It's 2025. Welcome to the Thunderdome.

The coming decade will be about hunkering down, rebuilding from the wreckage of the postnational era, and fighting alongside like-minded allies.

Below you’ll find a guest post from Shuvaloy Majumdar, MP for Calgary Heritage. I’ve known Shuv for years. I trust his judgment. I worried about his decision to get into politics. I still do. Even so. . . top-drawer guy.

Here’s me in the National Post today: Liberals are leaving an ungodly mess for Poilievre's Conservatives to clean up. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has the chops and the mojo to win next year’s federal election by a mile. But if he’s got a roadmap that will get us out of the catastrophe that Canada has become, I don’t know what it is, and neither do you.

Inevitability.

I’ll be coming to all that, to close off the week. For the moment, the subhead from the Post column: New report details just how easily China can mess with Canadian elections. My bet: That report sheds more light on the way “foreign interference” works in Canada than the just-begun public inquiry headed by Justice Marie-Josée Hogue ever will.

I got a kick out of being the first in the mainstream press with the report, Beyond general elections: How could foreign actors influence the prime ministership? There are important and scary findings in the investigation, by Ronaldo Au-Yeung and Alsu Tagirova, that just add to the heap of evidence that it’s folly to draw clear lines between “domestic” and “foreign” issues, policies and politics.

But news happens fast, and yesterday I got scooped by the Globe and Mail, at the Hogue inquiry, and I don’t mind at all. Mehmet Tohti of the Uyghur Rights Action Project, who’d quite publicly bailed from the deeply-compromised proceedings a few weeks ago, decided to testify after all. I didn’t know Mehmet was going to do that.

Mehmet described his own painful experience with Beijing’s agents in Canada, and summed it up this way:

“It is about hijacking your family members to force you or compel you to live [under] the rule of a hostile regime, in a democratic country like Canada. And force you to be an informant. And use all their state power, like proxies, institutions or covert agents on the ground, like police stations, just to chase you and put pressure on you to stop what you are doing.”

I did not get scooped by the CBC here, however: 2021 Conservative platform pledges to help Uyghurs made party target of China, inquiry hears. Good for the CBC. Glad to see this central fact getting closer public attention. It won’t be news to Real Story subscribers or National Post or Ottawa Citizen readers, though.

Just one example, from a year ago: China's main goal? Ensuring Canada's Conservatives would lose. Explainer, from three years ago: O'Toole's policy on China is getting a thumbs-up from pro-democracy activists. To round out our little ramble down memory lane, I wrote this five years ago, when I was with Maclean’s: The real election threat is China.

As you might imagine I’ve been pleased to notice that in recent months the penny has been dropping. As Conservatives should not be pleased to notice, it’s not just the Liberal Party that’s been a proving ground for Beijing’s “elite capture” strategy and its influence operations.

If Conservatives want to pretend this was unrelated, they should suit themselves: The Comprador in the Conservative leadership race keeps digging, and the backstory on the Conservative Party's would-be messiah and all the things he didn’t want Conservative voters to know.

For a thrill ride through that otherwise uncharted wilderness: Conservatives, the Media and CCP Psy-Ops. That will take you right back to the gaping holes that invite “foreign interference” that the just-begun public inquiry headed by Justice Marie-Josée Hogue won’t even begin to properly survey. Anyhow. . .

How bad is it? Way worse than Poilievre is letting on.

In the Post I mention in passing the Gallup organization’s World Happiness report, which ranks Canadians under the age of 30 in 58th place among the nations of the world, between Malta and Ecuador.

As recently as 2010, Canada’s under-30 set was as happy as the happiest cohort, the over-60 crowd. The happiness deficit among young people in Canada is particularly pronounced among young women, who report a third more negative emotions than young men.

This up and coming generation isn’t expected to get any happier, any time soon, and that RCMP analysis I mentioned, the “secret” report that details trends that are expected to shape the next decade or so, is chilling. Especially the observation that “many Canadians under 35 are unlikely ever to be able to buy a place to live.”

The RCMP’s “whole of government” forecast notes that the RCMP needs to be capable of responding to “new and unexpected crises,” and quite a few are on the horizon. Here’s just one: "Law enforcement should expect continuing social and political polarization fueled by misinformation campaigns and an increasing mistrust for all democratic institutions." You can read the report for yourself after you’re done here. Just click.

