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This week on the Blendr Report, returning guest Brian Isted, an 11-year veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces who deployed to Iraq with Canadian Forces Intelligence Command, helps us make sense of the leaked confidential report explaining how Canada’s military is breaking down, the 300,000-soldier mobilization fantasy signed by Canada's Chief of Defence Staff, Jennie Carignan. The hybrid war Brian was monitoring as a cyber intelligence analyst in real time without realizing the enemy had already won. And Meta's overnight deletion of millions of bot accounts.

Each story arrives like a separate news cycle. Brian’s read is that they’re the same story.

Take recruitment. Canada lowered the threshold so far that the basic officer course, designed to pass people, is no longer passing them. Brian’s framing puts the problem on the brass, not on numbers. The same leadership that condemned its own barracks for mold and houses its troops in modular tents is now floating a plan to expand the supplementary reserve from 4,384 retired members to 300,000 ordinary Canadians and public servants. There’s no budget attached, no timeline, no plan for who would train these people. What it has is a paperwork structure that could be repurposed for conscription if the moment ever arrives.

Take fentanyl. Precursor chemicals ship from China. If a foreign nation killed 100,000 people a year with bullets, the country would call it war. Because it happens through black markets and supply chains, nobody calls it anything.

What ties the four stories together is a single question Brian keeps circling: what does it mean to defend a country whose institutions are already losing the non-kinetic war?

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Extended and Ad Free Version of Blendr Report EP165: Ex-Soldier Explains Why Canada’s Military is Collapsing From Within

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In Episode 164 of The Blendr Report, we examine four stories that reveal the fractures running through Canada's institutions. From the Armed Forces to policing, from economic policy to street protests.

The CAF Cohesion Crisis

A Canadian Armed Forces training platoon composed of 83% non-citizens reportedly devolved into ethnic infighting, exposing a fundamental problem with the military’s rapid diversification efforts. When the institution responsible for national defence can’t maintain cohesion in a training environment, what does that signal about operational readiness?

This isn’t just about recruitment numbers or meeting quotas. It’s about whether you can build a functional fighting force when the overwhelming majority of a unit doesn’t share citizenship, let alone common values or cultural frameworks. The military requires a level of trust and cohesion that transcends normal workplace dynamics — these are people who must be willing to risk their lives for one another.

The ethnic infighting reveals what happens when you prioritize demographic targets over operational effectiveness. As Jonathan observed, the military is supposed to be a family where everyone has each other’s back. When deep-rooted cultural differences create division instead of unity, you don’t have a team.

Carney’s $25 Billion Gambit

Mark Carney announced Canada’s first sovereign wealth fund with $25 billion in seed money, positioning it as an economic strategy to build national wealth. But the timing raises questions about whether this represents genuine long-term economic planning or pre-election political maneuvering.

We analyze whether a sovereign wealth fund makes sense for a country already running massive deficits, and whether the Carney government has the fiscal discipline to make this work or if it’s simply another vehicle for political spending dressed up as economic policy.

May Day Violence & Double Standards

Montreal’s annual May Day protest once again clashed with police, continuing a pattern of sanctioned left-wing protest violence that stands in stark contrast to how the Freedom Convoy was treated. While the convoy was characterized as a foreign-funded insurrection despite zero evidence, these annual labor protests — openly endorsed by communist organizations, Cuban government fronts, and foreign revolutionary groups — receive virtually no scrutiny.

Ontario labor unions are openly allied with the Consulate General of Cuba, the Bolshevik Tendency, and the Worker Communist Party of Iran. Yet somehow this doesn’t qualify as foreign influence, while a grassroots trucker protest becomes a national security threat.

The double standard isn’t accidental.

The Policing Collapse

In our paid subscriber segment, we examine the collapse of police clearance rates across Canada, where half of all violent crimes now go unsolved. This represents a fundamental breakdown in public safety and the social contract — when crimes don’t get solved, when criminals don’t face consequences, the entire justice system loses legitimacy.

These four stories aren’t separate issues. They’re symptoms of the same institutional decay: a military that can’t maintain cohesion, economic policy driven by political calculation, protests with obvious foreign backing ignored while grassroots movements are crushed, and a justice system that can’t clear half its violent crimes.

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Extended and Ad Free Version of Blendr Report EP164: Ethnic Rifts in Canada’s Military, Carney’s New Debt Fund & May Day Protests

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Many people believe Mark Carney appeared almost out of nowhere — that he was simply in the right place at the right time. Needed in a moment of panic, he stepped in to save Canada from Trump while saving the Liberal party from a complete collapse. That is the surface level version of what happened. It’s neat, flattering, believable and easy to sell. At least for those who haven’t been paying close attention.

For those that have, that story isn’t just false– it’s incomplete. The reality is Mark Carney didn’t suddenly emerge. He was being placed, prepared, and introduced years in advance. The Liberal majority we now find ourselves under was not some shocking turn of fortune, it was the result of careful positioning, long planning, and a political class using every opening the system gave them.

I’m not claiming there were any secret meetings in dark rooms or some grand conspiracy written on paper. Politics rarely works that way. More often, it works through networks, timing, soft introductions, institutional loyalty, media shaping, and people in power making sure the right doors open for the right person at the right time.

Based on what I’ve seen, Mark Carney’s rise looks less like an accident and more like an architect’s design.

The Myth of the Sudden Saviour

Every political era tries to produce its saviour. When governments become unpopular, or exhausted, they need renewal without surrender. They need a new face who can inherit the machine without being blamed for the destruction it leaves behind. They need a scapegoat and someone who feels fresh to protect its future.

That is where Carney fits perfectly. He wasn’t a long-serving cabinet minister tied to every Liberal mistake. He wasn’t a backbench MP carrying years of baggage. He wasn’t Trudeau. He was an “outsider”, or at least he was presented as one.

He had prestige, credentials, media polish, and enough distance from the government to seem clean, while remaining close enough to be trusted by those already in power.

That combination is rare. It is also politically valuable. So when people say Carney simply stepped up in a time of need, I think they miss the years that made that moment possible.

2020: Entry Through Crisis

Let’s Start in 2020. Canada came through COVID with deep economic damage. Businesses were shut down, spending exploded, inflation pressures grew, debt climbed, and public trust began to fray. Whether one supports the pandemic response or not, the country was weakened.

That is when Justin Trudeau brought in Mark Carney as an “informal” economic adviser.

Now ask a basic question: why Carney?

Because he carried a brand. Former Governor of the Bank of Canada. Former Governor of the Bank of England. International profile. Calm banker image. Crisis-manager reputation because of his role in the 2008 financial crisis.

To many Canadians, that resume sounds like competence before he says a word. During a time of a strong economic downturn, someone with an extensive “economic background” is exactly what Canadians were looking for. Officially, he was there to help guide recovery, but politics is rarely single-purposed. Bringing Carney close to the government did more than add advice. It reintroduced him to Canada. It put him near power. It let him study the landscape. It let the public grow used to seeing him linked with national leadership.

That matters. You don’t always launch a leader by declaring it. Sometimes you normalize them first.

The Soft Re-entry Into Canadian Politics

Remember, Carney had spent many years abroad. To much of the public, he was respected but distant. He needed re-entry. That process appears to begin here.

By attaching him to national recovery, the Liberals gave him relevance. By giving him an advisory role rather than a partisan title, they reduced backlash. By keeping him near Trudeau but not inside cabinet, they let him gain proximity without blame. That is clever politics.

He could influence policy, learn the mood of the country, reconnect with elite networks, and prepare for something larger — all while appearing above day-to-day politics.

If you were trying to build a future leader quietly, this is roughly how it would look.

2021: Introduction to the Liberal Base

Then came 2021. Carney delivered a keynote speech at the Liberal convention. This was not some accidental cameo. This was a formal presentation to the party faithful.

He spoke of his experience, his ideas, his vision, and the major challenges ahead. He promoted themes he returns to often: climate risk, economic change, technological disruption, the need for managed transition.

Some heard thoughtful leadership. I heard something else: branding.

This was the party meeting the “possible successor.” Politics often introduces future leaders long before admitting they are future leaders. A convention stage is where parties test reactions. They watch, applause, headlines, donor chatter, elite approval, and grassroots comfort. Carney was being shown to Liberal voters in a safe setting, wrapped in policy language and global credentials. Again: not an accident.

