After a decade spinning in a maelstrom, we’re headed straight into a hurricane.

The Trudeau Liberals’ hegemonic hold on Canada’s political, cultural and economic life is now officially and formally winding down. Parliament has been prorogued until March 24, although it isn’t certain that Canada will have a new Parliament with a new prime minister even by June, when Canada is supposed to be hosting the G7, by which time the Liberals are expected to have a new leader too.

Who knows. We’ll get there. Justin Trudeau will be gone, but this is what you should bear in mind as Canada careens and lists and tumbles out of this mess.

The world’s first “postnational state” that Trudeau inaugurated in 2015, with the able assistance of Dominic Barton’s McKinsey & Company and all the resources the Canada-China Business Council threw at the project, was never intended to be some four-year thing to be evaluated by voters in the ordinary course of events.

It was built to be permanent. Its undoing will require one hell of an effort, and in the meantime Donald Trump’s inauguration – a $150 million extravaganza funded by Pfizer, OpenAI, Amazon, Meta and a constellation of cryptocurrency firms – is set for January 20.

That’s just two weeks away, and Trump has pledged to impose what would be a crippling 25 percent tariff on goods from Canada and Mexico “on Day 1” unless measures regarding flows of illegal migrants and drugs are somehow stopped.

We’ll see. The thing is, on Day 1, Canada’s federal government will be locked in the interregnum between the Trudeau epoch and Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s new “common sense” order. We’re sitting ducks.

What would a Conservative Great Leap Forward look like?

Poilievre deserves much credit for correctly diagnosing the several possibly fatal wounds the Justin Trudeau decade has inflicted on this country. About that, here’s something I found fascinating over the holiday hiaitus.

It would be worth your time to take in Poilievre’s conversation with Dark Web archdruid Jordan Peterson over the weekend, and then have a listen to the year-end remarks of the lonesome American socialist warlord Bernie Sanders.

Going by my own 90-minute encounter with Peterson a couple of weeks ago I can say that it isn’t easy to keep the conversation going exactly along the lines one might prefer. Not to criticize Peterson’s interviewing style but I can’t fault Poilievre for failing to get into any number of the the existential dysfunctions Canada is enduring.

Even so, Poilievre comes off more like an intelligent and slightly nerdy Canadian version of Bernie Sanders than the doofus Canadian iteration of Donald Trump that the Liberals and New Democrats have so strenously tried and failed to make him out to be.

Fun example: On Saturday, the NDP MP Peter Julian attributed Poilievre’s popularity to a “massive foreign interference strategy. . . the only reason Pierre Poilievre is leader of the Conservative Party right now.” He didn’t say this while drunk in a private conversation among fellow NDPers. Julian said this publicly, on the insufferable Elon Musk’s X, drawing on a thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory from last August.

At least the Conservatives are not crazy people

Today, the Feast of the Epiphany, is the anniversary of the Trumpist insurrection of January 6, 2021, an event that remains an open and profoundly embarrassing wound among Americans. I fully realize that there are some yobbish Putin fanciers at the outer fringes of Canada’s Conservative Party, but give me a break.

Can you imagine Canadian Conservatives storming Parliament Hill, smashing windows and breaking down doors and baying for blood? Of course you can’t. And you certainly can’t imagine Poilievre even coming close to countenancing such conduct, so don’t even try.

I don’t carry any water for Poilievre, but I am persuaded that he’s genuinely and sincerely concerned about the wretched state of affairs to which working-class Canadians have been reduced. Besides, Poilievre isn’t just the best alternative we’ve got. He’s the only alternative. Jagmeet Singh’s New Democrats are a caricature of the party they inherited, so here we are.

My National Post readers and this newsletter’s subscribers will know that I am not bubbling with optimism that Poilievre’s remedies can possibly heal what Canada has sustained. Without getting into all that, I’ve had my say, and while Poilievre’s overall analysis of the Trudeau era’s calamities is grounded in hard facts and driven by empathy, his “Axe the tax, Build the homes, Fix the budget, Stop the crime” remedies are woefully insufficient to the circumstances of the real world.