It’ll take radical, invasive intervention just to get to ‘normal’ again

Poilieve’s enemies are quite right in this one respect: there are going to be big, scary changes if his Conservatives get elected. Let me put that another way. They’d be right if they were saying there should be big scary changes if Poilievre’s Conservatives get elected.

Housing is the “domestic” issue at the top of everyone’s minds in Canada, even though it’s not merely “domestic” and anyway it’s really a crisis in housing availability and affordability, and it’s not so much a political crisis as a full-blown generational catastrophe.

Until very recently, Poilievre’s remedy has been an articulation of variations on the theme of this snappy slogan: “Fire Gatekeepers. Build Homes. Fast.” This was always just pissing in the wind, as the facts show, which we’ll come to.

And the public has been catching on.

Our friends over at Blacklocks’ Reporter have got a hold of an $814,741 contract the Privy Council entered into with the Strategic Counsel firm in Toronto that shows that Poilievre’s idea of witholding federal funds from municipalities that fail to raise building-permit numbers by 15 percent a year has landed with a bit of a “mixed views” thud.

Canada’s construction industry is building as fast as it can - about 250,000 homes a year. Hiking municipal building permits by 15 percent a year wouldn’t put a dent in the target the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation reckons would have to be met - 741,000 housing starts, every year, for the next six years, just to reach a dubious “affordability” target.

Quite sensibly most people in the Strategic Counsel survey said: Hey, Ottawa, you’ve really got to do something about immigration.

Lately, Poilievre has been pulled reluctantly into being more specific about his intentions: “We need to make a link between the number of homes built and the number of people we invite as new Canadians.” No kidding. He says a Conservative government with him in the wheelhouse would return Canada to a policy that “invites a number of people that we can house, employ and care for in our health-care system.” Now we’re getting somewhere.

But we need to stop kidding ourselves about the enormity of the changes that need to be put into effect to fix the mess, and the radical surgery required to do it Poilievre’s way.

But what about Canada’s “low-fertility” and “aging” population?

Like the “labour shortage,” these things are mostly works of fiction.

Canada’s population isn’t aging faster than any other G7 country. And it’s not as if those distinctly unhappy Canadians under the age of 30 stubbornly refuse to have kids. It’s that they can’t afford to, and they can’t afford homes to raise the kids in, so actual houses - single-detached homes - are being built less and less, and because they cost so much they’re available to a shrinking and increasingly wealthy fraction of the population.

The most commonly occurring Canadian household, until 1976, was two parents and three kids. After 1976, two-person households - roomates, a couple, a single parent with a child -took top spot. By 1981, people living alone (one on five households) surpassed the two-parent, three-kids household (one on six). The gap keeps widening. By 2011, less than a tenth of Canadian households coinsisted of a couple with three or more kids.

Reverse-engineering the Liberals’ Great Leap Forward

Everything the Trudeau government has done since 2015, whether by incompetence or on purpose, has ended up putting Canada at the mercy of what is probably the biggest housing bubble of all time.

The number of “temporary” work-permit holders in Canada has doubled over the past three years to at least 2.5 million, including foreign students, many if not most of whom have also been granted work permits, or are working without them. That’s six percent of the population of Canada.

Scotiabank reckons the real number would amount to eight percent of the Canadian population if you go by Ottawa’s own guesstimate of “undocumented’ residents. It’s actually more like 16 percent of Canada’s workforce, which was put at 16.5 million people as of last month.

And they all need a place to live.

Add to that about 1.2 million permanent residents admitted to Canada over the past three years, and another 866,000 who became citizens over the past three years and the final figure is. . . nobody knows.

It was only last month that Immigration Minister Mark Miller was pleading the case of the big box stores. They were getting spooked about Ottawa’s hints that it would have to do something about the public uproar over foreign students making up an increasingly huge component of the big retailers’ payrolls. “Labour shortages” and all that, old boy.

Now we’re expected to believe that Miller has seen the light, and by golly, by 2027 we’ll have brought those numbers down a bit. I’m not so sure.

There were 1,040,985 foreign students studying and working in Canada last year. Ottawa now says that this year we’ll be going into the first year of a “temporary” two-year “cap” on new foreign-student admissions. It will mean “only” 364,000 students will be admitted in 2024 (next year’s number is still up in the air) which, conveniently, is the same number of students whose study permits are set to expire this year.