Crisis as Political Fuel

There is also a pattern in Carney’s messaging style. He is effective at framing issues as urgent turning points. Climate disaster. Economic upheaval. Democratic danger. Sovereignty threats. History at the door. Maybe he believes all of it sincerely. Maybe some of it is true. But politically, urgency is useful. When people feel calm, they compare details. When people feel fear, they look for managers. Carney’s public style creates moments where voters are told the stakes are existential and only serious experts can steer the ship.

That’s why the Trump angle later mattered so much. It fits an existing template: danger is here, normal politics is too small, trust the credentials. In a world growing towards trust in authority instead of competence and results, Carney wasn’t just a good fit, he was a perfect match.

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2022: The Maclean’s Prediction

Then there is 2022. Under a section for Mark Carney, A Maclean’s line described the challenge of saving the world from climate disaster and then added that perhaps an even greater challenge would be leading a “certain late-cycle governing political party in Canada.”

That phrase deserves attention.

Late-cycle means nearing the end of its run. Governing party meaning the party in power. In Canada at the time, that clearly pointed to the Liberals under Trudeau.

So what was being floated? That Carney might one day lead them.

Was it a prophecy? No. More likely it reflected what connected people were already discussing quietly. Elite magazines often do not predict from nowhere. They echo narratives already moving through political circles. Sometimes a “speculation” piece is simply an early public airing of a private conversation. If so, then by 2022 the idea of Carney replacing Trudeau was already established, and likely the Liberal party was in the process of making it happen.

2024: No Longer “Informal”

Fast forward to 2024. Carney is named chair of the Task Force on Economic Growth. Now he was not merely hovering nearby. He was tied directly to the Liberal economic future. Trudeau said Carney would play a vital role in shaping the next steps of the plan. Read that carefully: shaping the next steps.

That is not ceremonial language. That signals trust, influence, and succession energy.

At this stage, Carney’s path had moved through three phases:

1. Adviser in crisis

2. Introduced to the base

3. Given formal strategic role

That is a ladder. People only call careers accidental when they ignore the steps.

Trudeau’s Fall, Carney’s Opportunity

Meanwhile Trudeau was weakening. The cost of living pressure rose. Fatigue set in. The carbon tax became a major symbol of Liberal overreach in the eyes of many voters. Opposition attacks sharpened. The public wanted Trudeau gone. Then, Trudeau resigned. Personally, I believe all of this was theater and intentional. Meant to put the blame for all the bad policies and scandals on Trudeau and away from the Liberals as a party.

But Trudeau had already fulfilled his role in the plan. Not just what seemed like intentionally plunging Canada into an economic free fall, but packing the senate during his leadership.

The Senate reviews legislation and can slow, amend, or complicate government plans. While it is more nuanced than pure party obedience, appointments still matter. And Trudeau appointed 81 out of the 97 senators before he resigned.

That does not mean every senator becomes a puppet but it does mean the governing worldview of the appointing era can remain long after the appointing prime minister is gone.

So imagine you are handing power to a successor from your own side. Leaving behind a Senate filled largely under your watch is not meaningless. It lowers friction. It preserves continuity. It gives the next government friendlier terrain than starting from scratch.

Again, not illegal. Not secret. Just power used intelligently.

The Missing Piece: Majority Control

At this point the Liberals could have:

• A fresh leader with elite credentials

• Distance from Trudeau’s image

• Institutional continuity

• A favourable Senate environment

But one thing still matters most in parliamentary politics: numbers in the House of Commons. Without a majority, governing becomes negotiation. With a majority, governing becomes command. So how do you close a narrow gap? One answer is floor crossing.

Some people speak of the recent floor crossings as if it suddenly happened in response to fresh conditions, but evidence suggests courting MPs had been ongoing for years.

Mélanie Joly admitted efforts had been made to recruit Chris d’Entremont dating back to around 2020.

Think about that.

If you are trying to persuade opposition MPs years in advance, then this is not a random post-election movement. It is long-game politics. Relationships are built. Grievances are tracked. Ambitions are noticed. Doors are kept open. That is how serious political operators work.

“You Vote for the Person” — Mostly False

Whenever floor crossing angers voters, defenders repeat a line: you vote for the person, not the party. This is one of the most convenient myths in Canadian politics. When you vote, you vote in the party you want to rule, not the MP or the leader. After all, if a leader resigns it doesn’t trigger a general election. Just like how Mark Carney came to power, the leader is simply replaced while the ruling party stays the same. Even if theoretically MPs left the ruling party and crossed to another party, giving the other party more seats in the house of commons, the ruling party would stay in power despite having less seats in the house of commons. Also, Canadians do not vote based on the MP in their riding.

In reality, a Narrative Research survey suggests only 50% of Canadians say they know the names of the Candidates in their ridings that they voted for, and only 6% say they vote for the riding MP instead of the party. That doesn’t reinforce the narrative of a system of individual MPs that represent the voices of their riding. It’s evidence that most people will vote for any name that represents the broad values of the party.

What the data actually suggests is that most people blindly vote for the same political party every federal election, about 1 in 3. Second most vote based on the policies of the parties, and third votes based on the party leader. Not only do people not mainly vote based on the MP, it’s dead last in people’s considerations.

And MPs themselves reinforce this truth every day by voting almost always with party lines. A report from Canada Commons found that MPs vote with the party 99.6% of the time. They even urge MPs to be more independent. But when you consider the advantages you get from running under a party banner, it all makes sense. Using party branding, party messaging, party funds, party leaders, party whips, and party campaign machines. Not many would disagree with the claim that most MPs wouldn’t even win their seats without help from the party. If MPs act as party members nearly all the time, but suddenly become lone independent vessels the moment they cross the floor, people are right to be skeptical.

Voters Rightfully Feel Betrayed

If someone wins under one banner, using one team’s volunteers, donors, signs, message, and voters — then hands that seat to another party midstream, many people feel their vote was transferred without consent. That reaction is rational and many people would like to see the end of floorcrossing.

Even those who defend the legality of floor crossing often know it lacks moral legitimacy in many cases. That is why polling tends to show voters prefer alternatives such as:

• resigning and re-running

• sitting as an independent

• forcing a by-election

Why Reform Never Happens

Repeated efforts have been made to restrict or reform floor crossing and they all fail. Why? Because every major party imagines one day benefiting from it. There have been multiple bills tabled to address this issue that have been consistently voted down, by often the bigger parties. The Liberals may use it today. Conservatives may need it tomorrow. Smaller parties may rely on it later. Political classes often preserve tools they publicly condemn when in opposition. That is one of the oldest habits in politics: denounce the loophole until it helps you.

The Incentives Behind Crossing

Each floor crosser will give reasons: values, fit, changed circumstances, leadership concerns, national interest. Sometimes those reasons may be sincere. But incentives exist too:

• committee roles

• profile boosts

• access to ministers

• local funding leverage

• future nominations

• career survival

• relevance inside power

To pretend none of that matters is childish. Human beings respond to incentives. Politicians are human beings with microphones, no different than you and I.

The End Game

The final step of almost total control void of accountability came after the majority. The liberals packed committees, the last stand of parliamentary debate. Opposition still exists. Courts still exist. Elections still exist. So no, democracy is not literally dead.

But concentrated power is real. Majorities matter. They can move fast, shut down resistance, and define the national story.

The deeper problem is the system. This article isn’t really about one man. The sad truth is as much as Canadians don’t like what Carney is doing, everything he did is allowed in our system as it stands. Carney is simply the most polished recent example of a broader truth: Canada’s political system allows for parties to game it with recycled power through leader swaps, institutional appointments, media narratives, and seat transfers while claiming every outcome is pure democratic will.

Maybe sometimes voters choose, but as it is now, they’re managed toward a narrow set of outcomes already prepared for them. That distinction matters.

Maybe Mark Carney is exactly what Canada wanted. Maybe he is the right man at the right time. Or maybe he is what a governing machine spent years preparing as its greatest secret weapon. Maybe the machine has more control of the people and the system than many would like to believe. What I reject is the fairy tale that he just appeared, untouched by design, summoned by need.

Politics is rarely that innocent.

If Canadians want a better country they should strive for a better system. They should dedicate themselves to involvement in politics. In the west-minister system we have no leader. Party leaders are not the leaders of the country, they are leaders of the party. The party is led by the will of the people. Or so it should be.

