeed, if the leader is willing to definitively renounce all the revolutionary stuff from the Second Great Social Justice Decade (2012-2022, the first being 1965-1975).
The guy just more or less cancelled the national carbon policy ($130 by 2040 is a face-saving way to say that carbon taxes aren’t happening), gender ideology is gone at a federal level, and the federal government is dropping all the DEI quotas in all the new agencies. Companies are rapidly following suit.
The one remaining Trudeau shift is IAAC and Indigenous participation in projects. And there it’s clear to me that Carney just doesn’t want a civil insurgency and is trying to make the First Nations into industrial capitalists through economic participation in pipelines (let’s see if this works).
And … it’s working. His support remains sky high.
The Ontario Liberals, and the UK electorate, are crying out for a Carney type leader. If they get one, the left and right parties will diminish again. But they need the centre-right competent leader or the vote will continue to go to Reform and Green.
Beacon? May I humbly suggest we compare and contrast what he says with what he does before rushing to any superlative adjectives.
For example, how about we the electors of this managerial 'centrist' actually gain access first to the secret MOU between Carney and the CCP about how the RCMP is to work with China's state security... but only on the Canadian side of this cozy little arrangement that is raising so much alarm from the non supporting Chinese and Hong Kong and Taiwanese diaspora totally ignored by this beacon... before crowning Carney as an example of some kind of western liberal democratic champion?
Because he spends almost no time in Canada, yet busy showing his own willingness to appear on any international stage to offer commentary about the kind of global order he would prefer, you'll have to check his latest flight plans to nail down where the beacon is currently and temporarily flashing.
The writer didn't mention a third way Labour's support has splintered: sectarian politics in the form of the Muslim Vote, an organisation promoting candidates running on a platform mainly about Gaza. 4 MPs were elected as Independents the 2024 election, and they won a number of council seats in the local elections last week (in some places the Green Party adopted the Muslim Vote platform and won, with the candidates wearing keffiyehs).
But in general, it is nuts to be running council (municipal) elections with national political party banners, when the municipalities are hugely constrained by what they are allowed to do, what they are obliged to do, and their tax raising abilities. This election had party candidates running on platforms about Gaza, immigration, and tax policy, when all the councils do is run local services (schools, social care, garbage collection), and rely on central government funding more most of it. The election was really a huge opinion poll on the national parties. Far better to have the Canadian system of non party-affiliated municipal councillors.
Interesting article that gives some substance to another piece I was reading recently by Ross Douthat in the New York Times where he argues that Western society has become so fragmented and authenticity driven that it can no longer establish a durable consensus. So while the existing political order may be collapsing there are now too many competing narratives about what should replace it for any stable governing vision to emerge.
Reading this piece you can see that dynamic playing out in Britain in real time. The old center is hollowing out but what replaces it is not one coherent alternative. Instead you get fragmentation in every direction at once. Reform Greens regional nationalism generational divides identity blocs anti establishment politics and increasingly short lived governments that burn through legitimacy almost instantly.
What struck me is that it reinforces Douthat’s point that defeating the “wrong ideas” is not the same thing as building a durable governing consensus. You can beat DEI excesses beat populists beat nationalists beat the establishment whatever but none of that by itself answers the harder question of what actually holds a society together anymore.
The key line from Douthat for me was “That might be how you prevent the wrong set of ideas from establishing themselves but it’s not how you govern in the absence of consensus or how you establish a new consensus that can last.”
I think there's a key point, closer to root cause:
All organizations (companies, parties, teams, countries) take on the characteristics of their leader. If our leaders have not become more selfish, ego-driven, enthusiastic proponents of ends-justifying-means, and I think they are, we're certainly more aware of it as a result of instant reporting, and social media rumination. Perception is reality.
As a result of these forces, people withdraw, look inward, are less generous, less willing to sacrifice, because they see the example of leaders acting for themselves, or their small tribe.
Leaders own this trajectory, and strategists perpetuate it.
Many times I had the experience of knowing the rightness of my plan, and knowing that it would fail, SHOULD fail, because too many did not agree. I had special access and privileged tools to see what others could not, yet it was wrong to force the change.
We are led by fools who do not know this humility, and our society is less successful because of it. David Eby's NDP and the corrupt governance of the Capital Regional District on Vancouver Island are perfect examples, but they are endemic.