Last year alone, the number of work-permit holders in Canada officially grew by 502,835 people. According to Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey, the Canadian economy grew only 417,500 jobs in 2023, as my old chum Rohana Razel points out.

Also last year, 203,300 Canadians ended up unemployed. And the tent cities across the country keep getting bigger and more numerous.

Here’s the thing.

Even if federal government was controlled by totally insane people who believed that the entire point of the Canadian economy was simply to provide jobs for people emigrating to Canada to work, we’d have 85,335 unemployed foreign work-permit holders to take care of, just from last year’s arrivals, on top of everyone else.

What the hell are we going to do?

So, good, Pierre Poilievre says he’s going to match up the number of new arrivals every year (last year Canada brought in 1.2 million newcomers, officially) with the number of new people we can house, employ and care for in our health-care system.

What do you reckon that new number would be? Say, 300,000 newcomers, give or take?

Poilievre’s formula wouldn’t require simply blocking 800,000 people on Canada’s immigration flightpath starting in 2024, and turning away all those prospective citizens, permanent residents and people arrriving via the dizzying array of temporary work-permit categories on the books.

It would mean telling perhaps two million people already here that their work-permits are being cancelled. It would mean telling more than a million foreign-students: Sorry, but once you’ve graduated or earned your diploma or whatever it is, you’re going to have to go, because we Canadians need to get ourselves sorted.

And even then, would we have managed to stabilize rents at some affordable level and bring house prices back down from the monthly-mortgage heights that only one in four Canadian households can afford to pay?

The Big World Outside

Here’s where I cede the floor to Shuvaloy Majumdar, the Honourable Member for Calgary Heritage. As I mentioned in my column today, Shuv’s been around. He was an adviser to Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird during the Harper years. He’s a respected foreign policy analyst.

This guest post is an edited version of an address Shuv delivered in the House of Commons last week.

On the rivals we must now confront

Mr. Chair, it is an honour to rise in the chamber today on the issue of our strategic partnership with Ukraine. As members know, I have been sanctioned by Russia three times. I have also had the honour of visiting Ukraine multiple times: pre-Maidan, during Maidan, post-Maidan and several times thereafter, just before the war.

I think it’s important, as we get into this debate, to take a step back and consider the environment we are in right now.

When America withdrew from Afghanistan, it signalled two things. First, it signalled the end of Pax Americana, the end of a peace that had stretched through the world in the aftermath of the Cold War and created the greatest period of peace humanity has ever known.

 The second thing it signalled was a retreat for NATO from Afghanistan, from a legitimate war it waged after an Article 5 attack on New York on September 11, 2001.

In the aftermath of NATO’s moment of retreat, we have watched all of our Cold War arrangements unfurl and the rule of law undermined.

We saw in Hong Kong the end of a deal negotiated by Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping, a deal that was supposed to last for 50 years. It ended at its halfway mark with the imposition of the national security law on the people of Hong Kong. What was the western response? It was muted.

In the aftermath of that, Russia turned up its invasion of Ukraine nearly 100-fold. It dispatched battalions of soldiers, arrogantly driving towards Kyiv with the purpose of conquest. What was the western response? It came from the White House: “President Zelenskyy, we have a plane for you, not the guns you need to fight and win the war.”

 It is interesting to me that President Putin and Xi Jinping sat at the Beijing Olympics prior to that invasion to map out their unlimited ambition around the world. Part of that ambition included not just the borders of Ukraine and the rest of the world in the Middle East and Asia; it also included ambition on Canada’s northern borders, our Arctic sovereignty.

 Only a few months ago, part of this constellation of authoritarians around the world - with their interoperable cybersecurity effects and their interoperable drone warfare systems - dispatched Iran and its constellation of proxies to wage war on the western alliance yet again. They did it via Iran in the horrific attacks of October 7 that claimed over 1,000 Israeli lives, and they did it in northern Israel with rockets launched by Hezbollah - rockets that are Iranian-built and Iranian-designed, with technologies from Russia and China.

In the aftermath of the chaos we have seen - including the conflict in Gaza, which has claimed so many lives - we also see a disruption to our global trade supply chains across the Red Sea region. Attacks by the Iranian-backed Houthis on shipping routes are driving up the cost of everything everywhere, creating chaos and disorder in international markets and compelling a response from the west to make the authoritarians stop.