If we don’t take our role seriously and lead this country, the narcissistic tyrants will lead, and the country will continue down the path of chaos.

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A man tried to kill the President of the United States for the third time in two years. Cole Thomas Allen, thirty-one, charged the security checkpoint at the White House Correspondents' Dinner with guns and knives, with an officer taking a round in his vest.

Two days before that, a federal grand jury in Alabama handed down an eleven-count indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center for paying neo-Nazis. Three million dollars routed through shell companies — Fox Photography, Rare Books Warehouse — into the bank accounts of men inside the KKK, the National Alliance, and the Aryan Nations. One informant pulled in over a million dollars across a decade while flying the swastika.

This is the closed loop. An NGO raises money to fight a threat. The threat is needed for the next round of fundraising. So the threat gets funded. The threat then gets named to the press. The press names you, and your neighbour, and the man at your church, as members of that same threat. And then a thirty-one-year-old kid from Torrance, California decides he is the hand of justice.

The machine sets the temperature.ans it has to keep finding new enemies. When the first batch is exhausted, the meaning of the word expands. Mao started with the nationalists, ran out, turned on landlords, then teachers, then his own. The category grows until it swallows you.

We’re watching the same engine run today. The secret police, the show trials, the cattle car — those uniforms have been retired. The same work now sits with the universities, the editorial boards, and the donation page.

What makes today’s version worse than the original Marxists is the lying. Marx at least had the spine to write that we ask for no compassion from you, and when our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror. The men in his lineage today pull the trigger and then claim victimhood. They shoot you and tell the country your blood is oppressing them.

This is how sadism gets laundered into morality.

Hannah Arendt warned us. A totalitarian movement can’t stop. It has to keep moving, which me

You’re told the violence is defensive. You’re told the man you’ve been taught to hate is, in Hassan Piker’s words, guilty of “social murder.” You’re told he no longer counts as a person — he’s a cog, a stand-in, a category. Once the human being is gone, the killing becomes ethics.

The country doesn’t need more violence. It needs to stop handing these outfits one more dollar of trust. Stop nodding when the universities tell you who the enemy is. Stop pretending the SPLC, the New York Times, and their brothers in the racket get to set the moral temperature of the West.

The closed loop only stays closed if we keep paying for it.

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Extended and Ad Free Version of Blendr Report EP163: Trump Assassination Attempt, Carney's Conflicts of Interest, and NGO Extremism

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At this point in western civilization it would be easier to answer why people are socialists than why they aren’t. The younger generation has grown up with their heads filled with dreams and their minds captured by Disney fairytales and happily ever afters. Our inflated sense of optimism for the future is fueled by the echoing voices of teachers and parents telling us to dream big and shoot for the stars.

Sadly the reality of life is a very different story. Assets inflated beyond our reach, prices rising while incomes stay flat, sending dozens of resumes after over a decade of school only to hear the silence of our phones and empty email inboxes. At the same time we have unlimited access to social media feeds flooded with videos of others seemingly living much better lives than our own. Even if those depictions of their lives aren’t genuine, the feeling of being inadequate fuels the anxiety of a generation.

With most young people experiencing some version of this reality it’s no wonder they are turning to an economic system which seems to care for the “underclass”. However, the reality of this system is a very different from what we’re told.

The Return of Socialism: Why It’s Happening—and What It Leads To

Socialism and communism are making a serious comeback. You can see it in the rise of figures like Mamdani in New York, and now in Canada, where the NDP has elevated Avi Lewis—a figure who openly embraces ideas that go well beyond mild social democracy.

He’s proposing free buses, free internet and phone services, and government-run grocery stores. For young people who feel disenfranchised and hopeless, these changes seem like a ticket to a better society.

Therefore, younger people across Western countries are not just tolerating these ideas—they’re welcoming them. Before getting into why that is, it’s worth grounding the situation.

Support for Socialism Is Broad—Not Just Young

It’s true that younger people show the highest support for socialism. But the gap across age groups isn’t as wide as people think. A study by the Fraser Institute called: Perspectives on Capitalism and Socialism, polled people from Canada, the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom. They found that of people aged 18–34, 46% support socialism as the ideal system. People aged 35–54 support it 43% and ages 55+ support it 38%.

So yes, support is strongest among the young—but nearly 4 in 10 older Canadians feel the same way. That’s not fringe, that’s almost half. Among ages 18–24, support reaches about 50%, one in two. That number may soften with age, but for now, it’s real. I believe there are 3 very strong reasons why so many people find socialism so attractive.

People don’t know what Socialism is

The Fraser Institute study asked people across Canada, the U.S., Australia, and the U.K. what they think socialism means. It offered three definitions.

1. State ownership of the means of production
   In plain terms: government control over industries and companies.
   This had the lowest support—around 40%.

2. Government providing more social services
   This drew the highest support—roughly 55–65%.

3. Guaranteed basic income (GBI)
   Also popular, landing around 45–57%.

What first stands out makes support for socialism apparent: the more the definition sounds like receiving free or subsidized lives, the more people endorse it. The more it sounds like the government exercising control, the less they support it.

These definitions may sound different, but ultimately all three point in the same direction—greater state involvement in the economy. You can’t run large-scale programs without control over how they’re delivered. You can’t fund a guaranteed basic income without higher taxation.

So while people disagree on wording, the underlying shift is the same, expansion of the state. What’s also interesting is the definition people enjoyed the least is the most accurate definition, government control over industries and companies. This is likely because the language is direct. Many socialist would rather say “we will open free grocery stores” then, “we will seize grocery stores from private individuals and take your money through taxation to pay for the food inside of them.” The key to socialism is the twisting of language to hide the actual intentions.

People Assume They Won’t Pay

The second reason people support socialism also rests on a quiet assumption—that someone else will foot the bill. When asked how to pay for expanded government programs, the most popular answers were, by taxing the top 1% (66–72% support) and taxing the top 10% (53–59%).

However, support drops sharply when taxes apply broadly, when a General income tax increase is proposed only 31–39% support it, if a 20% value-added tax is proposed then only 16–29% support it.

People favour socialism when they believe they won’t have to pay for it. That’s why phrases like “eat the rich” are so popular, people are separated into groups of oppressor or oppressed, proletariat or bourgeoisie, working class or ruling class. Those on the bottom of the economic hierarchy are empowered to take from those on the top.

Many people believe taxing the rich will be how this growth in government will be realized, but in practice large welfare states are often funded by broad taxation.

In Canada, the average person pays over 42% of their income in taxes when you combine income tax, sales tax, payroll deductions, and other levies. That’s more than what many spend on food, housing, and clothing combined. Beyond direct taxes, there’s the silent almost invisible taxation, inflation. Often driven by government spending and money creation. It’s a quieter tax, but it hits everyone. It is usually the rich that are insulated from it because they are largely the holders of assets that increase in value as inflation increases.

The Economy Feels Broken

The third reason is the strongest driver. Life is expensive. Housing is out of reach for many. Wages haven’t kept pace. In 2024, Canada was ranked 2nd worst globally for house price-to-income ratio. 2 major cities in Canada, namely Vancouver and Toronto were among the top 20 most expensive real estate markets in the world.

Abacus data conducted a national survey asking Canadians about their top concerns when it comes to the state of the country. 60% of Canadians cite cost of living as their number 1 concern, 41% point to housing affordability, Nearly 90% are worried about the current state of housing and that increases to 91% for Canadians 18-44.

3 in 5 Canadians are both worried about their ability to pay for their mortgage or rent and fear losing their homes or rental because of financial issues. Among non-homeowners, almost half believe they’ll never own a home. That’s not a small frustration—it’s a structural problem that destroys the foundation of western society. Home ownership isn’t just an investment for families, it’s a tie to their nation and proof of a stake in your country.

When people feel locked out, they stop participating and start looking for another option. Many attribute the fall in living standards to the growth of capitalism and compare their lives to those living a better one. It’s harder to understand the inner workings of a mixed economy and the economic results of government versus private decisions. It is much easier to place blame on strangers whose struggles you will never have to understand and a system that is seemingly oppressing you.

Many people believe the New Democratic Party has no legs to stand on after the last election where they couldn’t garner enough support to gain party status. However with the ever growing favour of socialism in western countries it would be wise to pay close attention to Avi Lewis’s platform, which contains the policies people want.