UK politics has been a shambolic mess since Cameron decided a Brexit referendum would be a smart move. They somehow seem to keep finding ever less impressive people to make PM.
This could reflect that some things are going badly in the UK. Or it could just reflect the global anti-incumbent sentiment that has played a major role in most elections worldwide since the Pandemic. Nevertheless, part of the job of a politician is to read the public mood and respond to it in a way that the public appreciates. It's hard to look at such a dramatic swing in Labor popularity and not conclude that Starmer is just not what the public wants.
So while I agree, cycling through PMs at record speed is not great, it is probably inevitable at least one more time before a more stable government gets formed. And if that's correct, best get on with it.
I am going to make it my mission here to call you out every time you try to make “Remigration” somehow an acceptable concept within the Overton window of things that should be contemplated by polite society.
You’re talking about mass rounding-up and deportation of legal immigrants (maybe even citizens, right?) based on racial or national origin. It would require concentration camps and Trump-ICE-like storming of cities to accomplish.
We cannot allow this to happen. We would be monsters. “Remigration” is only a hairs breadth away from outright white supremacy as national policy, and needs to be completely off the table for serious consideration.
Not at all. "Remigration" literally means any migrants, including temporary residents, returning home. Scale and means are matters of discussion and debate. It's telling that we have no word for "migrants returning home" acceptable in what you call "polite society".
I personally think sending temps and lawbreakers home, plus an unwelcoming environment for welfare recipients and people who refuse to assimilate, would be a huge step forward and quite likely sufficient.
Motte and bailey fallacy. Sending lawbreakers home wouldn’t move the needle on the total number of migrants in the country and you know it.
And sending _all_ the temps home (2 million!) would require concentration camps and ICE storming of cities. Carney knows it too which is why he’s creating a path for them to all become PR and then citizens. Even if we all recognize that Trudeau made a mistake with the TFW surge, it can’t be undone now.
What does an “unwelcome environment” mean, in terms of actual policy?
Deporting 50,000 people could be done within the bounds of humane policies. Deporting 2 million will turn us into monsters.
Your papers expire, you leave willingly or get sent home. I would expect nothing less if I went to work in the US and my visa expired. I don't care what weird nudge nudge pretense they were lured here with where some shady agent told them temporary really meant permanent. We have borders for a reason and we need to prioritize the lives and interests of people already legally living here over low skill foreigners brought here for I don't even know what reason by the worst prime minister we have ever had. Anything less means our government doesn't care about Canada or Canadians.
There are like 1.2 million temporary people in Canada (students and TFWs) in this category. Do you think this is practical for those kinds of those numbers?
This kind of comment is a perfect reflection of what has happened to turn Britain into a broken state. It reflects a movement also occurring in Canada described by Matt Goodwin as, "a serious movement that is interested in representing the national majority. It has now been fully hijacked by what the economist Thomas Piketty once called the ‘Brahmin Class’, or what others call the ‘Lanyard Class’: urban, left-wing, socially cocooned, liberal if not radically progressive, morally righteous yet deeply inexperienced activists who have completely lost touch with the country." It is this movement and those who support who are breaking Canada apart right now but thinking well of themselves as champions of the victim class doing so. Arguing that nothing can be done to address those who are currently breaking our immigration system from integration into empowering separate enclaves with political clout without becoming 'monsters' is suicidal empathy in action. And sticking with the opinion guarantees support for never-ending but always increasing dysfunction.
Canada is not Britain or Western Europe. We have never had a permanent underclass of immigrants drawing welfare for generations. Multiculturalism works, or worked, here. (People call it the Canadian multicultural miracle for a reason!)
And not sure if you’ve noticed, but the Gaza protests have stopped, after accomplishing zero and having no influence on Canadian foreign policy. The centrists won.
Trudeau almost broke our system by increasing the numbers too much, but we have stopped that. We now need to swallow the slug of Trudeau-era TFWs and fake students, unfortunately, and never elect such a government again. But Carney has turned off the taps on new arrivals. We’re back to sustainable levels that can sustain the Canadian Multicultural Miracle.
Canada isn’t the UK or Europe. On this one topic, we’re better, in fact we’re the best in the world.
