"Canadians recognize the challenges." and "Canadians have already shown they’re willing to accept difficult truths."
Please. Where is the evidence for these claims? As far as I can tell the ONLY challenge Canadians are prepared to recognize is Trump and the collective response to his BS suggests the entire country is on SSRIs. We now have 20 months (and counting!!) of sitting on our collective asses fretting about Trump while the house that is Canada continues to rot. It's as if Trump has given the populace an excuse to do SFA about this place. I am already looking forward to next spring's announcement of an upcoming meeting between the PM and Premiers to discuss interprovincial trade barriers - followed by nothing.
We are a polite people. The polite thing to do when someone asks "how are you?" is to say "great." What we are doing to ourselves is the national equivalent. Instead of saying things aren't fine and we need to change, we'd rather be nice.
If any government ever wanted a blank cheque to bring in wholesale structural reforms to the Canadian economy and way of doing things, they have it now. Any objections, just say "Orange Man Bad" and you are absolved of everything.
Carney can use this rare leverage to remove anti-development laws, remove First Nations defacto veto powers, actually build pipelines and mines, reform the tax codes, and build the military. These changes will bring in way more investments than any investment conference ever would.
OR, he could simply respond with retaliatory tariffs and industry specific bailouts.
I wish it were so. But in an oligarchy/aristocracy which Canada has effectively been since the days the white colonialists arrived, the mechanisms for change are either very few or non existent.
Some elements which would help would be eliminating the forced French language education of a fifth of the Canadian population. By effectively preventing a large segment of the population from learning the language of free markets you reduce their opportunities to improve themselves and effectively create a lower caste of workers who have limited opportunities outside the confines of the “Laurentian plantation” and must look to their superiors to survive.
Eliminating the power of the political party system which with the current system of having centralized candidate approvals by the party whose interest in kowtowing to their party establishment results in choices between bland individuals with little to choose from. The presence of 75 percent government subsidization of political contributions reinforces this inertia.
With the suppression of free speech embodied in vaguely defined hate speech legislation and de facto censorship by compromised mass media, controls on electronic media, etc , not to mention the unseemly haste to disarm the Canadian population, I despair to see how any consensus on a way forward that doesn’t preserve the power of Canada’s current oligarchy.
The status of French in Canada is perhaps unique in the entire world. We expend untold financial and cultural resources propping up what would otherwise be, let's face it, a de facto dead language in North America, ostensibly so that a tiny minority can stubbornly refuse to (or not have the opportunity to) learn a word of English so long as their first language is French. As you point out, this has the effect of keeping these people uncompetitive in the general market and beholden to government in a number of ways.
This has also mutated into a means of keeping the country run by a bilingual elite which reside almost exclusively in Montreal and Ottawa, based on an ability conferred by geography far more often than talent or even desire. It promotes a characteristic - bilingualism - that for any other language would be a minor piece of personal history and slight situational advantage, into something that can carry your entire career without any other particular skills. No wonder it is held so sacred by those so advantaged. Madness.
Bilingualism and / or biculturalism is central to the founding of our country. It's not some add-on concession to the French. A quick check shows that 13% of quebecers are anglophone and 50% are bilingual.
The unfortunate outcome for Anglo Canada is that the majority of the country is left out of the machinery of government, either by virtue of geography ( they don't live in the Ottawa/Montreal triangle), or because French is, in some cases, not even the second language. The result being that political parties and more importantly the public service, really are Laurentian centric and operate in that world view. There is no fix for that with our history and constitution.
Canada would immediately become a vastly more governable and reasonable place if Quebec separated. The East/West and left/right political imbalances would be immediately fixed, federal politics would become much more accessible to the 87% of Canadians who are not fluently bilingual, and somehow there would be far less corruption.
Someone should write an alternate history novel on if Quebec voted yes in 1995. Somehow I can see where both Quebec and ROC are doing better in 2026 than we are now.
ROC would be richer per capita than Switzerland, Steven Harper would still be PM, and Quebec would decide to attempt to save the French language by welcoming every French speaking immigrant with a pulse, becoming the most ethnically diverse nation on earth.
The country was founded on a lie. French is only regionally important. That is indisputable fact. Trying to engineer the entire country into a Trudeaupian ideal is not only doomed to fail, but also a pointless distraction. Provinces that want to promote French are free to do so. They should also bear the full cost of detaching from global innovation.
Yeah, and French immersion programmes are very popular right across the country, not only because learning a second language makes you smarter, but because parents recognize that learning French increases your opportunities and exposes you to all that another culture has to offer.
All excellent reasons, beside it being foundational to our country, to learn and promote the French language.
The main attraction of French immersion is that it acts as publically funded private school: no special education students, smaller class sizes and students from generally more privileged demographics
I've met a shocking number of people who went through French immersion who claim to have no functional proficiency as an adult. It's very hard to keep much less gain proficiency in a language that is totally irrelevant to your daily life.
I learned to speak Chinese. I use it everyday, because I can find Chinese online, and there are people around me who speak it. I live in Eastern Canada.
If I can do that, you can make the effort to maintain your French.
I took French in high school, as well as Spanish and Latin. I live in Calgary and never encounter French outside reluctant interaction with the feral government. I work in a STEM field so Latin has been useful. It also bettered my understanding of English grammar. I frequently encounter Spanish in Calgary and of course while traveling in the US. It is only in parochial Laurentian Canada that French is elevated far beyond its real world importance.
They're popular because they're a free way out of the tolerance public schools have for disorder in the name of equity. It's 100% about the mix of students, and people openly admit that.
It also gives your kids an edge in Federal civil service competitions and if you make it in it qualifies you for a supervisory position. Plus like all the elite schools from Harvard to Western on down, who you meet is 90 percent of the value. This is how the elite reproduces.
Perhaps this is a chance to arrest a decline decades in the making.
Unfortunately, I do not believe that chance will be taken advantage of.
Not when the bulk of the electorate is economically illiterate, wants more of the pie rather than wanting to grow the pie, wants others to pay for their increased share of the shrinking pie, and have never read a single Auditor General's report (you only need to read one - the same fiscal incompetence and malfeasance is repeated and documented in each report given that nothing is ever done about it).