Despite their non-party status they’ve still continued to receive support from the government, they just got $670,000 in funding to carry out their parliamentary duties. The NDP were undeniably resourceful during the Trudeau era, their coalition allowed the Trudeau government to carry out their agenda. No good deed goes unpunished.

The NDP Platform

Canada’s grocery sector is concentrated. A handful of companies control a large share of the market essentially making them oligopolies. 5 companies control 65% of the grocery market share. With such a larger share of the market many Canadians are rightly concerned about price gauging. Avi Lewis correctly identifies the problem but, like many socialists, arrives at a destructive solutions. To account for these grocery giants advantage in the market he proposes to create yet another oligarch, that being the government. Suggesting that the government create, subsidize and run publicly owned grocery stores around the country.

The issue is that this doesn’t remove concentration—it shifts it. A state-backed competitor, funded by taxpayers, could easily dominate the market over time.

History offers caution here. Countries that nationalised food distribution—like Venezuela—saw shortages, long lines, and declining supply. Similar patterns appeared in Cuba and the Soviet Union. The intent was stability. The result was scarcity and loss of security. There are many stories of Venezuelans skipping work and keeping their kids home from school so they had time to line up at grocery stores for hours. We can learn from the past or suffer in the future.

Nationalised Telecommunications and Pharma

Lewis also proposes expanding public control into telecom and Vaccine production.

The concern here isn’t just efficiency—it’s control. When the state becomes the main provider, access can become political, not just economic. COVID was a demonstration of what could happen when you give the government too much power over these sectors.

The government gave false information about practices that could stop the spread of the virus. Then they forced people to take an untested vaccine and falsely advertised that it would reduce spread. They allowed classified documents from Canada’s highest security laboratory to be sent to China. What’s worse is the Liberal Government then fought the release of the documents outlining the incident. Then during the lockdowns, the government unlawfully shut off the bank accounts of truckers protesting—and even those supporting them. These are events we cannot dismiss when thinking of these policies.

Free Transit

Similar to Mamdani in New York, Lewis is proposing “free and reliable transit”, as if anything given away for free could sustain utmost reliability over time. This policy is also unrealistic and didn’t play out well in New York. After Mamdani won the mayoral race he received backlash following the increase in bus fares in New York.

Free public transit sounds appealing, but it still has to be paid for by somebody. Lewis also proposes large-scale electrification, rail expansion, and infrastructure upgrades that would cost tens or hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars. Never asking the question of how we will be able to pay for it. There’s a pattern in similar proposals: costs rise, and “free” becomes subsidised, then partially paid, then expensive again.

Ending Homelessness Through Public Housing

Another part of the plan includes building over a million public housing units within five years largely to reduce the rate of homelessness in the country. Other countries have tried large-scale social housing. As this likely will ease the rise of homelessness, not only will these homes never be owned by Canadians but there are many problems with this approach. The Netherlands, for example, has over 2.3 million of these units totaling 30% of their housing, but supply constraints and long wait times remain—often stretching years or even decades.

The average waiting time to get into a housing unit is now over 7 years, in some places that can increase to 12.5 or 19 years. At the same time, heavy public-sector involvement can shrink the private rental market, tightening supply further. The result is pressure on both systems. Social housing starts at helping the lower class but as it grows and the private housing shrinks middle income individuals become priced out of the rental market and are forced into social housing.

This creates a perpetual cycle of more reliance on government funded housing which puts a lot of stress on tax payers to fund. Eventually the private sector housing is set to disappear and be completely dominated by social housing.

Phasing Out Oil and Gas Expansion

Lewis proposes halting new fossil fuel projects and shifting toward renewables, this is a policy championed by the green movement. As we live in a petro society with the Iran war highlighting the delicacy of the market, it’s clear we need more energy, not less. The challenge is transition risk. Countries that reduced domestic energy production and refineries have faced supply issues and rising costs.

Germany’s recent experience is one example with a goal to phase out coal, they planned to close all 84 coal power plants. This led to an energy shortage because of the Iran war and has forced them to consider ramping up coal power to avoid an energy crisis.

Where This Leads

None of these ideas exist in isolation. They reflect a broader shift toward larger government, more central control, and greater reliance on public systems.

That shift is being driven by real problems—especially cost of living and housing.

But the proposed fixes carry their own risks:

• Reduced supply and longer wait times

• Higher taxes across the board

• Greater state control over key sectors

• Potential inefficiencies that compound over time

The rise of figures like Avi Lewis wasn’t random. It was predictable.

When people feel the system isn’t working, they look for something else.

The appeal of socialism today is rooted in frustration, not theory. That’s why it’s gaining ground. The question isn’t whether people want change—they clearly do. The question is whether these solutions fix the problems, or deepen them. If you’re concerned about where this is heading, the most useful thing you can do is understand the arguments—both for and against—and have the conversation clearly. Both sides agree on the problems we face, however the “solutions” proposed by one side will be devastating.

I suspect given this new Liberal majority and the rising sentiment that Mark Carney is a “center-right” Liberal, in the next election we will see a record rise in the support for Canada’s socialist party, the NDP. The perception of socialism and lack of historical context will undoubtedly drive Canada and many other western nations into the hands of socialists and communists, bringing us down the path of totalitarianism.

It seems to me that the ideologues wish to shift us from one system of overreach and control, to another. However, it is not for us to simply pass judgement. Bad ideas will only fall to better ones.

The Liberal government under Mark Carney has secured a majority through floor crossing, reaching 174 seats. Many Canadians are asking me whether there is even a point in voting. My response: only if your actions don’t stop there.

The idea of “two wings, one bird” is gaining ground across the West—the belief that all major parties are controlled by the same interests. Many people, trying to make sense of recent events, conclude that the game is rigged and the winners are chosen by an “elite.”

A study by the Media Ecosystem Observatory on social media–fuelled conspiracy theories noted a rise in several narratives, including media–elite collusion, election fraud, and the “deep state.” Trust is eroding because people feel they are playing a game they cannot win, controlled by forces beyond their reach.

When you look at the chain of events behind Mark Carney’s rise and his majority government, it becomes clear why many see it as a state manufactured with powerful backing.

Start with the leadership race. It was called after Justin Trudeau had, over ten years, severely damaged the Liberal brand. Abacus polling from January 19, 2025, showed Liberal support at a low point: Conservatives at 46%, Liberals at 20%, and the NDP at 19%, based on a sample of 1,500 Canadian adults.

At that moment, a Liberal victory seemed out of reach.

What followed was a shift in tone. Blame for policy failures was increasingly placed on Trudeau, and pressure mounted until he stepped down. Carney then entered the race against long-serving MPs and quickly became the frontrunner.

This is notable. He had spent over a decade outside Canada, serving as Governor of the Bank of England (2013–2020), later as a UN Special Envoy, and then as chair of Brookfield Asset Management (2020–2025). Despite this, he won the leadership race decisively.

That alone is unusual. Leadership winners are almost always long-time MPs with recent domestic political experience. Carney not only broke that pattern but also did so with record support, winning every one of the 343 ridings—including those of his opponents.

Then came the 2025 election. The Liberals secured 43.76% of the vote and 169 seats, just short of a majority. The Conservatives won 41.31% and 144 seats. Under proportional representation, the Liberals would have held about 148 seats and the Conservatives around 140—highlighting how first-past-the-post can distort outcomes depending on geography.

This result also marked a sharp reversal: a roughly 24-point swing from the 20% polling figure in January to nearly 44% in the election. Such a comeback is rare in Canadian politics.

After the election, the Liberals moved to secure a majority through floor crossings—another unheard-of outcome. Reports surfaced of efforts to recruit MPs from other parties. Five crossed the floor, four from the Conservatives.

Historically, large-scale floor crossing is rare. It has happened before—under John A. Macdonald and Jean Chrétien—but remains unusual. Overall, Liberal governments have benefited more from such moves, gaining 26 seats compared to 15 for Conservatives.

What stands out here is the profile of some who crossed. For example, Marilyn Gladu, known for positions at odds with current Liberal policy, switching sides raises questions that many find hard to reconcile.

She supported the truckers’ movement that happened during COVID, she’s supported legislation that would limit abortion, and she’s spoken in favor of conversion therapy.

There is also context worth noting. In 2011, Bill C-306 proposed requiring MPs who switch parties to trigger a by-election. It would have forced MPs to seek a fresh mandate before sitting under a new banner. The Conservatives voted against it—142 opposed. That decision now has consequences.