So we just sit back, do nothing, and watch the country enter a sectarian shithole because we do not want to be seen as "monsters". Something needs to done, now. Mass forced expulsion is not really a practical option quite apart from the left's "feelings" and worry about being called a monster. But some strong signals need to be given to get the point across, and sending lawbreakers home would be a good start. We must tackle the elephant in the room which is the refusal of large sectors of the immigrant community to be assimilated into the British culture; and even worse, the encouragement of the left to do so under the banner of Multiculturalism.
I remember being told that “None is too many” was the Canadian policy on Jewish immigration. Now being extended in Quebec to Muslims and like all Quebec initiatives can be expected to be applied in Canada within 2 to 5 years.
Brexit was an own-goal, foisted by cruel cynics (and russian bots) who encouraged unhappiness for their "chance", and destroyed economic growth, so people are unhappy.
Unhappy people agitate. The merry-go-round will spin because unhappy people vote, "anything is better than this." They sure as fuck don't re-elect.
I still think that Starmer has to go, but I can see how waiting one year and having an orderly leadership succession process would be better than immediate defenestration.
Labour Party members need to have a serious discussion about what they stand for, informed in part by serious public consultations.
Even this might not be enough to prevent Farage and company from winning a significant number of House of Commons seats in the next general elections (2028 or 2029).
But it might well be better than "let's outdo the Tories, insofar as offing our leader(s) is concerned".
The path of the Greens in the UK are perhaps what the NDP are looking for as their way out of irrelevance here in Canada.
In the coming months and years, when the economy is down the drain, unemployment is high, people can't afford groceries or a roof over their heads, and a Liberal government that may curtail unbridled handouts (big if) - THAT is the time the NDP can position themselves as the Big Government party ready to dole out large handouts to anyone and everyone AND ACTUALLY SUCCEED.
Because in that state, there will actually be a market for those policies among unemployed voters who are desperate and don't see the Liberals coming to their rescue in the same manner.
Christ! Sounds like Canada! Especially the unfortunate 18-24 year olds. And all our coffee servers,burger flippers are all imports,wanna be permanents. My son is in his 30’s and he despises the Liberal Government and all the other institutions we used to hold dear! lol Afrer riding his new Harley thru the States several times last year,I think he has serious plans to move there. Don’t blame him,gets to keep more of his income,revenue,him and his wife being contractors,owning their own businesses
Christ! Sounds like Canada’s situation,especially the 18-24 year olds. My son is in his 30’s,despises this Liberal Government,and suspicious of the rest of them. Our coffee,burger flippers are all imports. Not a pleasant situation. Excellent article Andrew,thank you
When the major parties are wings of a uniparty intent on destroying the nation, as in Britain and, quite possibly, Canada, reducing the major parties to unelectable basket cases is the only possible way forward.
I wish Canadian voters and MPs were as bolshy as the Brits.
There's a lot more daylight between our Liberal and Conservative parties than there is between UK Labour and Tories, or between Australian Labour and Liberal-National. This is thanks to the PC/Reform merger in the 2000's for the most part.
The thing that makes our CPC "unacceptable" to so many pearl clutchers and our state owned/supported media is that they want smaller government and more individual freedom, unlike the supposedly right leaning parties in these other Commonwealth countries.
We have a real alternative already but we are too scared and mentally captured to take it.
Do you have to always resort to ad hominem attacks on voters who choose not to support your preferred political party?
I've noticed this a lot from you and several other avowed "we're sick and tired of the status quo" commentators here on The Line.
A word of advice: You won't win support from unconvinced non-supporters if you continue to question their intelligence.
I'm not sure there is any persuading anyone on this anymore. The nation failed a crucial test of intelligence and maturity in 2025 and shows no indication of any correction.
I see. So all those Canadians who voted for Liberals, NDP and BQ candidates in their respective ridings are simply dumb.
Gottcha.
Not at all. They might just not care about Canada. Or Canadians.
Hey, you're the one that said it ;)
I would love to agree, but I fear that the CPC are themselves too scared and mentally captured to be who they ought to be.
Politics is finally succumbing to the numbing history of do-nothingism. Do nothing Europe, do nothing England, do nothing Canada...are all in decline...while an excellent case can be made for a do-something Trump administration and US performance.
This is, of course, red meat for all you TDSers. But voters want plans, performance and action. Trump is the only one deliverying. I hate how he does some things. You can shoot at him, swear at him, denigrate him and protest all you want but but, by God, he's getting things done.