The fact that Justin Trudeau was elected PM in three successive elections tells you all you need to know about the bulk of the Canadian electorate, and is an excellent indicator of how likely Canadians are to shed complacency and sloth in favour of ambition.
As Dr. McCoy said to Captain Kirk, "it's dead, Jim".
“The fact that Justin Trudeau was elected PM in three successive elections tells you all you need to know about the bulk of the Canadian electorate, and is an excellent indicator of how likely Canadians are to shed complacency and sloth in favour of ambition.”
A perfect summary. Well-done. I wish I wrote that paragraph.
However, in the absence of a suggestion as to what society can do in conjunction with politicians and public servants to bring about the reversal of the trends you've identified, I'm afraid the article left me feeling little but despair.
Respectfully, a general goal needs to be articulated. Say, for example, aim to:
* lead in the exploration of Mars, or
* become more deeply integrated with countries in sub-Saharan Africa over the next decade, in order to take advantage of promising demographic and economic trends there, or
* build a high-speed rail network that links all of Canada's major cities, from Halifax to Vancouver, by 2060.
If not these, perhaps we could aim to:
* greatly boost original and leading edge research and development in the medical, biotech and pharmaceutical sectors, with a view to creating effective treatments for major illnesses, including Malaria, Dengue Fever, Ebola, Zika, and degenerative neurological diseases, or
* lead in the development of "green tech" in the mining sector, or
* build capacity in the field of nuclear fusion.
Finally, we could consider how to exploit things that Canada has and which need to be taken up the value chain. For example, we could seek to use our vast forestry resources to build top-quality, yet affordable pre-fabricated housing for domestic use and for global export.
The only impediment to Canada's potential would be to indulge in the usual Canadian tendency to worry about "the risks" of doing bold things, coming up with outrageous ideas and then doing what's necessary to make them a reality.
Not our strong suit, but what better time to change the paradigm than now.
I agree that we need specific proposals, but your choice of goals makes no sense to me. With the exception of nuclear fusion, not one of the goals you mention draws upon our comparative advantages. In biotech, for example, we don't even merit a participation ribbon. Energy and critical minerals are the essential characteristics of this new economy and Canada is blessed with an abundance of both (indeed, they explain Trump's abnormal interest in our corner of the globe). Why not resurrect Harper's aspiration to make Canada a global energy superpower and, at the sane time, take the necessary steps to develop our critical mineral resources? The first steps are simple: remove the UNDRIP from our legislative framework, amend the Impact Assessment Act, block Chinese investment in our energy and mining sectors, and both foster and celebrate an entrepreneurial rather than a bureaucratic culture.
I was writing "wild ideas" in part to underscore the point, which is that the only thing that holds us back is our lack of imagination.
This is evident every day in the business sector, where the mindset is shaped either by access to government granted oligopolies, or the view that it only ever makes sense to sell to the United States, because they speak English and they are close.
We need to get our house in order and play to our strong suit: the land.
House in order:
- remigration, as third world migrants are a net drain
- cut broad public sector, including NGOs. We can't afford them. They are mostly useless, and remigration frees up many Uber eats opportunities for them to support themselves.
The land:
- nuclear icebreakers at Churchill
- railway from North Bay to Churchill to open up mining on the Shield
- amend s. 35 so indigenous lose their veto
-force through resource projects
-modest tariffs on the capital goods needed for resource projects, so we build equipment here
- build a reputation so that if you want a project in any frontier area, you need Canadian goods and expertise
Redirecting our manufacturing so that it supported resource extraction would also be great for national unity.
Dark skin is fine, if they are born here and integrated with Canadian culture. Migrants are different - there is plenty of evidence that, on average, they are a net economic drain on Canadian society.
I was thinking this exactly: This essay has a good thesis but is too heavily laden with AI verbiage and very short on actionable examples of "sweeping change." I think the author could do better.
Canadians are so not ready for sweeping change. Also, Canada is not a serious country and it is a country that can't get anything built or done. So, as mentioned, Canadians are so not ready for sweeping change.
If Carney were honest about the trade dispute requiring war like mobilization, he would :
-expedite trade agreements with Pacific rim countries to provide preferred access to oil, LNG, potash, critical minerals and agriculture
-remove roadblocks to building export infrastructure (pipelines, ports, roads, rail), which would likley involve time boxing environmental reviews and consultations to a few months and exercising Parliamentary Supremacy to subvert lawsuits and the Supreme Court
-critical minerals do not provide leverage if they are in the ground. As above, the Feds need to remove roadblocks to get mines up and running in 4 or 5 years
-redirect federal resources to dividing the TCH through BC, upgrading all roads leading to the Port of Vancouver to limited access and grade separating rail lines such that port becomes one of the world's most efficient. The same needs to be done for transportation to the Ring of Fire
-reforming Federal labor law that allows unions to get in the way of operating the world's most efficient transportation network
-changes in tax laws, government funding and legal liability to significantly diminish the ability for activist groups to obstruct. The Harper government had many ideas back in the day
-most of all, a change in political messaging to label obstructionist NGOs, activist groups, unions, academics, lawyers, politicians and government relations firms as bad Canadians
And that might be what we would expect if this was really a war or other "existential threat".
Except it's all BS and the actions or lack thereof by politicians, and the non-reaction by markets all week, confirm that. Catastrophe Carney is blowing hot smoke up our asses again just like his best buddy Donald Trump.
We’re supposed to have a Representative Democracy.
Representative democracy doesn't mean representatives just doing what the people want. Direct democracy would be far more effective for that (and it’s not like we don’t have the technology now.) Representative democracy means representatives doing what the people would do if they had sufficient information, time, ability and inclination to do so. And a major part of finding out what that should be, is discussing and deliberating with their colleagues.
Parliament should be a collection of individuals who vote based on a proposal's merits instead of its party origin, not a few working MPs, half of whom do nothing except gainsay what the other half does, and all of whom are backed by about 250 partisan drones.