For starters, the immediate crisis a Poilievre government will face is the major cause of the economic dislocation we’re facing, and he’s been quiet about it: It’s not just that Canada’s housing and jobs economies have no room for roughly three million people in this country who are here on various kinds of “temporary” status. It’s more like 4.9 million people whose visas are going to expire before the end of this year.

No amount of tax-axing is going to deal with this, and you’d need something along the lines of a Mao-era Great Leap Forward to “build the homes” to house them all in residential markets that would be even vaguely affordable for most people. And to do that you’d have to tear down Canada’s cities and build a grim Leninplatz on top of each heap of rubble.

Here’s just one other little thing that could stand in the way of any effective legislative agenda that Poilievre might want to embark upon. Almost all the current occupants of the Upper Chamber are senators appointed by Justin Trudeau. So, that’ll be fun: on top of everything else, the prospect of forcing a constitutional crisis just to get anything done.

Not to be dreary, but about the brokenness, but see Notes on the Coming Disturbances, and a earlier assessment: Nearing Nine Years Since Year Zero, So there’s all that.

It’s not just Canada that’s broken. It’s the Liberal Party.

To build the new postnational state in place of what we’ve been badgered to understand as the genocidal old-stock white supremacist settler-state patriarchy that Trudeau so gallantly set out to save from itself, the Liberal Party had to be refashioned to serve as the conduit to Parliamentary power and privilege. See It’s 2025. Welcome to the Thunderdome.

Bear in mind that Justice Marie-Josée Hogue’s Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions is expected to issue its final report before the end of this month. The inquiry’s long-delayed and filibustered timetable had anticipated that Hogue’s proposed structural changes would be in place well before what was presumed to be an October 2025 federal election.

Here’s the thing about that. Never mind that owing to Team Trudeau’s rewriting of the party constitution we still don’t know who elected Trudeau to the leadership of the Liberal Party in the first place, and there’s been no inquiry into the massive infusions of weirdly coordinated Mandarin-bloc donations to Trudeau’s own riding association warchest in the aftermath of his 2015 capture of a Parliamentary majority.

See: Liberals are leaving an ungodly mess for Poilievre’s Conservatives to clean up; New report details just how easily China can mess with Canadian elections. In that piece, and in the Thunderdome newsletter, I refer at length to the findings in this in-depth analysis published by the Canadian International Council: Beyond general elections: How could foreign actors influence the prime ministership?

While all the talking-head punditry and chat-show panelists are preoccupied with speculation about just who might emerge as Justin Trudeau’s successor, here’s just one fact that has gone unnoticed. If you simply happen to be domiciled even temporarily in this country, you only have to be 14 years old to cast your vote for the next leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.

All for now.

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Canada Desperately Needs a Baby Bump

C2C Journal

Canada Desperately Needs a Baby Bump

Published on July 4, 2025

Todayville

By Michael Bonner

The 21 st century is going to be overshadowed by a crisis that human beings have never faced before. I don’t mean war, pestilence, famine or climate change. Those are perennial troubles. Yes, even climate change, despite the hype, is nothing new as anyone who’s heard of the Roman Warm Period, the Mediaeval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age will know. Climate change and the others are certainly problems, but they aren’t new.

But the crisis that’s coming is new.

The global decline in fertility rates has grown so severe that some demographers now talk about “peak humanity” – a looming maximum from which the world’s population will begin to rapidly decline. Though the doomsayers who preach the dangers of overpopulation may think that’s a good development, it is in fact a grave concern.

In the Canadian context, it is doubly worrisome. Our birth rates have been falling steadily since 1959. It was shortly after that in the 1960s when we began to build a massive welfare state, and we did so despite a shrinking domestically-born population and the prospect of an ever-smaller pool of taxable workers to pay for the expanding social programs.

Immigration came to the rescue, and we became adept at recruiting a surplus population of young, skilled, economically focused migrants seeking their fortune abroad. The many newcomers meant a growing population and with it a larger tax base.

But what would happen if Canada could no longer depend on a steady influx of newcomers? The short answer is that our population would shrink, and our welfare state would come under intolerable strain. The long answer is that Canadian businesses, which have become addicted to abundant, cheap foreign labour through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, would be obliged to invest in hiring, training and retaining Canadian workers.
Provincial and federal governments would scramble to keep older Canadians in the workforce for longer. And governments would be torn between demands to cut the welfare state or privatize large parts of it while raising taxes to help pay for it.