The mid-terms will validate either us or them. Voters around the world will not be sucked in by do-nothingism much longer.
Action by itself is not governance. A guy swinging a hammer wildly is “doing something” too.
The real question is whether the action produces a durable consensus and functioning institutions afterward or just more fragmentation and backlash.
People are clearly exhausted with managerial drift and do nothing politics. Fair enough. But “at least he’s doing stuff” is a pretty low civilizational standard.
You know who else "did stuff"? Justin Trudeau. Messed with everything. Attempted to fix what wasn't broken. How did that work out?
Wisdom is knowing when to make changes, knowing whether you have the competence to make those changes without making something else far worse, and knowing when to leave things alone. Neither our past PM nor the current US President has any of that wisdom.
"pretty low standard". Only if you disregard the "small things". This just in this AM: "Thousands of parents owing more than $100,000 in child support who started losing their passports on Friday under a new State Department effort to enforce a 1996 law. The department plans to lower the threshold to $2,500."
Note JC...the law wasw implemented in 1996. Trump 1; Doing nothing 0.
Permanently destabilized international relations by repeatedly threatening to militarily invade an ally to get concessions he could have had just by asking for them: 2
Incredibly niche policy on child support probably not convincing many to pay a gazillion dollars in arrears because they are likely already bankrupt: 1
Geez, don't make me make common cause with annoying American leftists and elbows up morons.
KRM. Bluntly, "international relations" requires some destabilization. EU, Germany, UK.
Are you seriously criticising child support support?
However, you make my point: action invites criticism.
Except, of course, that Trump's "Done List" is so much longer than almost any other leader's.
lol, yes, and we're all so much better off hahahahaha, especially his own country.
Among SO MANY benefits, his country is now saddled with a record amount of debt, and climbing, (when the circumstances suggest it might be time to put a little hay in the barn), but hey, patterns of behaviour are always reliable and we might have looked at the shambles of a company his daddy left him for a preview... his success speaks for itself!
He's a real do er. So many things done, lol.
Sji..When the elder Trump died, he passed on abou $414 M. Trump's assets today are about $6.3 B. You're right, success speaks for itself.
BTW Who do you like as the next Democratic presidential candidate?
Relevance?
Are you saying I need to go along to get along because there may not be a candidate I like?
Patent bullshit.
If you're saying he's doing a better job than any Democratic candidate... as time goes by, I'm more and more convinced a mildly retarded chimp would do a better job. If Delirium Tremens stayed home, stuffed his hole with big macs and watched tv we'd be better off financially, at the very least.
Just asked a simple question, sji.
Sometimes demolition is needed. Then, swinging a hammer can be very effective.
Yes it’s pretty low. But it’s all there is.
Doing nothing is fine, even desirable, when things are going well. These days, however, ...
Dude, anything positive that Trump does, which you often have to look at sideways and in the best possible light to even see, is drowned out by two or three objectively batshit crazy things he also does.
How's annexing Greenland going? Illegally sanctioning all of his allies? Disrupting global energy supply to go to war with Iran for... reasons? Did we not have a crisis for a few months and it was getting boring? Inflation not high enough? Not to mention ruining Canada's politics with his ridiculous threats.
And even where there is a rational goal - removing illegals or getting other NATO members to contribute more for example - those could be accomplished without 95% of the negative side effects by not acting like a total unhinged psychopath while pursuing them.
TDS is a real problem but there is no world where you can justify a really disproportionate amount of the shit he has done.
What's truly amusing is that so few leaders have made so few mistakes. And the best protection from criticism for making errors is...(wait for it)...doing nothing.
DT transformed a successful RE company his daddy left him, and now he's transforming his whole country. So much transformation!
(Some get transformation by proximity to the plume of shiticulate.)
Huh?
QUOTE
You can shoot at [Trump], swear at him, denigrate him and protest all you want but but, by God, he's getting things done.
END QUOTE
Getting things done. Hm.
You know, there are some things that need doing, and other things that, if done, end up undermining shared interests.
For the President of the United States to incite racism, all the while claiming that he is "fixing" problems with US immigration policy, is surely not a thing that should have been done.
Nor, on the face of it, was it a great idea to launch a war that has actually made things much worse in the world, by shutting down trade flows to and from some of the world's biggest producers of helium, artificial fertilizers for use in agriculture, sulphur and other chemicals crucial to the manufacture of semiconductors, and so forth.