The problem, I say, is politicians, and more particularly, the elections we use to put them in office. Those elections, which have degenerated into popularity contests based on who can bribe the people with their own money, have produced not a democracy, but an oligarchy.
Votes don’t make democracy - representation does!
If you want a statistically representative sample of a population, you take a random sample of a sufficient size to satisfy a desired confidence and margin of error. This is basic statistics.
You can use some basic filters to enhance the pool you draw from, but it should be clear that most of today’s politicians aren’t that much smarter than average.
In other words, turn parliament into a randomly chosen citizen’s assembly.
Lots of details to work out like length of term, how to pick cabinet etc., but these are not insurmountable problems.
Expecting different results from doing the same thing over and over again is insanity. Just like politics today. (Or me beating my head against the wall here on this topic …)
The fact that random lottery for Parliament is starting to sound like a better idea than what we have, really says something about the state of our democracy and government.
Having seen several extensive and over-complicated job interview processes in the private sector, I likewise started to think that a better method would be to cut anyone obviously unsuitable based on qualifications and cursory informal meeting, then draw lots among who is left. I'm willing to bet that on average you would get at least as good results as a three-stage interview process.
A random collection of people found at any bus stop in Canada could likely run this country better than the current self-aggrandising clapping seals who sit the MP benches.
That's exactly the point, and it's not just an understandable comment born out of frustration, there's real evidence for it - see the writing of Helene Landemore for more.
Everything you've written is bang-on. Not going to happen, mind you, but it's a good list.
Also, Poilievre could theoretically save his own skin and promise electoral reform as a central plank in its platform. That would change the channel with immediate effect. Don't promise a committee to study it - that's what the liberals do. For me, just state that electoral reform will be a reality and watch what happens. For me, Pierre Poilievre is finished it looks like.
Considering how bad the polls are, Poilievre should be coming up with some really wild ideas. Broad democratic and electoral reform. Re-open the constitution. Loud anti-corruption scheme including auditing all the Covid money and prosecuting those who stole public funds. Plan for radical and enforceable government transparency so he has a real response whenever Liberals quash a committee investigation. Areas where the Liberals can't follow him because they are central to their advantages or DNA. It doesn't even have to be feasible because he's not going to have to implement it any time soon. (And also make secret peace with the media companies so he isn't running against every reporter in the country.)
He literally has nothing to lose at this point but continues to play it safe in hopes that Trump abruptly drops dead and Joe and Jane Boomer start caring about cost of living and "powerful paychecks". They have no cost of living because they own a solid gold house outright and don't care about paychecks because they are fucking retired and watch CBC all day FFS.
It's like watching a tragedy in real time. The one guy who might have actually made real positive changes just seemingly evaporating because he refuses to play the game or take any risks.
Yes, he made it painfully obvious when he pandered to the far right (going completely to the dark side by supporting those convoy #{}#%^s) instead of making meaningful policy reform recommendations to the middle while doing both with a snarly instead of a serious attitude.
To paraphrase President Andrew Shepherd in The American President “This is a time for serious people, Pierre, and your fifteen minutes are up.”
I was going to add - give Doug Ford a large bag of money under cover of night and hire Kory Teneyke as a 'consultant' for about $300K a year. That would be the Liberal solution and would fix about half of the party unity problem.
But it could happen if we all make an effort. First thing is to agree that it's a better solution, then to believe it's possible, then make an effort in convincing those around us. Eventually we reach a tipping point.
Note that there is now a random assembly in the province of East Belgium, and they are being used in many municipalities in both Europe and the US.
The modern word for this is sortition.
There's lots more on the wikipedia page for it as well as numerous other sites.
Helene Landemore has written extensively and with empirical evidence shows that sortition assemblies can and do arrive at solutions that seem outside the grasp of elected assemblies. David van Reybrouck is another author, and Brett Hennig has a number of YouTube videos on it.
Who chose comfort? As someone in my mid-30s, I don't feel I've gotten much of that. If the boomers wanted their children to live better than they did, living much better than their own parents in retirement on the backs of their children is not such a way to show it.
The issue is we're not just asking people to endure discomfort for an indefinite future time periods, we're asking younger generations in particular to do it after having not even enjoyed the prosperity others did through relatively good times. Even worse, after having effectively subsidized the prosperity of older generations (through both home prices and increasing spending on retirement benefits).
The scale of sacrifice that the geriatrics in this country would have to make *just to allow young people to enjoy the same share of their own incomes after housing that previous generations did*, however soft those incomes might be, is so enormous that they won't even think about it. And that's before any further belt-tightening that comes from the pie having actually shrunk due to trade wars or other global circumstances. They may have previously consoled themselves that we could grow our way out of problems that arose entirely an expectation they would enjoy more than they earned (on both housing appreciation and public benefits) but it's not any single even that made that unreasonable.
At this point, I'm not willing to make any sacrifice for the country until the boomers not only sacrifice, but have a worse standard of living than I do, given what they inherited compared to what they left. I don't think many people my age are. Elbows up!
What counterpoint? She acknowledges whatever patience currently exists is on borrowed time. I'm not going to put words in anyone's mouth, but I feel whatever disagreement is there is likely just a matter of degree.
Just as comfort made us complacent, I think being uncomfortable will inevitably inspire people too. Not merely in the exciting, possibility-opening sense, or even because necessity forces innovation, but because people will take more chances when the calculus starts to favour “may as well”, when they have less to lose and more to gain from taking one.
My concern is how much those who still have plenty to preserve will be able to block those increasingly inclined to take that chance.
We all know some of that is generational. Our ability to progress has been limited not only by demographic outflanking, but, I think, by kindness too, because those standing in the way are, by and large, our parents. We’re understandably reluctant to upset them, but there’s a limit to how much of our own future we can sacrifice to preserve their expectation of abundance, particularly when most would still be nowhere near actual hardship, even with quite a bit less.