Only weeks ago, the same network cut data cables in the Red Sea region that supply 25 percent of data from the Indo-Pacific region into Europe.

These are massive attacks across our western alliance, and as the west comes under attack, it is time for us, as a country, to grow up and join an alliance of democracies around the world that will reclaim policies of peace through strength, instead of experimenting with various versions of appeasement.

In this discussion, in this take-note debate today, I am encouraged by the strategic partnership with Ukraine and Canada that has been proposed and agreed to.

What is more important is implementing three particular parts of it that will define Canadian leadership, and could help change the course of history for the better.

First, Ukraine must win the war.

President Zelenskyy rose in this chamber and asked for one thing. He said to end Russia's weaponization of energy. Why would he say that? He understood that Canada is the sole NATO ally with the potential to backfill European energy demand, with $3 trillion in natural resource strength, the fourth-largest oil reserves in the world, NATO's third-largest reserves of natural gas and the capacity to scale nuclear and agricultural products and technologies for the world.

Putin today mimics Stalin nearly a century ago, bent on creating famine by weaponizing the food supply, disrupting international energy supply chains, and burning and blockading grain supplies for the developing world so that it cannot reach fragile markets.

Vladimir Putin spent years choreographing Germany's dependencies on Russian oil. Having exploited that to shake down Europe, he intervened in Syria and Libya to subvert pipelines that would have supplied Europe. He amplified misinformation against our own Canadian energy industry and ensured a steady stream of revenue of nearly $1 billion a day - $250 million a day from Germany alone - to fund the Russian war machine.

When Germany finally realized the costs of this, Chancellor Scholz and subsequently President Volodymyr Zelenskyy came knocking on our door for Canadian energy. Both times, we turned them away.

Russia and Iran scale production today, evade sanctions and provide discounted prices to Beijing to wage their wars in Europe and the Middle East. Qatar, host to Hamas, inked a 3.5-million-tonne gas deal with France just this week.

If the NDP-Liberals truly care about trading relationships that support Ukraine, then they can do the one game-changing thing that the world has been demanding, which is to end Russia's weaponization of energy and let Canadian resources be what fuels, feeds and secures the world.

Second is defence production.

In our inventories as a country, we can provide Ukrainians the CRV7 missiles they require and the mobile hospitals that were purchased but not delivered. We can provide the 155-millimetre ammunition and the light armoured vehicles they require to push back against the Russian tide.

This request came directly from Ukraine as well. It came from the Ukrainian ambassador, in our own mainstream press. He went on our cable networks to plead that the government should come to negotiate defence production and defence supply.

I am encouraged to see it as part of the strategic partnership laid out here today, but I believe it is a Conservative government that would deliver the inventory and the defence production partnerships that Ukraine requires.

Finally, there is compensation for Ukrainians as they pursue the difficult task of rebuilding their economy.

We know that Russia has $300 billion of frozen assets across the western world, of which $200 billion resides in Europe and $4 billion in the United States. Ukraine will require $600 billion to rebuild its economy.

Repurposing these frozen assets for losses, injuries and damages caused by Russian aggression in Ukraine is a critical requirement. We are at the halfway mark of that, but would it not be wonderful to think of Canada as a centre of investment, of infrastructure and of the partnerships that are required to rebuild the Ukrainian economy and the world thereafter?

We have all the know-how, the skills and the expertise across our cities and our people to be a critical part of rebuilding this vital democracy.

Let me close with this.

The democratic world needs to arrive at a shared understanding of the rivals we must now confront:

Rivals to our Atlantic alliance, most fiercely met by Ukrainian soldiers on the borders that they are fighting so hard to defend;

Rivals across the Middle East, with our partners there, with borders that they deserve to maintain and with terrorist extremists that deserve to be defeated;

Rivals that are threatening the order of the Indo-Pacific region; and rivals that require deterrence to know that the resolve of the world is against their ambition to reorganize the world and that Canada would be a fierce and vital part of that partnership.

I am thankful for the opportunity to provide some views in this debate. Conservatives support the strategic partnership with Ukraine as an important step forward, and we believe that our future Conservative government will deliver the energy, the munitions and materiel, and the compensation for investment and infrastructure that Ukraine requires.