A war, by the way, that seems to have solidified the grip on power of Iran's self-serving and pernicious theocracy, and in particular its "praetorian" Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps.
It surely was also unwise to "do things" that have essentially severely undermined the USA's closest allies, and threatened Canada and Mexico with severe economic damage?
Your assessments are held post-action... 20:20 hindsight. The inclination to act--without clarity is the element under discussion here. Unlike The Line, I favour it...knowing full well that intelligent aforethought works more in favour of better outcomes than nothingism most of the time.
As a post script, I believe that voters, globallyl, are well and truly fed up with it. Time--and elections--will tell.
I see Carney (a Progressive Conservative prime minister, wearing Liberal red out of convenience) as an almost-unique beacon in the world right now of how managerial centrism _can_ still succeed, if the leader is willing to definitively renounce all the revolutionary stuff from the Second Great Social Justice Decade (2012-2022, the first being 1965-1975).
The guy just more or less cancelled the national carbon policy ($130 by 2040 is a face-saving way to say that carbon taxes aren’t happening), gender ideology is gone at a federal level, and the federal government is dropping all the DEI quotas in all the new agencies. Companies are rapidly following suit.
The one remaining Trudeau shift is IAAC and Indigenous participation in projects. And there it’s clear to me that Carney just doesn’t want a civil insurgency and is trying to make the First Nations into industrial capitalists through economic participation in pipelines (let’s see if this works).
And … it’s working. His support remains sky high.
The Ontario Liberals, and the UK electorate, are crying out for a Carney type leader. If they get one, the left and right parties will diminish again. But they need the centre-right competent leader or the vote will continue to go to Reform and Green.
Beacon? May I humbly suggest we compare and contrast what he says with what he does before rushing to any superlative adjectives.
For example, how about we the electors of this managerial 'centrist' actually gain access first to the secret MOU between Carney and the CCP about how the RCMP is to work with China's state security... but only on the Canadian side of this cozy little arrangement that is raising so much alarm from the non supporting Chinese and Hong Kong and Taiwanese diaspora totally ignored by this beacon... before crowning Carney as an example of some kind of western liberal democratic champion?
Because he spends almost no time in Canada, yet busy showing his own willingness to appear on any international stage to offer commentary about the kind of global order he would prefer, you'll have to check his latest flight plans to nail down where the beacon is currently and temporarily flashing.
The writer didn't mention a third way Labour's support has splintered: sectarian politics in the form of the Muslim Vote, an organisation promoting candidates running on a platform mainly about Gaza. 4 MPs were elected as Independents the 2024 election, and they won a number of council seats in the local elections last week (in some places the Green Party adopted the Muslim Vote platform and won, with the candidates wearing keffiyehs).
But in general, it is nuts to be running council (municipal) elections with national political party banners, when the municipalities are hugely constrained by what they are allowed to do, what they are obliged to do, and their tax raising abilities. This election had party candidates running on platforms about Gaza, immigration, and tax policy, when all the councils do is run local services (schools, social care, garbage collection), and rely on central government funding more most of it. The election was really a huge opinion poll on the national parties. Far better to have the Canadian system of non party-affiliated municipal councillors.
Not to mention the Greens are the comfortable and welcoming home for any and all anti-Semites.
The NDP does very well in Toronto.
Interesting article that gives some substance to another piece I was reading recently by Ross Douthat in the New York Times where he argues that Western society has become so fragmented and authenticity driven that it can no longer establish a durable consensus. So while the existing political order may be collapsing there are now too many competing narratives about what should replace it for any stable governing vision to emerge.
Reading this piece you can see that dynamic playing out in Britain in real time. The old center is hollowing out but what replaces it is not one coherent alternative. Instead you get fragmentation in every direction at once. Reform Greens regional nationalism generational divides identity blocs anti establishment politics and increasingly short lived governments that burn through legitimacy almost instantly.
What struck me is that it reinforces Douthat’s point that defeating the “wrong ideas” is not the same thing as building a durable governing consensus. You can beat DEI excesses beat populists beat nationalists beat the establishment whatever but none of that by itself answers the harder question of what actually holds a society together anymore.
The key line from Douthat for me was “That might be how you prevent the wrong set of ideas from establishing themselves but it’s not how you govern in the absence of consensus or how you establish a new consensus that can last.”