But it’s of course broader than that, too. The system we’ve been working within for too long simply made complacency remarkably rewarding. You could get rich off rising assets without producing anything, businesses could prosper in relatively easy markets or by running the clock on government work, and those same governments could administer this decline without paying much of a political price for it. I think we underestimate how unusual it is for someone not to become complacent when their circumstances simply don’t demand anything else. Conversely, I’m not sure hard times make people stronger so much as make taking a chance more rational when the comfortable option stops being particularly comfortable.
Luckily (in a way), this really isn’t a moment when we can resist change in the hope of preserving that old normal. The change is already happening, and it won’t be preserved no matter what we do. The question is how much of our resources we waste coddling those who benefited from the old bargain and aren’t ready to admit it isn’t coming back, or whether we speed up that realization and make sure the incentives now run the other way.
I think that means people and institutions that refuse to adapt actually need to feel some consequences for refusing to. We can’t keep rewarding preservation while asking the people trying to build something new to absorb all the risk.
That will likely require changing our social framing. People who feel they’re merely enjoying what they earned, or businesses merely operating as they always have, probably don’t feel like they’re doing anything wrong. But we’re approaching, if not already beyond, the point where demanding that the country protect your expectations at the expense of what it needs to become, and what it needs to do to make sure no one can threaten us quite so easily again, starts to look not just complacent, but a little unpatriotic.
If this really is a nation-building moment, patriotism can’t just mean an admittedly heartening collective freakout when we’re threatened. It has to mean being willing to change with the country, compete for it, build something for it, and sometimes accept less from it, so we can come out of this with something better than what we went in with.
Canada needs truth and leadership. It needs Premiers who act in haste to remove every and all interprovincial trade barriers. It needs to address the realities that will be imposed by climate change. It needs leaders to look towards the future instead of trying to just stay in power. It needs to address the impending freshwater crisis. It needs to address that the US will never again be a reliable trading partner.
We, and the world, are facing problems we're not ready to honestly address because politicians are afraid to hand out bad news. We're paying for programs we can't afford with borrowed money. What we're doing is not sustainable. It's time for serious people to tell the truth. Are there any?
What is the point of Canada if it continues to be a poorer and less dynamic place than the US?
If Canada's elites would sacrifice even an bit, then perhaps Canadians would believe in the project more. But instead our elites invest elsewhere and have one foot out the door.
Canada reminds me of a national version of the company town that is used to extract and then when done the company leaves and let's the town decline into nothing.
Mike, with respect, I think you need to lower your expectations of Canadians, and our willingness to accept positive change.
Quite frankly, having lived in Canada longer than Mike Meyers and Mark Carney combined, I am not sure my expectations can be lowered any further.
The citizens of this Country have neither the stomach, nor the desire to accept that so much is wrong, and that so much needs to change.
I live in a riding that would vote Liberal if the Party ran a burnt out stump painted red. My vote doesn’t count.
I have paid millions of dollars in personal and business taxes, and I have substandard access to healthcare, education, and benefits as a result.
The social contract was broken ten years ago.
We were told we were a racist, genocidal, colonialist nation living on stolen land.
We became the most woke Country in the world. We invited the diseases of postmodernism and deconstructionism into our schools, our lives, our governments, and our institutions.
The point I am trying to make, is that the exact same Canadians would vote for the exact same economic, cultural, regulatory, and tax regime fiasco again, and again, and again.
George Grant said it best in 1965: “The Liberal Party left us like fish on the shore of a dying lake.” (Lament for a Nation)
Mike, thank you for trying. I think you are genuine, and I applaud your writing subject, both in content and in style. However, friend, I respectfully suggest you are far too optimistic.
For me there was no social contract. Everything must be viewed through the reality that if Quebec doesn't like it, even a small amount, it ain't happening.
That is how Canada has operated all my life and I am 60 next year.
When I was young, we walked to school everyday. Folks watched out for the kids walking to school.
First day of baseball season, the Dads organized an “Opening Day” parade where we would walk through the streets of Northridge (North London) to Little League Park.
We attended Sunday school, Cubs and Scouts, and we were brought up to appreciate the beneficence of our British heritage, our traditions and values, and that we stood on the shoulders of giants. Western Civilization was a gift to be treasured.
We believed we could do as well or better than our parents.
We paid higher taxes, but that was the price of being a Canadian citizen.
That social contract is long gone, but I sure do remember my now 92 year old mum counting on that baby bonus cheque each month so we could eat something more than grocery store brand KD.
I hope Mr. Carney reads this piece and recognizes his limited communucation anf policy are drift, as you described.
His best and immediate solution is to rescind many of the green, anti-oil and anti-business regulations passed by his predecessor.. Let our citizens and businesses achieve and succeed.
"Canadians recognize the challenges." and "Canadians have already shown they’re willing to accept difficult truths."
Please. Where is the evidence for these claims? As far as I can tell the ONLY challenge Canadians are prepared to recognize is Trump and the collective response to his BS suggests the entire country is on SSRIs. We now have 20 months (and counting!!) of sitting on our collective asses fretting about Trump while the house that is Canada continues to rot. It's as if Trump has given the populace an excuse to do SFA about this place. I am already looking forward to next spring's announcement of an upcoming meeting between the PM and Premiers to discuss interprovincial trade barriers - followed by nothing.
Well-done, Gordo.
Bingo !!!
We are a polite people. The polite thing to do when someone asks "how are you?" is to say "great." What we are doing to ourselves is the national equivalent. Instead of saying things aren't fine and we need to change, we'd rather be nice.
That quote is straight-up, in-your-face bafflegab - a hallmark of the Trudeau years.
Maybe, but I think both are correct. The problem is governments that are loathe to be forthright with Canadians.
All politicians lie. Everyone knows this at a cellular level.
If any government ever wanted a blank cheque to bring in wholesale structural reforms to the Canadian economy and way of doing things, they have it now. Any objections, just say "Orange Man Bad" and you are absolved of everything.
Carney can use this rare leverage to remove anti-development laws, remove First Nations defacto veto powers, actually build pipelines and mines, reform the tax codes, and build the military. These changes will bring in way more investments than any investment conference ever would.
