There was a version of this country that worked.
This was a country that used to punch above its weight across all key metrics and in a large part, did so espousing classical liberal values.
Multiculturalism here was both uncontroversial and functional. People came from everywhere, integrated, and got on with building lives, businesses and contributing to that overall ethos Canadian culture.
Minority rights and gender equality stopped being fights and became defaults.
Ontario, the most populous province, ran one of the cleanest grids on the continent for half a century on the back of CANDU, a reactor we designed ourselves. Peaceful, homegrown, zero-carbon, clean energy, and nobody lost any sleep over it. In fact, most people probably weren’t even aware of that.
By every classical liberal measure that actually mattered, Canada was a success story that inspired the rest of the world.
I want to be precise about the word “liberal”. The small-l, “classic” version meant open markets, open minds, equal treatment, and a state clueful enough to stay out of the way. That Canada earned its stature honestly.
Then, in 2015, the big-L Liberals took over the small-l idea. They have spent a decade undertaking what looks like something between a “controlled demolition” and act of subversion.
Start with energy, our single largest missed opportunity
We can’t build pipelines. A country sitting on one of the largest energy endowments on earth cannot get its own product to its own coast or even to its own citizens. In 2017 the Trudeau government changed the rules and moved the goalposts on the Energy East pipeline which resulted in its cancellation.
Canada is sitting on the fourth largest oil reserves on earth, after other political temperate zones: Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Iran, and we import between 500K – 600K barrels per day, nearly all of it, from the United States (“Elbows Up!”)
When Germany came knocking in 2022, Chancellor Scholz flew here and asked, practically begged, for us to sell them natural gas. Russia has just invaded Ukraine, and that put the Germans (which had wisely demolished their own nuclear power grid) into an awkward spot of having to buy energy from Putin.
Our answer? There has “never been a strong business case.” Maybe we could interest the Germans in some solar panels and windmills. They went and signed a fifteen-year deal with Qatar instead. Qatar. Not exactly a human-rights exemplar, especially during Pride Month.
We did eventually sign an LNG deal with Germany, off the West Coast, in May of this year. Four years late, for volumes that would have looked modest in 2022. Better than nothing. Slower than everything.
None of this was an accident of incompetence. It was ideology. A decade of WEF-flavoured talking points, degrowth dressed up as climate virtue, and a governing instinct that treated Canadian resource wealth as something to apologize for.
Ottawa’s own reports spelled out the anti-capitalist drift in black and white (Bombthrower covered one here). When the environment file is handed to a former Greenpeace activist pinned to the far left of the spectrum, the pipeline math and the LNG math and the nuclear math all start to make a grim kind of sense.
Speaking of nuclear. The recent strategy was supposed to prove we still build things. “10 New Nuclear Reactors!” Oh boy.
Read past the headline. The plan is:
- two reactors under construction …by 2035, and
- five more “planned” (or “under development”) by… (checks notes)… 2040.
Planned. Under development. Unserious.
Meanwhile…. over in China, they’re projecting roughly 200 gigawatts of total capacity, which means about 100 new reactors, finished and powered-on by 2040. They finish a reactor in about five years, and they a couple dozen under construction simultaneously. We are going to have started two.
We invented the CANDU. We are now a rounding error in the industry we helped create.
On Indigenous affairs, honesty requires two things at once
Most people can only manage one.
The first is that the historical record is genuinely damning. Broken treaties. Mishandled reserves. The residential schools. Generational neglect. Like slavery in the United States and elsewhere across the world, our treatment of First Nations casts a long shadow, and pretending otherwise isn’t helpful.
The second is that none of us alive today built that system. Nobody alive today bears any culpability for it. How could we?
The dichotomy between responsibility and duty was always so cogently captured in a lecture I remember in college, given by the late Jack Richardson: the great Canadian producer. I remember it well, but I’ll paraphrase:
“When you’re the producer on a record, your job is to deliver the master to the label – full stop.
Anything that gets in the way of that: the bass player dies of a heroin overdose, somebody burned the studio down, the lead singer’s wife left him and now he’s out on a ledge…
…all kinds of things can go wrong and none of them may actually your fault, but every single one of them is your problem.
You have to deliver the fucking record. That’s on you“.
That is exactly where reconciliation should sit. Something we did not cause and still have to remedy… somehow.
But nothing that we do are actual remedies.
Instead of the hard, unglamorous business of clean water, functioning services and honoured agreements, we got theatre: Never-ending land acknowledgements read off laminated cards. Streets renamed, it seems deliberately, to incomprehensible text strings. Empty gestures that move no needle on any stated goal and instead breed the exact resentment they claim to be healing.
A growing share of the public has stopped seeing any of this as a lingering injustice to be addressed but now views it as a permanent guilt-management industry to tune out.
The elephant in the room: Immigration
Immigration was our masterpiece.
For decades we skimmed the cream of the planet. Skilled, educated, motivated people from every culture and country, selected through a points system that drilled down on simple KPI: can you come here, integrate, and build something? Successful applicants kept their heritage, celebrated it, added it to the mix, …and got to work.
