The guy fronting Bill C-34 is @MarcMillerVM, the same Lib who, as recently as 2023, said he wanted to throw Canadians in jail for denying the existence of fake “unmarked graves” that he helped make up. What sane Cdn trusts these people to decide what people are allowed to say?

Governments at all levels and of all stripes have been very good at creating new rules. Much less good at asking whether those rules still make sense. Over time, regulations accumulate. They pile up year after year, often long after the problem they were meant to solve has changed or disappeared altogether. The result is a system that becomes more complicated, more expensive, and less responsive to the people it’s supposed to serve. In Port Coquitlam, we’ve just finished taking a hard look at our hospitality regulations, and we went directly to the people on the ground, running hospitality businesses. Together, we called a time-out and asked some simple questions: Does this rule still serve a purpose? Can it be modernized? Can it be simplified? Should it exist at all? The result of this work is that Port Coquitlam Council has approved the elimination or modernization of dozens of out-of-date, or simply nonsensical regulations. I’m proud of this work, and how quickly we completed it. The next step is to replicate the approach in a well thought out way for our entire system of regulations and bylaws because our belief is that government shouldn’t be measured by how many rules it creates. It should be measured by whether those rules actually make life better. For more details visit portcoquitlam.ca/media

Fast Ferries seem kind of quaint, given the current NDP scandal of "whoops, we delegated the entire government to First Nations."

BC Legislature blames planning for high housing costs. Bill 44, 46, 47 pass in a rush. Bills eliminate city planning (automatic approval of market housing towers within all circles shown - overuling city approved area plans) effectively ending local planning democracy. Why? To make housing more affordable they say. But Vancouver has tripled the number of housing units in the city since 1970. No other centre city in all of North America has done nearly as much. If adding market housing lowered costs Vancouver should have North America's cheapest housing. Instead it has North America's most expensive. Adding new density near transit is good for many reasons. Sadly making housing more affordable is not one of them.

The new GG's installation speech was a decent example of something that keeps bothering me. Arbour told young Canadians "don't underestimate how lucky you are to grow up here" and described a country "pretty well on the way" to being perfect. Canada is still, on the whole, a good country. But that is a very particular perspective. It is the perspective of people for whom Canada works. And there's a growing tendency among those people who are comfortable, credentialled, institutionally secure to treat any honest reckoning with where the country is falling short as a kind of disloyalty. Mention that the economy is sclerotic, housing is broken or that the healthcare system isn't delivering or that living standards have stagnated, and you're either being unpatriotic or importing MAGA talking points. The effect is to make criticism of real problems socially impermissible among exactly the people with the power to address them.

Normally I'd think it's dumb to blame a guy who's only been PM for a year for the housing price and debt crisis, but in the case of Mark Carney, he was directly involved in what I consider the underlying causes during his time as the Governor of the Bank of Canada.

It was indigenous elites who initiated the mass Graves hoax, egged on church burnings, and turned national grief into power and Profit. Journalists do ordinary indigenous people no favours by covering up for corrupt tribal politicians. Indigenous people deserve the truth too.

I have been seeing a certain archetypal commenter in the spotlight recently; all women my age, progressive, and employed at mainstream institutions. I don't know them. Yet in every case, I can intuit their origin story. It goes something like this: > be an older millennial female, no strong passion, but strive hard in school > reach High School > steer clear of the kids who like talking about “far out” philosophical issues > also steer clear of student government and debate club, which seems too contentious and vaguely threatening > focus on getting perfect marks, complying with college reqs. Get into top uni based on those marks > get introduced to politics in freshmen social justice class, instantly floored > the appeal of college politics is just how cut-and-dried it is. Unlike other fields, it has a clear “good” and “bad” side, no ambiguity. The “good” side always wins in classroom discussions, you feel like a hero for validating consensus with "The Conversation" > politics becomes your religion, “this is my passion!” > graduate with top marks and recs. Your degree is essentially in “Current Thing-ism”. Have no broad understanding of history or philosophy. > Your concept of human events is just people being oppressed for 4000 years until feminism and progress happened in the 20th c. > despite the Global Financial Crisis, immediately get hired by a government/media org because they want someone who “understands the role of female politics in our new digital era!” > most of your colleagues share your perspective, the ones who don't are older guys on their way to retirement, not looking for the confrontation that disagreeing with you would certainly involve. > great awokening happens, double down on Current-Thingism politics > organe-man-bad and COVID happens, triple down on politics. > you are 15 years deep in your career, you have never once genuinely engaged with a peer who didn't validate your worldview or who you didn't consider a "token" opposition to placade your political enemies > vibe shift happens, establishment uncertain, time to have a "conversation" with the people you've considered deplorable > have conversation, hear non-progressive opinion that is common in the modern world, historically ubiquitous > react with schock, umbrage horror. "Can you even believe this is happening?" > confident that non-progressive opinion is trivially easy to refute, somehow have no idea how to actually refute it > unaware just how deeply you have been betrayed by your education, such that the average educated man on the street has more practical understanding of what politics is than you do with decades of "experience."

we can't defund this failed institution fast enough

"A proposal to investigate indigenous ways of knowing... backpropagation in convolutional neural networks" would instantly be approved for say $20k federal funding. I wish this was satire.

Fun fact: Canada's new AI Strategy includes the word 'indigenous' over 6 times more than 'GPU'

Uh oh! Proof of residential school excellence.

In researching the roots of the unmarked-graves panic, I re-read this 2016 @thewalrus piece, where I decried the (racist) idea of indigenous ppl as truth-telling forest elves with secret (& unfalsifiable) "knowings" from land, animals, & the dead. elves need no fact-checking…

Journalists should resolve to treat their Indigenous sources as real-life human beings—as opposed to mystic savants who channel sacred and unfalsifiable ‘knowings’, writes @jonkay. quillette.com/2026/06/03/pre…

Watch how this CBC host deceptively twists BC Conservative leader Kerry-Lynne Findlay's words here with a loaded question at the end designed to bait a response. Findlay was obviously referencing a court battle over DRIPA (which First Nations have repeatedly threatened).

In 2021, Canadian media and institutions basically hallucinated the discovery of 215 children’s bodies in a mass grave near a former Catholic residential school. The evidence: radar saw soil disturbances that could have been tree roots. A wave of church arsons ensued. People making the case for censorship often urge that destructive manias like this can be suppressed/soothed if we prevent people from communicating about them. And here was a perfect case: false information was being recklessly (or maliciously) amplified, leading to literal hate crimes. Shouldn’t the censors do something? But the mass-grave craze infected the censorship class, so opposition got targeted instead. At least one “disinformation” NGO categorized skepticism as “hate speech,” and Canada even saw efforts to criminalize so-called “denialism” (drawing an absurd comparison to the Holocaust). Good for the Globe and Mail to come clean.

and lives by himself in a 5,000 sf mansion.

Justin Trudeau: The wealthy of the world needs to "step up" and limit their wealth intake. He charges $100k for speaking.

The combination of psychologically defeating progressive education and cultural trends, and very high immigration, and 40% higher inflation adjusted minimum wage since 2005 I believe, is a very genuine tragedy that we need to crawl out of for our young people

Slight note: "Mass immigration is now over" provided we exit millions of expired and expiring low-skill temps through the gift shop. That’s still a kinetic force capable of cancelling out improvements to inflow. The basement apartment is still flooded.