OR, he could simply respond with retaliatory tariffs and industry specific bailouts.
I think we all know which way this is going.
He has had 18 months to initiate any or all of your excellent proposals.
You are correct..."a rare leverage" moment. I hope you err on your second prediction.
I wish it were so. But in an oligarchy/aristocracy which Canada has effectively been since the days the white colonialists arrived, the mechanisms for change are either very few or non existent.
Some elements which would help would be eliminating the forced French language education of a fifth of the Canadian population. By effectively preventing a large segment of the population from learning the language of free markets you reduce their opportunities to improve themselves and effectively create a lower caste of workers who have limited opportunities outside the confines of the “Laurentian plantation” and must look to their superiors to survive.
Eliminating the power of the political party system which with the current system of having centralized candidate approvals by the party whose interest in kowtowing to their party establishment results in choices between bland individuals with little to choose from. The presence of 75 percent government subsidization of political contributions reinforces this inertia.
With the suppression of free speech embodied in vaguely defined hate speech legislation and de facto censorship by compromised mass media, controls on electronic media, etc , not to mention the unseemly haste to disarm the Canadian population, I despair to see how any consensus on a way forward that doesn’t preserve the power of Canada’s current oligarchy.
The status of French in Canada is perhaps unique in the entire world. We expend untold financial and cultural resources propping up what would otherwise be, let's face it, a de facto dead language in North America, ostensibly so that a tiny minority can stubbornly refuse to (or not have the opportunity to) learn a word of English so long as their first language is French. As you point out, this has the effect of keeping these people uncompetitive in the general market and beholden to government in a number of ways.
This has also mutated into a means of keeping the country run by a bilingual elite which reside almost exclusively in Montreal and Ottawa, based on an ability conferred by geography far more often than talent or even desire. It promotes a characteristic - bilingualism - that for any other language would be a minor piece of personal history and slight situational advantage, into something that can carry your entire career without any other particular skills. No wonder it is held so sacred by those so advantaged. Madness.
Bilingualism and / or biculturalism is central to the founding of our country. It's not some add-on concession to the French. A quick check shows that 13% of quebecers are anglophone and 50% are bilingual.
The unfortunate outcome for Anglo Canada is that the majority of the country is left out of the machinery of government, either by virtue of geography ( they don't live in the Ottawa/Montreal triangle), or because French is, in some cases, not even the second language. The result being that political parties and more importantly the public service, really are Laurentian centric and operate in that world view. There is no fix for that with our history and constitution.
Canada would immediately become a vastly more governable and reasonable place if Quebec separated. The East/West and left/right political imbalances would be immediately fixed, federal politics would become much more accessible to the 87% of Canadians who are not fluently bilingual, and somehow there would be far less corruption.
Yes and if Alaska and Hawaii can function quite nicely as full members of the USA so could the Maritimes.
Someone should write an alternate history novel on if Quebec voted yes in 1995. Somehow I can see where both Quebec and ROC are doing better in 2026 than we are now.
ROC would be richer per capita than Switzerland, Steven Harper would still be PM, and Quebec would decide to attempt to save the French language by welcoming every French speaking immigrant with a pulse, becoming the most ethnically diverse nation on earth.
I honest to God think Quebec uses Canada and it's noblesse oblige payments and protected market as a crutch.
One thing is for sure and has been for over a century, without Quebec voters the country would be way more to the right.
The country was founded on a lie. French is only regionally important. That is indisputable fact. Trying to engineer the entire country into a Trudeaupian ideal is not only doomed to fail, but also a pointless distraction. Provinces that want to promote French are free to do so. They should also bear the full cost of detaching from global innovation.
You guys really look for things to be grouchy about.
Yeah, and French immersion programmes are very popular right across the country, not only because learning a second language makes you smarter, but because parents recognize that learning French increases your opportunities and exposes you to all that another culture has to offer.
All excellent reasons, beside it being foundational to our country, to learn and promote the French language.
The main attraction of French immersion is that it acts as publically funded private school: no special education students, smaller class sizes and students from generally more privileged demographics
Oh it's so easy, just learn, duh.
I've met a shocking number of people who went through French immersion who claim to have no functional proficiency as an adult. It's very hard to keep much less gain proficiency in a language that is totally irrelevant to your daily life.
I learned to speak Chinese. I use it everyday, because I can find Chinese online, and there are people around me who speak it. I live in Eastern Canada.
If I can do that, you can make the effort to maintain your French.
I took French in high school, as well as Spanish and Latin. I live in Calgary and never encounter French outside reluctant interaction with the feral government. I work in a STEM field so Latin has been useful. It also bettered my understanding of English grammar. I frequently encounter Spanish in Calgary and of course while traveling in the US. It is only in parochial Laurentian Canada that French is elevated far beyond its real world importance.
They're popular because they're a free way out of the tolerance public schools have for disorder in the name of equity. It's 100% about the mix of students, and people openly admit that.
It also gives your kids an edge in Federal civil service competitions and if you make it in it qualifies you for a supervisory position. Plus like all the elite schools from Harvard to Western on down, who you meet is 90 percent of the value. This is how the elite reproduces.
1995 referendum scared the living shit out of the establishment
“Eliminating the power of the political party system …
YES! See my post below on random assemblies.
Perhaps this is a chance to arrest a decline decades in the making.
Unfortunately, I do not believe that chance will be taken advantage of.
Not when the bulk of the electorate is economically illiterate, wants more of the pie rather than wanting to grow the pie, wants others to pay for their increased share of the shrinking pie, and have never read a single Auditor General's report (you only need to read one - the same fiscal incompetence and malfeasance is repeated and documented in each report given that nothing is ever done about it).
The fact that Justin Trudeau was elected PM in three successive elections tells you all you need to know about the bulk of the Canadian electorate, and is an excellent indicator of how likely Canadians are to shed complacency and sloth in favour of ambition.
As Dr. McCoy said to Captain Kirk, "it's dead, Jim".
