As Things Fall Apart, A Question.

Did it happen on purpose or by mistake?

That’s one question among many about Canada that I can’t answer by interrogation of the facts alone, so I’m left to guess. I expect it’s probably a bit of both “deliberately” and “by accident,” with more precise answers to be found within the Liberal government’s chronic incompetence and hubris.

In any case, I try, in the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen today, in Liberal-induced housing disaster cannot go on. It looks at how Canada’s dramatically worsening standard of living is compounded by the emergence of a semi-official, quasi-underground workforce that is set to reach four million people by the end of this year. And they all need roofs over their heads. It’s about how Canada is being up-zoned into a new country where it’s practically impossible to raise a family unless you’re rich.

Unless and until I encounter evidence to the contrary my conclusion is as I have put it elsewhere: This is what you get when you set out to transform Canada into a borderless post-national confederation of intersectional racial and gender-identity oblasts.

You know what else you get? A Department of National Defence that takes the serious, peer-reviewed Canadian Military Journal and empties it of any inquiry into why recruitment has crashed or why our navy is sinking at dockside or why Canada’s military spending is falling off a cliff while the rest of the G7 girds its defences against Beijing, Moscow and Tehran. Instead, you fill the journal’s pages with critical-studies think pieces that take a “feminist intersectional trauma-informed approach to reimagine and transform CAF culture” from the ashes of its patriarchal white supremacist legacy.

My contribution today follows on this piece from a couple of weeks ago, Immigration and housing — the elephants in Canada's crisis room, along with this piece from last November, Canadians go full European on immigration skepticism. Also Real Story analyses, most recently: Nearing Nine Years Since Year Zero.

As seen on television. Not pictured: A landscape of Liberal-friendly landlords, university administrators and well-to-do strip mall college entrepreneurs preying upon an underclass of exhausted renters, homeless people and foreign guest workers.

Not to go full ‘I told you so’ but here’s me from five years ago, when I first noticed that Canada wouldn’t have an “economy” at all were it not for the influx of easily exploitable newcomers in a variety of increasingly opaque federal categories: On immigration, Trudeau simply tells us what we want to hear.

As my pre-newsletter readers will know I was as proud as the next guy about Canada’s newcomer-welcoming “points-based” immigration tradition which was quietly subjected to an assisted-dying policy, and I’m exceedingly well-disposed to vigorous refugee resettlement, and unapologetically hostile to the outsourcing of immigration policy to lobbyists for lazy and unscrupulous employers. Here’s me from ten years ago, when the Stephen Harper’s Conservatives were genuinely trying to fix the corrupt Temporary Foreign Workers Program.

I lamented back then that nobody in that racket had gone to prison. My remedy for the so-called labour shortage then is my remedy now: Invest properly in apprenticeships, pay decent wages, offer decent benefits, and if you can’t run a business in this way then shut the hell up or shut the hell down. Nowadays we dress up that same folly in hipster newspeak: We need to make room for digital nomads, man.

I’ll be filing my next newsletter from Jerusalem, continuing my work on the war that’s taken so much of my attention since October 7, the wider war that establishment opinion persists in cautioning Israel against inciting, as though that wider war had not already been underway for years now.

That’s all for now.