I think there's a key point, closer to root cause:
All organizations (companies, parties, teams, countries) take on the characteristics of their leader. If our leaders have not become more selfish, ego-driven, enthusiastic proponents of ends-justifying-means, and I think they are, we're certainly more aware of it as a result of instant reporting, and social media rumination. Perception is reality.
As a result of these forces, people withdraw, look inward, are less generous, less willing to sacrifice, because they see the example of leaders acting for themselves, or their small tribe.
Leaders own this trajectory, and strategists perpetuate it.
Many times I had the experience of knowing the rightness of my plan, and knowing that it would fail, SHOULD fail, because too many did not agree. I had special access and privileged tools to see what others could not, yet it was wrong to force the change.
We are led by fools who do not know this humility, and our society is less successful because of it. David Eby's NDP and the corrupt governance of the Capital Regional District on Vancouver Island are perfect examples, but they are endemic.
That Douthat piece is really good. Gerson-like in its ability to step back from the fray and look at the fundamentals underlying the situation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/opinion/uk-elections-post-liberalism.html
UK politics has been a shambolic mess since Cameron decided a Brexit referendum would be a smart move. They somehow seem to keep finding ever less impressive people to make PM.
This could reflect that some things are going badly in the UK. Or it could just reflect the global anti-incumbent sentiment that has played a major role in most elections worldwide since the Pandemic. Nevertheless, part of the job of a politician is to read the public mood and respond to it in a way that the public appreciates. It's hard to look at such a dramatic swing in Labor popularity and not conclude that Starmer is just not what the public wants.
So while I agree, cycling through PMs at record speed is not great, it is probably inevitable at least one more time before a more stable government gets formed. And if that's correct, best get on with it.
As the need for mass remigration becomes more and more obvious, the pool of people willing to deny it becomes less and less impressive.
I am going to make it my mission here to call you out every time you try to make “Remigration” somehow an acceptable concept within the Overton window of things that should be contemplated by polite society.
You’re talking about mass rounding-up and deportation of legal immigrants (maybe even citizens, right?) based on racial or national origin. It would require concentration camps and Trump-ICE-like storming of cities to accomplish.
We cannot allow this to happen. We would be monsters. “Remigration” is only a hairs breadth away from outright white supremacy as national policy, and needs to be completely off the table for serious consideration.
Not at all. "Remigration" literally means any migrants, including temporary residents, returning home. Scale and means are matters of discussion and debate. It's telling that we have no word for "migrants returning home" acceptable in what you call "polite society".
I personally think sending temps and lawbreakers home, plus an unwelcoming environment for welfare recipients and people who refuse to assimilate, would be a huge step forward and quite likely sufficient.
Motte and bailey fallacy. Sending lawbreakers home wouldn’t move the needle on the total number of migrants in the country and you know it.
And sending _all_ the temps home (2 million!) would require concentration camps and ICE storming of cities. Carney knows it too which is why he’s creating a path for them to all become PR and then citizens. Even if we all recognize that Trudeau made a mistake with the TFW surge, it can’t be undone now.
What does an “unwelcome environment” mean, in terms of actual policy?
Deporting 50,000 people could be done within the bounds of humane policies. Deporting 2 million will turn us into monsters.
Your papers expire, you leave willingly or get sent home. I would expect nothing less if I went to work in the US and my visa expired. I don't care what weird nudge nudge pretense they were lured here with where some shady agent told them temporary really meant permanent. We have borders for a reason and we need to prioritize the lives and interests of people already legally living here over low skill foreigners brought here for I don't even know what reason by the worst prime minister we have ever had. Anything less means our government doesn't care about Canada or Canadians.
There are like 1.2 million temporary people in Canada (students and TFWs) in this category. Do you think this is practical for those kinds of those numbers?
This kind of comment is a perfect reflection of what has happened to turn Britain into a broken state. It reflects a movement also occurring in Canada described by Matt Goodwin as, "a serious movement that is interested in representing the national majority. It has now been fully hijacked by what the economist Thomas Piketty once called the ‘Brahmin Class’, or what others call the ‘Lanyard Class’: urban, left-wing, socially cocooned, liberal if not radically progressive, morally righteous yet deeply inexperienced activists who have completely lost touch with the country." It is this movement and those who support who are breaking Canada apart right now but thinking well of themselves as champions of the victim class doing so. Arguing that nothing can be done to address those who are currently breaking our immigration system from integration into empowering separate enclaves with political clout without becoming 'monsters' is suicidal empathy in action. And sticking with the opinion guarantees support for never-ending but always increasing dysfunction.