“The fact that Justin Trudeau was elected PM in three successive elections tells you all you need to know about the bulk of the Canadian electorate, and is an excellent indicator of how likely Canadians are to shed complacency and sloth in favour of ambition.”
A perfect summary. Well-done. I wish I wrote that paragraph.
Not quite, it might also tell you how many people thought the alternative was worse.
I have been declining my ballot for quite some time- because I believe elections themselves are the problem. See my post on random assemblies below.
Well, people who thought the alternative was worse merely serve to emphasize my point.
Sorry, but if you think that then you're committing a false dichotomy and a non sequitur at the same time ...
This was a good read.
However, in the absence of a suggestion as to what society can do in conjunction with politicians and public servants to bring about the reversal of the trends you've identified, I'm afraid the article left me feeling little but despair.
Respectfully, a general goal needs to be articulated. Say, for example, aim to:
* lead in the exploration of Mars, or
* become more deeply integrated with countries in sub-Saharan Africa over the next decade, in order to take advantage of promising demographic and economic trends there, or
* build a high-speed rail network that links all of Canada's major cities, from Halifax to Vancouver, by 2060.
If not these, perhaps we could aim to:
* greatly boost original and leading edge research and development in the medical, biotech and pharmaceutical sectors, with a view to creating effective treatments for major illnesses, including Malaria, Dengue Fever, Ebola, Zika, and degenerative neurological diseases, or
* lead in the development of "green tech" in the mining sector, or
* build capacity in the field of nuclear fusion.
Finally, we could consider how to exploit things that Canada has and which need to be taken up the value chain. For example, we could seek to use our vast forestry resources to build top-quality, yet affordable pre-fabricated housing for domestic use and for global export.
The only impediment to Canada's potential would be to indulge in the usual Canadian tendency to worry about "the risks" of doing bold things, coming up with outrageous ideas and then doing what's necessary to make them a reality.
Not our strong suit, but what better time to change the paradigm than now.
I agree that we need specific proposals, but your choice of goals makes no sense to me. With the exception of nuclear fusion, not one of the goals you mention draws upon our comparative advantages. In biotech, for example, we don't even merit a participation ribbon. Energy and critical minerals are the essential characteristics of this new economy and Canada is blessed with an abundance of both (indeed, they explain Trump's abnormal interest in our corner of the globe). Why not resurrect Harper's aspiration to make Canada a global energy superpower and, at the sane time, take the necessary steps to develop our critical mineral resources? The first steps are simple: remove the UNDRIP from our legislative framework, amend the Impact Assessment Act, block Chinese investment in our energy and mining sectors, and both foster and celebrate an entrepreneurial rather than a bureaucratic culture.
I was writing "wild ideas" in part to underscore the point, which is that the only thing that holds us back is our lack of imagination.
This is evident every day in the business sector, where the mindset is shaped either by access to government granted oligopolies, or the view that it only ever makes sense to sell to the United States, because they speak English and they are close.
“… in the absence of a suggestion as to what society can do in conjunction with politicians …
See my post on random assemblies below.
And aside from all your business suggestions, there is also the matter of fixing the tax system … see my response (deep) in Valerie’s thread below.
We need to get our house in order and play to our strong suit: the land.
House in order:
- remigration, as third world migrants are a net drain
- cut broad public sector, including NGOs. We can't afford them. They are mostly useless, and remigration frees up many Uber eats opportunities for them to support themselves.
The land:
- nuclear icebreakers at Churchill
- railway from North Bay to Churchill to open up mining on the Shield
- amend s. 35 so indigenous lose their veto
-force through resource projects
-modest tariffs on the capital goods needed for resource projects, so we build equipment here
- build a reputation so that if you want a project in any frontier area, you need Canadian goods and expertise
Redirecting our manufacturing so that it supported resource extraction would also be great for national unity.
The more I think of your proposals, the more appalled I am.
Whether you are aware of it or not, what you have written is, in many respects, a Maple MAGA manifesto.
"Third world migrants"? "Net Drain"?
Why don't you come out and say what is implied "We don't want dark skinned people, particularly Muslims, in this country"?
Dark skin is fine, if they are born here and integrated with Canadian culture. Migrants are different - there is plenty of evidence that, on average, they are a net economic drain on Canadian society.
I was thinking this exactly: This essay has a good thesis but is too heavily laden with AI verbiage and very short on actionable examples of "sweeping change." I think the author could do better.
Canadians are so not ready for sweeping change. Also, Canada is not a serious country and it is a country that can't get anything built or done. So, as mentioned, Canadians are so not ready for sweeping change.
If Carney were honest about the trade dispute requiring war like mobilization, he would :
-expedite trade agreements with Pacific rim countries to provide preferred access to oil, LNG, potash, critical minerals and agriculture
-remove roadblocks to building export infrastructure (pipelines, ports, roads, rail), which would likley involve time boxing environmental reviews and consultations to a few months and exercising Parliamentary Supremacy to subvert lawsuits and the Supreme Court
-critical minerals do not provide leverage if they are in the ground. As above, the Feds need to remove roadblocks to get mines up and running in 4 or 5 years
-redirect federal resources to dividing the TCH through BC, upgrading all roads leading to the Port of Vancouver to limited access and grade separating rail lines such that port becomes one of the world's most efficient. The same needs to be done for transportation to the Ring of Fire
-reforming Federal labor law that allows unions to get in the way of operating the world's most efficient transportation network
-changes in tax laws, government funding and legal liability to significantly diminish the ability for activist groups to obstruct. The Harper government had many ideas back in the day
-most of all, a change in political messaging to label obstructionist NGOs, activist groups, unions, academics, lawyers, politicians and government relations firms as bad Canadians
And that might be what we would expect if this was really a war or other "existential threat".
Except it's all BS and the actions or lack thereof by politicians, and the non-reaction by markets all week, confirm that. Catastrophe Carney is blowing hot smoke up our asses again just like his best buddy Donald Trump.
If we could just get real transparency from our elected officials, that would be a huge step in the right direction.
WAKE UP PEOPLE!!
We’re supposed to have a Representative Democracy.