Given all this, some Canadians are turning cynical, concluding that their vote no longer matters. I take a different view. If anything, this is a reason to do more, not less.

If you believe important actions are happening behind the scenes—or in plain sight—and not being properly examined, then speak. Participation cannot end at the ballot box.

There are laws coming that, in my view, risk undermining freedom and security—what I have called “Liberal Trojan horse laws.” Whether one agrees with that label or not, the broader point stands: laws should be judged by their effect, not their framing. They definitely should stand up to scrutiny and not be pushed through forcefully like in the case of Bill C-9.

The irony of fast-tracking and ending discussion on legislation that will limit free speech and expression is almost laughable if it weren’t so dangerous.

Rights unused tend to weaken. If people disengage, the space for power widens.

Some are considering leaving the country. That may offer relief, but likely only in the short term. I encourage those who wish to leave to continue spreading the messages needed to end the erosion of rights and freedoms. Political and ideological trends do not stop at borders, especially in an age shaped by social media.

There is also a broader debate about ideology. Some argue that elements of modern policy draw from ideas that have been reshaped or repurposed over time. Take Milton Friedman’s “negative income tax,” often cited today in discussions of guaranteed basic income. What was proposed as a replacement for certain social programs is now, in practice, layered on top of existing systems—such as the GST credit, which provides income-based support.

Whether one sees this as adaptation or drift depends on perspective. But it shows how ideas can change as they move from theory to policy and become weaponized.

The Liberal government, like any government, uses language to frame its agenda. That is not new. It does, however, place a burden on citizens to look past wording and assess substance.

Eventually, silence is treated as consent, whether you like it or not.

*Paid subscribers can find the ad-free version of the episode at the bottom of this article.*

Mark Carney has his majority. Not through a general election or a mandate from the Canadian public. Through five floor crossings and three by-election wins in ridings the Liberals already held. That's the foundation this government now stands on.

Let’s start with the numbers. The two Toronto by-elections saw voter turnout between 31 and 33 percent. In University-Rosedale, the Liberal candidate took roughly 65 percent of that vote. Run the math and you land around one in five eligible voters in the riding. That’s your mandate. The Terrebonne result carried similar weight — a Supreme Court-ordered rerun of a riding the Liberals originally won by a single vote after Elections Canada misprinted addresses on mail-in ballots.

Then there are the floor crossings. Angus Reid polling shows 75 percent of Canadians believe some form of democratic accountability — whether a by-election, recall, or automatic trigger — should follow any floor crossing. A supermajority of the country opposes the mechanism that delivered this government its power. And yet here we are.

What makes this worse is what comes next. With a majority in the House and a Senate where over 90 percent of members were appointed through the Trudeau administration, there is no remaining check on legislative power. Bills that had been sitting in limbo are now headed straight through the pipeline: the Online Harms Act with its retroactive fines and life imprisonment provisions, the Strong Borders Act expanding warrantless surveillance, the Cybersecurity Act granting power to disconnect internet access, the Combating Hate Act redefining hate speech to include religious text, and the Lawful Access Act mandating backdoor infrastructure and blanket metadata retention.

Andrew Lobaczewski wrote in Political Ponerology about how totalitarian systems don’t need everyone on board. They just need to push out principled opposition and let the rest follow the herd. That pattern is playing out in real time across Canadian institutions. When 99.6 percent of MPs vote along party lines and most of them can’t even describe their own job — as the Samara Centre’s Tragedy in the Commons report revealed — you don’t have representative democracy.

The takeaway here is straightforward: competent, capable people need to build lives outside the reach of this machinery. That’s not defeatism. That’s the only rational response when the system no longer answers to the people it claims to represent.

If you’re interested in hearing the rationale behind this perspective, Listen to The Blendr Report EP162 on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Rumble.

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Ad Free Version of Blendr Report EP162: Carney’s Manufactured Majority and Canada’s Democracy Problem

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Lucy Biggers was not on the fringe of the climate movement. She was deep in it. Over a hundred million views on Facebook. Interviews with Greta Thunberg and AOC. She pushed the Green New Deal, got plastic straws banned, helped change her newsroom's language from "climate change" to "climate crisis." For five years of her twenties, this was her identity, purpose, and tribe.

Then COVID hit. The world shut down, plastic was everywhere and nobody cared, carbon emissions dropped by maybe five percent… and Lucy started doing the math.

If a global shutdown barely dents emissions, what exactly does net zero require? The answer, once you follow the thread, is the dismantling of modern life. And that was the first crack.

She picked up Michael Schellenberger’s Apocalypse Never and Steve Koonian’s Unsettled. Both written by people with credibility the movement couldn’t dismiss — a former green activist and an Obama appointee. What she found inside was that the science doesn’t say match the headlines. The UN reports don’t say what the summaries say. The summaries don’t say what the journalists say. And the journalists don’t say what the memes say. Seven layers of telephone between the data and the public. By the time it reaches your feed, the original finding is unrecognizable.

Lucy went quiet for five years. Took a behind-the-scenes role at the Free Press, had two kids, and slowly, piece by piece, rebuilt her own thinking from the ground up. She describes it as decolonizing her own mind. Not a political shift but a cognitive one. Relearning how to ask what she actually believed about each topic rather than downloading the approved answer from the group.

This conversation covers the full arc. How she got in. How the groupthink works at the newsroom level — the Slack channels, the social punishment, the purity tests with no redemption clause. How the climate movement maps onto religious psychology: a fallen world, a revolution, a purgatory, and a promised utopia on the other side. How the media frames weather data to imply danger that the underlying science doesn’t support. And how none of this requires a grand conspiracy to function. You push the first domino and human psychology does the rest.

We also get into the geopolitical angle. China as the world’s largest oil importer, manufacturing the solar panels and wind turbines the West is told it must buy, funding NGOs that push the narrative forward. The strategic logic is hard to argue with. Undermine your rival’s energy independence and sell them the replacement parts. It doesn’t need to be a tinfoil theory. It just needs to be good strategy.

The thing that sets Lucy apart from most people talking about this is that she has no interest in dunking on the people still inside. She was them. She knows what it feels like to carry climate guilt, to self-censor over a reality TV show, to believe you’re saving the world while never once checking the numbers. Her aim is simpler than combat. She wants to give young people the context they were never given and let them decide for themselves.

Deaths from natural disasters are down ninety-nine percent in a hundred years. The planet is greener than it was fifty years ago. We are safer, more prosperous, and more capable than any generation before us. Yet, we toy with the idea of throwing it all away.

If you’re interested in hearing the full conversation, you can listen to The Blendr Report EP161 on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Rumble.

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Today, Canada’s “democracy” operates as a procedural husk — a system that retains every formal structure of democratic governance being repurposed to serve the political class rather than the public it claims to represent.

Over the past five years, the governing party has called elections to bury active investigations into national security breaches and financial corruption. Parliament sat for just sixteen percent of the available days while MPs collected full salaries and per diems for the other eighty-four.

More than 121,000 ballots went uncounted in a single federal election. A riding was decided by one vote after an Elections Canada employee printed the wrong postal code on dozens of ballot envelopes — and the Supreme Court had to annul the result. A 298-vote Conservative lead in another riding disappeared overnight and surfaced as a 29-vote Liberal win, chalked up to “data entry errors.”

A foreign power interfered in two consecutive federal elections, funded at least eleven candidates, and faced no meaningful consequence. A sitting Liberal MP publicly encouraged people to collect a bounty placed by the Chinese Communist Party on a Conservative candidate. The current Prime Minister was initially installed by 131,674 Liberal Party members — roughly one-third of one percent of the Canadian population — and governs with a cabinet largely comprised of people who served the man that resigned in disgrace before him. And in the months since, five Members of Parliament elected under one banner have crossed the floor to hand that Prime Minister an impending majority no Canadian voter ever granted.

Not one of these events has triggered a constitutional crisis. The Governor General has not intervened, the courts have addressed only the most egregious case, and the media has covered each as an isolated story — a bad recount here, a questionable floor crossing there, a foreign interference inquiry that found “troubling” events but assured Canadians the overall outcome was not affected.

That is how a democracy dies. Through a slow and methodical dissolution of integrity, where each violation is absorbed, normalized, and filed away as an exception rather than recognized as part of a pattern.