We took people on humanitarian grounds too, generously so, but never more than we could economically and culturally absorb.
That gave us extraordinary dynamism. Entrepreneurs and investors who arrived with nothing and hit it out of the park. Chamath Palihapitiya came as a refugee from Sri Lanka and became one of the most influential venture investors of his generation.
Prem Watsa came from India and built Fairfax into a company that earned him the “Canadian Warren Buffett” tag honestly.
Legends, both. We could use as many of those as the world will send us.
Then we changed the filter.
The points system asked whether you could succeed here. The volume model, switched on after (guess when?) 2015, asked almost nothing. The targets stopped being calibrated to housing, services, and absorption capacity, and got calibrated to two different things instead: cheap imported labour for the mega-employers who lobbied for it, and a river of tuition to turn colleges into degree farms selling permanent residency with a diploma stapled to it.
The numbers got loud. Population grew faster in 2023 than in any year since the 1950s, almost entirely through immigration, into a housing market that was already broken. We’ve all seen the graph, I don’t need to repost it. By 2024 Ottawa was admitting north of 480,000 permanent residents a year, with temporary-resident inflows stacked on top that pushed the real figure far higher.
Then, even the Capital-L Liberals blinked. In late 2024 they slashed the targets and Justin Trudeau conceded, in his own words, that they “didn’t get the balance quite right.” Permanent-resident targets came down to 395,000 for 2025 and 380,000 for 2026, with brutal cuts to international students. Mark Carney, having replaced him, kept the lower numbers. Governments do not reverse that hard, that fast, on policies that are working.
Here is the part that gets people shouted down for raising, so let me be clear here:
This is a screening argument, and nothing else.
When you select immigrants, you screen. At least you’re supposed to.
Skills, language, education, and yes, background. When you stop selecting and simply move volume, you stop screening, and you get the entire Bell-curve of humanity – and quite possibly the wrong tail of it. That includes people from low-trust societies who carry their grievances and factional conflicts across the border with them, and it includes the criminal minority that any large, unvetted inflow will contain.
Ethnicity is beside the point here. The removed filter is the entire point.
The failure compounds when institutions respond to the predictable problems by looking away or dismissing credible criticisms as racism. When a serious crime involving a recent arrival gets softened in the media coverage, or when the judge sentencing a convicted violent criminal dials back the penalties in order to avoid deportation, ordinary people notice. They are not stupid.
People start rumbling about “two-tier” justice systems and “immigration discounts” for criminals, and they are correct.
True story: Racism in Canada had been all but eradicated.
This is reason I bothered writing any of this. Because it’s Canada Day. And I see too many reactions to what has happened in this country get boiled down to the lowest-IQ filter that exists: racism.
For what now seems like a bygone Golden Age, racism in this country was basically over.
Structural racism had been excised from the systems and institutions while garden variety cultural racism was confined to relatively few fringe dwellers. Every few families had one of those Archie Bunker type uncles and nobody really took them seriously.
The overwhelming majority of Canadians, born here and immigrants alike, simply did not organize their lives around skin colour. That was the win. That was paradise. We had it.
Some may say we always sorted ourselves, that Little Italy and Little India prove it (“Checkmate, multiculturists!”). They actually prove the opposite. Ethnic neighbourhoods are on-ramps: the first generation clusters for the food and the familiarity, the second scatters to the suburbs and marries out (including inter-marriage with other groups); and the whole thing runs on choice and empties itself by design. A bakery on a corner is culture. A hiring rule keyed to race is policy. The paradise ran on the former and its destruction happens on the latter.
Look at where a decade of dismantling this has left us.
For starters, racism is back from both sides, with a twist:
Structural racism came back, only this time wearing progressive branding. Job postings openly signal racial and other identity preferences. Criminal sentencing now weighs a defendant’s race, background and immigration status. A system that largely made race irrelevant has spent the last decade making it central again, then acts astonished at the reaction.
And because of that reaction cultural racism is now, also back with a vengeance. Resentment festers among perfectly normal people, including fully integrated immigrants from the earlier waves who did everything right and now watch the standard collapse behind them. That Archie-Bunker racism, the crude ambient kind we had mostly shamed out of public life, is back and being said out loud. Grassroots organizations that used to sit at the crank-fringe are growing past it. Social media runs on lowest-common-denominator rage bait, and a lot of it is now straight-up racist.
We spent forty years turning down the temperature on race in this country and it worked. Then, in the name of turning it down further, we cranked it al the way back up.
The title isn’t a joke, it’s the truth.
A classically liberal paradise is precisely what we built. Open, tolerant, prosperous, boringly functional, (“peace, order, good government”) the envy of people who had to flee places that were none of those things. The small-l achievement was real, and it was ours.
The big-L party inherited it, mistook the inheritance for a mandate to undertake a mass civilizational social engineering project, and spent a decade trading competence for platitudes, energy for symbolism, selection for volume, and hard-won racial peace for a fresh cycle of division marketed as inclusivity.
We had this one in the bag.
Now, not so much.
Happy Canada Day.
If you’re a net-producer, high agency Canadian interested in joining a like-minded group for the politically homeless in Canada, check out Ready.ca