Representative democracy doesn't mean representatives just doing what the people want. Direct democracy would be far more effective for that (and it’s not like we don’t have the technology now.) Representative democracy means representatives doing what the people would do if they had sufficient information, time, ability and inclination to do so. And a major part of finding out what that should be, is discussing and deliberating with their colleagues.
Parliament should be a collection of individuals who vote based on a proposal's merits instead of its party origin, not a few working MPs, half of whom do nothing except gainsay what the other half does, and all of whom are backed by about 250 partisan drones.
The problem, I say, is politicians, and more particularly, the elections we use to put them in office. Those elections, which have degenerated into popularity contests based on who can bribe the people with their own money, have produced not a democracy, but an oligarchy.
Votes don’t make democracy - representation does!
If you want a statistically representative sample of a population, you take a random sample of a sufficient size to satisfy a desired confidence and margin of error. This is basic statistics.
You can use some basic filters to enhance the pool you draw from, but it should be clear that most of today’s politicians aren’t that much smarter than average.
In other words, turn parliament into a randomly chosen citizen’s assembly.
Lots of details to work out like length of term, how to pick cabinet etc., but these are not insurmountable problems.
Expecting different results from doing the same thing over and over again is insanity. Just like politics today. (Or me beating my head against the wall here on this topic …)
The fact that random lottery for Parliament is starting to sound like a better idea than what we have, really says something about the state of our democracy and government.
Having seen several extensive and over-complicated job interview processes in the private sector, I likewise started to think that a better method would be to cut anyone obviously unsuitable based on qualifications and cursory informal meeting, then draw lots among who is left. I'm willing to bet that on average you would get at least as good results as a three-stage interview process.
A random collection of people found at any bus stop in Canada could likely run this country better than the current self-aggrandising clapping seals who sit the MP benches.
That's exactly the point, and it's not just an understandable comment born out of frustration, there's real evidence for it - see the writing of Helene Landemore for more.
Everything you've written is bang-on. Not going to happen, mind you, but it's a good list.
Also, Poilievre could theoretically save his own skin and promise electoral reform as a central plank in its platform. That would change the channel with immediate effect. Don't promise a committee to study it - that's what the liberals do. For me, just state that electoral reform will be a reality and watch what happens. For me, Pierre Poilievre is finished it looks like.
Or is he?
Considering how bad the polls are, Poilievre should be coming up with some really wild ideas. Broad democratic and electoral reform. Re-open the constitution. Loud anti-corruption scheme including auditing all the Covid money and prosecuting those who stole public funds. Plan for radical and enforceable government transparency so he has a real response whenever Liberals quash a committee investigation. Areas where the Liberals can't follow him because they are central to their advantages or DNA. It doesn't even have to be feasible because he's not going to have to implement it any time soon. (And also make secret peace with the media companies so he isn't running against every reporter in the country.)
He literally has nothing to lose at this point but continues to play it safe in hopes that Trump abruptly drops dead and Joe and Jane Boomer start caring about cost of living and "powerful paychecks". They have no cost of living because they own a solid gold house outright and don't care about paychecks because they are fucking retired and watch CBC all day FFS.
It's like watching a tragedy in real time. The one guy who might have actually made real positive changes just seemingly evaporating because he refuses to play the game or take any risks.
He's the wrong guy. Can't close the deal. I think the Conservatives are going to split up. The vitriol I'm seeing online is a good barometer I think.
Yes, he made it painfully obvious when he pandered to the far right (going completely to the dark side by supporting those convoy #{}#%^s) instead of making meaningful policy reform recommendations to the middle while doing both with a snarly instead of a serious attitude.
To paraphrase President Andrew Shepherd in The American President “This is a time for serious people, Pierre, and your fifteen minutes are up.”
I was going to add - give Doug Ford a large bag of money under cover of night and hire Kory Teneyke as a 'consultant' for about $300K a year. That would be the Liberal solution and would fix about half of the party unity problem.
Not going to happen only if we say it's not.
But it could happen if we all make an effort. First thing is to agree that it's a better solution, then to believe it's possible, then make an effort in convincing those around us. Eventually we reach a tipping point.
Note that there is now a random assembly in the province of East Belgium, and they are being used in many municipalities in both Europe and the US.
The modern word for this is sortition.
There's lots more on the wikipedia page for it as well as numerous other sites.
Helene Landemore has written extensively and with empirical evidence shows that sortition assemblies can and do arrive at solutions that seem outside the grasp of elected assemblies. David van Reybrouck is another author, and Brett Hennig has a number of YouTube videos on it.
Oh, anything is possible. Bring on electoral reform.
Who chose comfort? As someone in my mid-30s, I don't feel I've gotten much of that. If the boomers wanted their children to live better than they did, living much better than their own parents in retirement on the backs of their children is not such a way to show it.
The issue is we're not just asking people to endure discomfort for an indefinite future time periods, we're asking younger generations in particular to do it after having not even enjoyed the prosperity others did through relatively good times. Even worse, after having effectively subsidized the prosperity of older generations (through both home prices and increasing spending on retirement benefits).
The scale of sacrifice that the geriatrics in this country would have to make *just to allow young people to enjoy the same share of their own incomes after housing that previous generations did*, however soft those incomes might be, is so enormous that they won't even think about it. And that's before any further belt-tightening that comes from the pie having actually shrunk due to trade wars or other global circumstances. They may have previously consoled themselves that we could grow our way out of problems that arose entirely an expectation they would enjoy more than they earned (on both housing appreciation and public benefits) but it's not any single even that made that unreasonable.
At this point, I'm not willing to make any sacrifice for the country until the boomers not only sacrifice, but have a worse standard of living than I do, given what they inherited compared to what they left. I don't think many people my age are. Elbows up!
Read the comments of MustardClemtine above for a very good counterpoint to your viewpoint.
What counterpoint? She acknowledges whatever patience currently exists is on borrowed time. I'm not going to put words in anyone's mouth, but I feel whatever disagreement is there is likely just a matter of degree.
Read it again only slower.
Try making your own arguments sweetie.
Lose the condescension.