No matter what, the status quo won’t continue. And – even though Canada is right now taking in record numbers of new immigrants and temporary workers – we are going to discover this soon. The main cause is the “peak humanity” that I mentioned before. Fertility rates are falling rapidly nearly everywhere. In the industrialized West, births have fallen further in some places than in others, but all countries are now below replacement levels
(except Israel, which was at 2.9 in 2020).

Deaths have long been outpacing births in China, Japan and some Western countries like Italy. A recent study in The Lancet expects that by 2100, 97 percent of countries will be shrinking. Only Western and Eastern sub-Saharan Africa will have birth rates above replacement levels, though births will be falling in those regions also.

In a world of sub-replacement fertility, there will still be well-educated, highly skilled people abroad. But there will not be a surplus of them. Some may still be ready and willing to put down roots in Canada, but the number will soon be both small and dwindling. And it seems likely that countries which have produced Canada’s immigrants in recent years will try hard to retain domestic talent as their own populations decline. In contrast, the population of sub-Saharan Africa will be growing for a little longer. But unless education and skills-training change drastically in that region, countries there will not produce the kind of skilled immigrants that Canada has come to rely on.

And so the moment is rapidly approaching when immigration will no longer be able to make up for falling Canadian fertility. Governments will have to confront the problem directly—not years or decades hence, but now.

While many will cite keeping the welfare state solvent as the driving force, in my view this is not the reason to do it. The reason to do it is that it is in Canada’s national interest to make it easier for families to have the number of children that they want. A 2023 study by the think-tank Cardus found that nearly half of Canadian women at the end of their reproductive years had fewer children than they had wanted. This amounted to an average
of 0.5 fewer children per woman – a shortfall that would lift Canada close to replacement level.

The United Nations Population Fund (UNPF) has noticed the same challenge on a global scale. Neither Cardus nor the UNPF prescribes any specific solutions, but their analysis points to the same thing: public policy should focus on identifying and removing barriers families face to having the number of children they want.

Every future government should be vigilant against impediments to family-formation and raising a desired number of children. Making housing more abundant and affordable would surely be a good beginning. Better planning must go into making livable communities (not merely atomized dwellings) with infrastructure favouring families and designed to ease commuting. But more fundamentally, policy-makers will need to ask and answer an uncomfortable question: why did we allow barriers to fertility to arise in the first place?

The original, full-length version of this article was recently published in C2C Journal.

Michael Bonner is a political consultant with Atlas Strategic Advisors, LLC, contributing editor to the Dorchester Review, and author of In Defense of Civilization: How Our Past Can Renew Our Present.

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Court compels RCMP and TD Bank to hand over records related to freezing of peaceful protestor’s bank accounts

Published on July 4, 2025

Todayville

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms announces that a judge of the Ontario Court of Justice has ordered the RCMP and TD Bank to produce records relating to the freezing of Mr. Evan Blackman’s bank accounts during the 2022 Freedom Convoy protest.

Mr. Blackman was arrested in downtown Ottawa on February 18, 2022, during the federal government’s unprecedented use of the Emergencies Act. He was charged with mischief and obstruction, but he was acquitted of these charges at trial in October 2023.

However, the Crown appealed Mr. Blackman’s acquittal in 2024, and a new trial is scheduled to begin on August 14, 2025.

Mr. Blackman is seeking the records concerning the freezing of his bank accounts to support an application under the Charter at his upcoming retrial.

His lawyers plan to argue that the freezing of his bank accounts was a serious violation of his rights, and are asking the court to stay the case accordingly.

“The freezing of Mr. Blackman’s bank accounts was an extreme overreach on the part of the police and the federal government,” says constitutional lawyer Chris Fleury.

“These records will hopefully reveal exactly how and why Mr. Blackman’s accounts were frozen,” he says.

Mr. Blackman agreed, saying, “I’m delighted that we will finally get records that may reveal why my bank accounts were frozen.”

This ruling marks a significant step in what is believed to be the first criminal case in Canada involving a proposed Charter application based on the freezing of personal bank accounts under the Emergencies Act.