Canada is not Britain or Western Europe. We have never had a permanent underclass of immigrants drawing welfare for generations. Multiculturalism works, or worked, here. (People call it the Canadian multicultural miracle for a reason!)
And not sure if you’ve noticed, but the Gaza protests have stopped, after accomplishing zero and having no influence on Canadian foreign policy. The centrists won.
Trudeau almost broke our system by increasing the numbers too much, but we have stopped that. We now need to swallow the slug of Trudeau-era TFWs and fake students, unfortunately, and never elect such a government again. But Carney has turned off the taps on new arrivals. We’re back to sustainable levels that can sustain the Canadian Multicultural Miracle.
Canada isn’t the UK or Europe. On this one topic, we’re better, in fact we’re the best in the world.
So we just sit back, do nothing, and watch the country enter a sectarian shithole because we do not want to be seen as "monsters". Something needs to done, now. Mass forced expulsion is not really a practical option quite apart from the left's "feelings" and worry about being called a monster. But some strong signals need to be given to get the point across, and sending lawbreakers home would be a good start. We must tackle the elephant in the room which is the refusal of large sectors of the immigrant community to be assimilated into the British culture; and even worse, the encouragement of the left to do so under the banner of Multiculturalism.
I remember being told that “None is too many” was the Canadian policy on Jewish immigration. Now being extended in Quebec to Muslims and like all Quebec initiatives can be expected to be applied in Canada within 2 to 5 years.
Source?
We don't need a mass rounding up and deportation of legal immigrants; we just need one of ILLEGAL immigrants...
https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/none-is-too-many for Jewish position
https://ccla.org/major-cases-and-reports/bill-21/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_Charter_of_Values
https://www.jogc.com/article/S1701-2163(19)30737-6/fulltext
Dr Morgentaler was from Montreal.
Spread to Canada in a few years.
Yeah, I don't think that's it.
Brexit was an own-goal, foisted by cruel cynics (and russian bots) who encouraged unhappiness for their "chance", and destroyed economic growth, so people are unhappy.
Unhappy people agitate. The merry-go-round will spin because unhappy people vote, "anything is better than this." They sure as fuck don't re-elect.
Not a bad commentary at all. Thank you.
I still think that Starmer has to go, but I can see how waiting one year and having an orderly leadership succession process would be better than immediate defenestration.
Labour Party members need to have a serious discussion about what they stand for, informed in part by serious public consultations.
Even this might not be enough to prevent Farage and company from winning a significant number of House of Commons seats in the next general elections (2028 or 2029).
But it might well be better than "let's outdo the Tories, insofar as offing our leader(s) is concerned".
The path of the Greens in the UK are perhaps what the NDP are looking for as their way out of irrelevance here in Canada.
In the coming months and years, when the economy is down the drain, unemployment is high, people can't afford groceries or a roof over their heads, and a Liberal government that may curtail unbridled handouts (big if) - THAT is the time the NDP can position themselves as the Big Government party ready to dole out large handouts to anyone and everyone AND ACTUALLY SUCCEED.
Because in that state, there will actually be a market for those policies among unemployed voters who are desperate and don't see the Liberals coming to their rescue in the same manner.
This screams the ABC Movie of the Week.
Christ! Sounds like Canada! Especially the unfortunate 18-24 year olds. And all our coffee servers,burger flippers are all imports,wanna be permanents. My son is in his 30’s and he despises the Liberal Government and all the other institutions we used to hold dear! lol Afrer riding his new Harley thru the States several times last year,I think he has serious plans to move there. Don’t blame him,gets to keep more of his income,revenue,him and his wife being contractors,owning their own businesses
Christ! Sounds like Canada’s situation,especially the 18-24 year olds. My son is in his 30’s,despises this Liberal Government,and suspicious of the rest of them. Our coffee,burger flippers are all imports. Not a pleasant situation. Excellent article Andrew,thank you
I stopped reading after the first expletive.
Do better.
Sometimes you fire the coach because you can't fire the whole team.