This piece documents the pattern. Over the following sections, we trace a five-year arc of democratic erosion in Canada, from the Winnipeg Lab cover-up in 2021 through the manufactured majority likely to take hold next week. Every claim is sourced and every event is a matter of public record. Taken in isolation, any one of them could be dismissed as an anomaly. Taken together, they form a case that the country’s democratic institutions have not merely failed. They have been repurposed. While the husk may still remain, the substance is gone.

Elections as Escape Routes

There is a question Canadians ought to ask every time a federal election is called: what was Parliament about to find out?

In the summer of 2021, the House of Commons was closing in on one of the most serious national security breaches in Canadian history. Dr. Xiangguo Qiu and her husband Keding Cheng — both scientists at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, Canada’s only Biosafety Level 4 facility — had been fired in January of that year after CSIS determined that Qiu had “intentionally” worked to benefit the People’s Republic of China. The scope of what she had done was staggering. Qiu transferred live Ebola and Henipah viruses to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, collaborated with People’s Liberation Army Major-General Chen Wei on published research, allowed PLA-affiliated personnel access to Canada’s highest-security lab, and was listed as co-inventor on two Chinese government patents for innovations related to the Ebola and Marburg viruses — work that was the direct product of her position inside a Canadian government facility.

The House of Commons demanded answers. Opposition MPs passed a motion ordering the government to produce unredacted documents about the firings and the security breach. The Trudeau government refused. The House ordered it again. The government refused again. Over the course of months, four separate orders of Parliament were defied — a level of contempt for the legislative branch that has almost no precedent in Canadian history. When the Speaker of the House ruled that parliamentary privilege had been breached and prepared to enforce disclosure, the government did something extraordinary: it took the Speaker of the House of Commons to Federal Court to get a judge to block the release. The executive branch of government sued the legislative branch of government to prevent Canadians from learning what had happened inside their own national laboratory.

And then, before any of it could be resolved, Trudeau called a snap election in August 2021. The dissolution of Parliament killed all four House orders, ended the court challenge (which the government quietly withdrew during the campaign), and buried the investigation entirely. A Special Committee would eventually reconvene and produce a report with twelve recommendations — including adding the Wuhan Institute of Virology to Canada’s list of Named Research Organizations — but by then the political moment had passed. The documents were not produced during the election. The public moved on. The RCMP investigation into Qiu and Cheng remains open with no charges laid.

Three years later, the pattern repeated.

In June 2024, the Auditor General released a report on Sustainable Development Technology Canada — a federal foundation responsible for distributing hundreds of millions in public funds to clean-tech companies. The findings were damning. The AG found that SDTC had awarded $334 million across 186 cases in which board members held direct conflicts of interest, $59 million to ten projects that were entirely ineligible for funding, and an additional $58 million to projects where basic terms and conditions were never verified. Internal whistleblowers had secretly recorded a senior civil servant describing the mismanagement as “outright incompetence.” In total, roughly $390 million in taxpayer money was either misappropriated or awarded under conditions that should have disqualified it from the start.

The House of Commons passed a motion ordering the government to produce unredacted documents related to the scandal and to refer the matter to the RCMP for potential criminal investigation. The Liberals refused. The Speaker ruled that the government had “clearly not fully complied” with the order. The Conservatives seized the House with a privilege debate, and all legislative business ground to a halt on October 3, 2024. Rather than produce the documents, the government chose to let Parliament die. The House did not sit for a single productive day from that point until well into 2025 — a stretch of nearly eight months during which Canadians were governed without a functioning legislature.

The same playbook, twice in four years. An investigation reaches the point where disclosure becomes unavoidable, and the governing party reaches for the kill switch — dissolution in 2021, procedural paralysis in 2024. In neither case were the documents produced. In neither case did the public receive a full accounting. And in both cases, the mechanism that was supposed to hold the executive to account — Parliament itself — was neutralised by the very people it was meant to hold accountable.

The election is supposed to be the tool citizens use to enforce accountability on their government. In Canada, it has become the tool the government uses to escape it.

The Integrity of the Vote

Even if you set aside the corruption and the cover-ups — even if you accept the premise that Canadian elections are still called in good faith — the machinery of the vote itself is broken.

In the 2025 federal election, more than 121,000 special ballots went uncounted. Out of roughly 1.3 million mail-in ballots issued, nearly one in ten never made it into the tally. Elections Canada has not provided a clear breakdown of how many were misdirected, how many arrived late, and how many were simply never returned — a distinction that matters enormously when the integrity of an election depends on public confidence that every eligible vote was counted. CBC reported on the scale of the problem, but no satisfactory explanation has followed. The ballots were issued but not counted. And the country moved on as though that were normal.

In the Quebec riding of Terrebonne, it was worse than normal. Liberal candidate Tatiana Auguste defeated Bloc Québécois candidate Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné by a single vote — the narrowest margin in the country. The result might have stood had it not emerged that an Elections Canada employee had printed his own postal code on at least forty special ballot envelopes, causing them to be misdirected. One of those ballots belonged to a confirmed Bloc voter whose vote was rejected because it arrived at the wrong returning office. Quebec’s special ballot rejection rate ran between two and six times the national average. Over 800 ballots in British Columbia were never counted at all. The Bloc filed a legal challenge, and a Superior Court judge initially ruled against overturning the result. The Supreme Court of Canada disagreed, annulling the election and ordering a byelection for April 13, 2026. It took the highest court in the country to acknowledge what should have been obvious from the start: a riding decided by one vote, in an election where the administering body itself caused valid ballots to be rejected, is not a legitimate outcome.

Then there is Milton East–Halton Hills South, which may be the most troubling case of all. On election night, Conservative candidate Parm Gill led by 298 votes. It was not a razor-thin margin. It was a clear and comfortable win by any normal standard of Canadian electoral math. Then came the validation process. Elections Canada reported that Liberal candidate Kristina Tesser Derksen had in fact won the seat by 29 votes — a swing of 327 votes, all moving in the same direction, attributed entirely to “data entry and calculation errors.” A judicial recount overseen by Justice Leonard Ricchetti confirmed the Liberal win, narrowing the margin to 21 votes. Elections Canada issued a formal announcement and the result was certified.

What was never adequately explained is how a 298-vote lead transforms into a 29-vote deficit through clerical errors alone. Errors in vote tabulation are not uncommon — small discrepancies surface in virtually every recount — but they tend to distribute randomly across candidates. A uniform directional swing of 327 votes, every single one of which moves from one candidate to the other, is not a random distribution. It is a statistical pattern that demands a better explanation than the one Canadians received.

Three ridings. Three different failures. In Terrebonne, an employee’s mistake disenfranchised voters in a riding decided by the smallest possible margin. In Milton East, a candidate who won on election night lost his seat through a validation process that no one has convincingly explained. And across the country, 121,000 ballots were issued and never counted, with no public accounting of why.

The ballot is the most basic unit of democratic power. It is the one moment where every citizen is supposed to stand as an equal — one person, one vote, counted once. When that mechanism fails at scale, and when the failures consistently favour one party over another, the question is no longer whether Canadians trust their elections. The question is whether they should.

Foreign Interference — The CCP and Canadian Elections

The People’s Republic of China has been interfering in Canadian federal elections for years, and the Canadian government has known about it for just as long.

Classified intelligence documents, first reported by the Globe and Mail and later confirmed through the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference led by Justice Marie-Josée Hogue, established that China’s Ministry of State Security and United Front Work Department ran covert operations during both the 2019 and 2021 federal elections. The operations were not subtle. Beijing deployed disinformation campaigns on Chinese-language social media platforms, arranged for international students to work on preferred candidates’ campaigns, and funnelled money through a network of proxy donors who received reimbursement for their contributions — a direct violation of the Canada Elections Act. CSIS warned the Prime Minister’s Office in 2023 that China had “clandestinely and deceptively” interfered in both elections, and internal intelligence identified a network of at least eleven federal candidates across multiple parties — seven Liberal, four Conservative — who received funding or operational support linked to CCP-affiliated organizations.