People your age would probably do well not to antagonize the people you'll count on in old age if you're to get any support at all.
Just as comfort made us complacent, I think being uncomfortable will inevitably inspire people too. Not merely in the exciting, possibility-opening sense, or even because necessity forces innovation, but because people will take more chances when the calculus starts to favour “may as well”, when they have less to lose and more to gain from taking one.
My concern is how much those who still have plenty to preserve will be able to block those increasingly inclined to take that chance.
We all know some of that is generational. Our ability to progress has been limited not only by demographic outflanking, but, I think, by kindness too, because those standing in the way are, by and large, our parents. We’re understandably reluctant to upset them, but there’s a limit to how much of our own future we can sacrifice to preserve their expectation of abundance, particularly when most would still be nowhere near actual hardship, even with quite a bit less.
But it’s of course broader than that, too. The system we’ve been working within for too long simply made complacency remarkably rewarding. You could get rich off rising assets without producing anything, businesses could prosper in relatively easy markets or by running the clock on government work, and those same governments could administer this decline without paying much of a political price for it. I think we underestimate how unusual it is for someone not to become complacent when their circumstances simply don’t demand anything else. Conversely, I’m not sure hard times make people stronger so much as make taking a chance more rational when the comfortable option stops being particularly comfortable.
Luckily (in a way), this really isn’t a moment when we can resist change in the hope of preserving that old normal. The change is already happening, and it won’t be preserved no matter what we do. The question is how much of our resources we waste coddling those who benefited from the old bargain and aren’t ready to admit it isn’t coming back, or whether we speed up that realization and make sure the incentives now run the other way.
I think that means people and institutions that refuse to adapt actually need to feel some consequences for refusing to. We can’t keep rewarding preservation while asking the people trying to build something new to absorb all the risk.
That will likely require changing our social framing. People who feel they’re merely enjoying what they earned, or businesses merely operating as they always have, probably don’t feel like they’re doing anything wrong. But we’re approaching, if not already beyond, the point where demanding that the country protect your expectations at the expense of what it needs to become, and what it needs to do to make sure no one can threaten us quite so easily again, starts to look not just complacent, but a little unpatriotic.
If this really is a nation-building moment, patriotism can’t just mean an admittedly heartening collective freakout when we’re threatened. It has to mean being willing to change with the country, compete for it, build something for it, and sometimes accept less from it, so we can come out of this with something better than what we went in with.
“… we underestimate how unusual it is for someone not to become complacent when their circumstances simply don’t demand anything else.“
Like the quote from Upton Sinclair: It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
You might enjoy these:
https://www.mustardclementine.com/p/you-probably-arent-as-nice-as-you
https://www.mustardclementine.com/p/we-wont-fix-populism-until-we-admit
Excellent post!!
Canada needs truth and leadership. It needs Premiers who act in haste to remove every and all interprovincial trade barriers. It needs to address the realities that will be imposed by climate change. It needs leaders to look towards the future instead of trying to just stay in power. It needs to address the impending freshwater crisis. It needs to address that the US will never again be a reliable trading partner.
We, and the world, are facing problems we're not ready to honestly address because politicians are afraid to hand out bad news. We're paying for programs we can't afford with borrowed money. What we're doing is not sustainable. It's time for serious people to tell the truth. Are there any?
What is the point of Canada if it continues to be a poorer and less dynamic place than the US?
If Canada's elites would sacrifice even an bit, then perhaps Canadians would believe in the project more. But instead our elites invest elsewhere and have one foot out the door.
Canada reminds me of a national version of the company town that is used to extract and then when done the company leaves and let's the town decline into nothing.
Mike, with respect, I think you need to lower your expectations of Canadians, and our willingness to accept positive change.
Quite frankly, having lived in Canada longer than Mike Meyers and Mark Carney combined, I am not sure my expectations can be lowered any further.
The citizens of this Country have neither the stomach, nor the desire to accept that so much is wrong, and that so much needs to change.
I live in a riding that would vote Liberal if the Party ran a burnt out stump painted red. My vote doesn’t count.
I have paid millions of dollars in personal and business taxes, and I have substandard access to healthcare, education, and benefits as a result.
The social contract was broken ten years ago.
We were told we were a racist, genocidal, colonialist nation living on stolen land.
We became the most woke Country in the world. We invited the diseases of postmodernism and deconstructionism into our schools, our lives, our governments, and our institutions.
The point I am trying to make, is that the exact same Canadians would vote for the exact same economic, cultural, regulatory, and tax regime fiasco again, and again, and again.
George Grant said it best in 1965: “The Liberal Party left us like fish on the shore of a dying lake.” (Lament for a Nation)
Mike, thank you for trying. I think you are genuine, and I applaud your writing subject, both in content and in style. However, friend, I respectfully suggest you are far too optimistic.
For me there was no social contract. Everything must be viewed through the reality that if Quebec doesn't like it, even a small amount, it ain't happening.
That is how Canada has operated all my life and I am 60 next year.
I am 64 next year, so we are not too far off.
When I was young, we walked to school everyday. Folks watched out for the kids walking to school.
First day of baseball season, the Dads organized an “Opening Day” parade where we would walk through the streets of Northridge (North London) to Little League Park.
We attended Sunday school, Cubs and Scouts, and we were brought up to appreciate the beneficence of our British heritage, our traditions and values, and that we stood on the shoulders of giants. Western Civilization was a gift to be treasured.
We believed we could do as well or better than our parents.
We paid higher taxes, but that was the price of being a Canadian citizen.
That was the social contract.
That social contract is long gone, but I sure do remember my now 92 year old mum counting on that baby bonus cheque each month so we could eat something more than grocery store brand KD.
I could go on for hours about the Canada I once knew.
I didn’t leave Canada, She left me.
I hope Mr. Carney reads this piece and recognizes his limited communucation anf policy are drift, as you described.
His best and immediate solution is to rescind many of the green, anti-oil and anti-business regulations passed by his predecessor.. Let our citizens and businesses achieve and succeed.
Well said Mike, thank you!!