Trudeau was briefed, yet, chose not to act. When the intelligence leaks reached the press and public pressure mounted for a full inquiry, the government resisted for over a year before finally conceding. The Hogue Commission’s first report, released in May 2024, confirmed that Chinese state actors had engaged in foreign interference but concluded that the meddling had not altered which party ultimately formed government — a finding that offered just enough cover for the political class to treat the entire affair as a closed file. The final report, issued in January 2025, identified disinformation spread through social media as a major and growing threat to Canadian democracy, but by then the political conversation had moved on to leadership races and tariff wars.

What the Hogue Commission did not do — what no institution in Canada has done — is impose consequences. No candidate who received CCP-linked funding has been charged. No Liberal operative has been held accountable for ignoring the intelligence. No mechanism has been created to prevent the same interference from happening in the next election. CSIS confirmed that at least one former parliamentarian actively worked on behalf of a foreign government to influence proceedings inside Parliament itself, and even that revelation produced no criminal prosecution.

The interference extended beyond funding and disinformation into something far more direct. During the 2025 federal election campaign, Liberal MP Paul Chiang — the incumbent candidate for Markham–Unionville — stood before a Chinese-language media conference and told the room that they could claim a million-dollar bounty placed by Hong Kong authorities on Conservative candidate Joe Tay, a co-founder of HongKonger Station and a democracy advocate targeted by the CCP. “To everyone here,” Chiang said, “you can claim the one-million-dollar bounty if you bring him to Toronto’s Chinese consulate.” A sitting member of the Canadian Parliament publicly encouraged citizens to turn a political opponent over to agents of a foreign dictatorship for a cash reward. The RCMP opened a probe into whether Chiang had broken the law. Mark Carney, by then the Liberal leader, initially stood by him. Chiang issued a brief apology calling his own remarks “deplorable,” and withdrew from the race only after the RCMP investigation became public. He was not charged. He was not expelled from the party. He stepped aside quietly and the news cycle absorbed it within days.

Consider the full picture. A foreign government interferes in two consecutive Canadian elections. Intelligence agencies confirm it. The Prime Minister is briefed and does nothing. A public inquiry confirms the interference but assures Canadians the outcome was unaffected. A sitting MP promotes a foreign bounty on a domestic political opponent and faces no criminal consequence. And then the new Prime Minister — the one installed after all of this — flies to Beijing within months of taking office to forge a strategic partnership with the same regime.

The word for this is not diplomacy. When a foreign power interferes in your elections, places bounties on your candidates, collaborates with scientists inside your highest-security laboratory, and your government responds by deepening the relationship, the word is capture.

The Installation of Mark Carney

By January 2025, Justin Trudeau’s position had become untenable. His party was collapsing in the polls, his caucus was in open revolt, and a no-confidence vote was looming that his government almost certainly could not survive. The democratic resolution to this crisis was straightforward: face the confidence vote, lose, and let the Canadian public decide what came next in a general election. Trudeau chose a different path. On January 6, 2025, he prorogued Parliament — suspending the legislature entirely — and announced his resignation as Liberal leader, triggering an internal leadership race that would determine who governed the country without Canadians having any say in the matter.

The race itself was a formality. Mark Carney, the former Governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, entered as the prohibitive favourite and won on March 9, 2025, with 85.9% of the vote. The official results show that 131,674 Liberal Party members cast ballots — out of 163,836 who had registered to vote. In a country of roughly forty million people, Canada’s next Prime Minister was chosen by one-third of one percent of the population. Candidates who did not align with the party establishment were blocked from competing. The outcome was never in doubt.

What followed was not a transition of power in any meaningful sense. Carney kept the same Trudeau-era cabinet ministers in their posts — the same faces who had presided over the Winnipeg Lab cover-up, the Green Slush Fund scandal, the parliamentary gridlock, and the refusal to act on foreign interference. The personnel did not change because the governing apparatus did not change. A new name sat at the top. Everything beneath it remained identical. Jagmeet Singh and the NDP immediately pledged to prop up the new government, ensuring that the confidence of the House — the one remaining democratic check — would not be tested.

Carney then called a general election for April 28, 2025, and won a minority government. That election is now the democratic mandate he points to. But what preceded it matters. The prorogation was not a neutral act — it was a tactical manoeuvre designed to prevent the House from expressing non-confidence in the Liberal government before a new leader could be installed and a campaign launched on favourable terms. Canadians did not choose between Trudeau’s government and the alternatives. They were presented with a rebranded version of the same government, under a new leader they had no role in selecting, running on a timeline the outgoing Prime Minister engineered specifically to avoid accountability.

Within months of taking office, Carney made his priorities clear. In January 2026, he became the first Canadian Prime Minister to visit Beijing since 2017, announcing a new “strategic partnership” with the People’s Republic of China focused on energy, agri-food, and trade. The agreement included tariff reductions on Canadian canola and commitments to expanded agricultural exports. Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne travelled alongside representatives of Brookfield Asset Management — Carney’s former employer, which had already invested over $3 billion in China before Carney took the helm in 2020. The Bureau documented the depth of Carney’s financial entanglement with Chinese state-linked entities during his time at Brookfield, and the East Asia Forum noted that Canada’s turn toward Beijing, while framed as trade diversification away from Trump-era tariff pressure, carried significant strategic risks that the government appeared willing to absorb.

The sequence deserves to be stated plainly. A Prime Minister prorogues Parliament to avoid a confidence vote. A leadership race selects his replacement from within the party, chosen by fewer than 132,000 people. The new leader governs with the same cabinet, propped up by the same coalition partner, and calls an election on a timeline of his own choosing. He wins a minority. And his first major foreign policy act is to deepen Canada’s relationship with the authoritarian regime that his own intelligence agency confirmed had interfered in two consecutive Canadian elections, whose military collaborated with compromised scientists inside a Canadian government lab, and whose bounty a member of his own party promoted against a Canadian political candidate.

Mark Carney was installed as Prime Minister. 131,674 Liberal members elected him to lead their party, and a minority of Canadian voters gave that party the most seats in a general election that followed. Those are not the same thing, and the distinction matters — because every decision Carney has made since taking office flows from a mandate that was engineered, not earned.

Taxation Without Representation

The phrase is older than Confederation. It was the rallying cry of the American Revolution and a foundational grievance of every democratic movement that followed — the principle that a government which taxes its citizens without granting them a functioning legislature to oversee how that money is spent has forfeited its legitimacy. In Canada, between October 2024 and May 2025, that principle was not violated in theory. It was violated in fact.

When the House of Commons ground to a halt on October 3, 2024, over the Liberals’ refusal to produce documents related to the Green Slush Fund scandal, the conventional expectation was that the standoff would resolve within days or weeks. It did not. The privilege debate consumed the remainder of the fall sitting. Christmas recess arrived with no resolution. And then, on January 6, 2025, Trudeau prorogued Parliament entirely — not to break the deadlock, but to avoid a no-confidence vote his government could not survive. The House did not reconvene until March 24, 2025, and when it did, it sat only briefly before the election was called for April 28.

According to the Library of Parliament’s own records, the House of Commons sat for just 73 days out of 455 available days between October 2024 and December 2025 — a rate of sixteen percent. For eighty-four percent of the time, Canadians had no functioning legislature. No bills were debated. No committees met. No government spending was scrutinized. No questions were asked in Question Period, because there was no Question Period to attend. The executive branch governed unimpeded by the legislative branch for the better part of a year.

Throughout all of it, every Member of Parliament continued to collect their full salary. The base compensation for a Canadian MP is $194,600 per year, with additional allowances for housing, travel, and office expenses. Members received per diems for days they were nominally “in session” and continued to draw from taxpayer-funded budgets for constituency offices that had no parliamentary business to report on. The House of Commons sitting calendar tells the story: vast stretches of blank space where sittings should have been, interrupted by the occasional cluster of days that achieved nothing of substance before the next recess.

The cost of this arrangement was not abstract. During the months Parliament did not sit, the federal government continued to spend, regulate, and govern by Order in Council. Tax revenues continued to flow. Programs continued to disburse funds. Regulatory changes continued to be enacted. All of it happened without the oversight mechanism that exists specifically to ensure the executive does not spend public money without legislative approval. The entire premise of responsible government — the system Canada inherited from Westminster, in which the executive can only govern so long as it holds the confidence of the legislature — depends on the legislature actually sitting. When it does not, responsible government is a fiction. The government is responsible to no one.

What makes this period particularly corrosive is that Parliament did not shut down because of a crisis, a natural disaster, or a national emergency. It shut down because the governing party was caught in a corruption scandal and refused to comply with a lawful order of the House. The Liberals could have produced the Green Slush Fund documents, allowed the RCMP referral to proceed, and continued governing. They chose instead to let the legislature die rather than face accountability — and then used the resulting vacuum to engineer a leadership transition, install a new Prime Minister, and call an election on their own terms.

Canadians paid for every day of it. They paid the salaries of MPs who did not sit, the operating costs of a Parliament that did not function, and the price of a government that spent their money without anyone in the room to ask where it was going. The phrase “taxation without representation” is not a metaphor in this context. For nearly eight months, it was a literal description of how Canada was governed.

Manufacturing a Majority

Mark Carney won a minority government on April 28, 2025. Six months later, he began assembling the majority the electorate refused to give him.

On November 4, 2025, Nova Scotia MP Chris d’Entremont — elected as a Conservative — crossed the floor to the Liberal caucus. On December 11, Toronto-area MP Michael Ma followed. On February 18, 2026, Edmonton MP Matt Jeneroux became the third Conservative to cross. On March 10, NDP MP Lori Idlout, representing the vast riding of Nunavut, left the NDP to join the Liberals. And on April 8, four-term Sarnia–Lambton MP Marilyn Gladu became the fifth. Five crossings in five months, each one bringing the Liberals closer to the 172 seats required for a majority. With Gladu’s defection, they sit at 171 — one seat short, with three byelections scheduled for April 13 that could deliver the rest.

In every one of these ridings, voters cast their ballots for a specific party. The residents of Sarnia–Lambton elected a Conservative. The people of Nunavut elected a New Democrat. Those voters did not choose a Liberal representative, and no one has asked them whether they accept one. The ballot they marked and the member who now claims to represent them belong to two different political parties — and under Canadian law, there is nothing they can do about it until the next general election.

Gladu’s crossing is the most revealing. In January 2026 — three months before she herself crossed — Gladu publicly stated her position on the practice. “We elected you under this banner,” she said, “and if you don’t want to be under that banner, then we deserve a chance to have a redo.” She backed proposals that would require floor-crossing MPs to face an automatic byelection, giving voters the final say. The principle she articulated was clear and correct: the mandate belongs to the voter, not the member. By April, she had abandoned it entirely. The mayor of Sarnia and the president of the local Conservative riding association both called on her to resign and face a byelection. She has not done so. Carney has not asked her to.

The public’s view on this is not ambiguous. Angus Reid polling found that just one in four Canadians believe an MP who crosses the floor should be allowed to finish their term with the new party. Seventy-five percent believe some form of democratic accountability — a byelection, a recall mechanism, or an automatic trigger — should follow. The political class has ignored this consensus completely. There is no law requiring a byelection after a floor crossing, and no party in power has any incentive to create one, because the practice only benefits whichever party is doing the recruiting.

What makes this particular wave of crossings different from historical precedents is the arithmetic. CBC’s own analysis of floor-crossing history shows that it is rare for so many MPs to cross to the same party in such a compressed timeframe, and rarer still for those crossings to carry explicit strategic weight — each one narrowing the gap between a minority and a majority. This is not a handful of disaffected backbenchers following their conscience. This is a coordinated accumulation of seats that transforms the composition of Parliament without a single Canadian casting a vote.

The Hub framed the problem directly: Carney is “undemocratically winning a majority.” The word is precise. A majority government carries enormous power in the Westminster system — it controls the legislative agenda, dominates committees, and governs with near-impunity between elections. That power is supposed to be granted by the electorate. When it is assembled instead through backroom recruitment of individual MPs who switch their allegiance after the fact, the mandate is manufactured. The voters who created the minority Parliament on April 28, 2025, did not consent to the majority Parliament that is taking shape in April 2026.

Floor crossing is legal in Canada. It is also, in the plainest sense of the word, undemocratic. The voter chose one thing. The system delivered another. And no one with the power to change it has any reason to try.

The Husk Holds

On April 13, 2026, three federal byelections will determine whether the Carney government crosses the threshold from minority to majority. If the Liberals win even one of them (which they almost certainly will), they’ll hold 172 seats and command the House of Commons without needing the NDP, the Bloc, or anyone else. A government that was never supposed to have a majority will have obtained one through a combination of floor crossings no voter consented to and byelections triggered by the very scandals documented in this piece.

And waiting on the other side of that majority is a legislative agenda that should concern every Canadian who still believes the state answers to the citizen rather than the other way around.

Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, passed third reading in the House of Commons and is now before the Senate. The bill creates new criminal offences for the “wilful promotion of hatred,” expands the definition of hate crimes, and — most critically — removes a long-standing religious-expression exemption from Section 319(3) of the Criminal Code that protected Canadians who spoke in good faith on the basis of religious texts. The exemption had never once been successfully invoked to defend hateful speech. It was removed anyway. The bill also eliminates the requirement that the Attorney General approve hate-propaganda charges before they proceed, stripping away a prosecutorial safeguard that existed specifically to prevent politically motivated charges. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association warned that the bill’s vague language could be used to criminalise peaceful protest and silence unpopular expression. The Canadian Labour Congress raised concerns about its potential to infringe on freedom of association. The Canadian Constitution Foundation called it a direct threat to the Charter right to freedom of expression.

Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act, was tabled in March 2026 and would compel telecommunications providers to retain Canadians’ metadata for up to one year and grant police and CSIS expanded powers to access it. The bill originally appeared as part of Bill C-2, the Strong Borders Act, which was so sweeping in its surveillance provisions that the government was forced to split it into separate legislation after public backlash. Digital law professor Michael Geist warned that dangerous backdoor surveillance risks remain even in the revised version, and the government has not disclosed what the mass metadata retention regime will cost — either to taxpayers or to the telecommunications companies who will be forced to build the infrastructure.

The Online Harms Act — the previous incarnation of which died on the order paper when Trudeau prorogued Parliament — is being prepared for reintroduction. The original Bill C-63 proposed the creation of a Digital Safety Commission with regulatory power over online speech, provisions that critics including the Canadian Civil Liberties Association said amounted to government censorship of lawful content, and penalties that included the possibility of house arrest before an offence had been committed and life imprisonment for certain categories of speech.

And then there is the broader architecture of executive power that Carney has been assembling since taking office. The One Canadian Economy Act, passed in June 2025, allows Cabinet to declare any infrastructure project to be in the “national interest” — at which point all regulatory findings required under any federal law are deemed to have been made, and the Minister can issue a single document authorizing the project to proceed. The government has invoked emergency-powers rhetoric to justify everything from housing construction to trade corridors, framing routine policy priorities as crises that require bypassing normal democratic processes. And in March 2026, the Carney government asked the Supreme Court of Canada to overturn two lower-court rulings that found the invocation of the Emergencies Act during the 2022 Freedom Convoy protests was unlawful and violated the Charter. Two levels of court agreed the law was used unconstitutionally. Carney’s response was not to accept the rulings but to appeal them — seeking to establish the legal precedent that a future government can invoke emergency powers to crush a protest it finds politically inconvenient.

This is the legislative programme that a manufactured majority will be asked to pass. Criminalization of speech the government deems hateful, with fewer safeguards against abuse. Mass surveillance of Canadians’ digital metadata. A regulatory framework for online content that hands a government commission authority over what can and cannot be said on the internet. Executive power to bypass environmental and regulatory law by declaring projects to be in the national interest. And a legal campaign to establish that the Emergencies Act can be wielded against citizens who dissent.

A minority government would face opposition, amendment, and compromise on every one of these bills. A majority government faces none. With 172 seats, the Liberals control the legislative agenda, dominate every committee, and pass legislation without a single opposition vote. The bills listed above move from contentious proposals to foregone conclusions.

That is what is at stake on April 13. Not merely which party holds a few extra seats, but whether the legislative checks that remain — the last thin barriers between proposal and law — survive the week. The husk of Canadian democracy has absorbed every violation documented in this piece: elections used as escape routes, votes that went uncounted, foreign interference met with partnership rather than prosecution, a Parliament that did not sit, a Prime Minister no one elected, and a majority no one voted for. Each one was treated as an isolated incident. Each one was normalized. And each one made the next one possible.

The husk holds. It absorbs. And if the majority falls into place next week, it will have served its final purpose — providing the appearance of democratic legitimacy to a government that has spent five years systematically dismantling the substance of it.

The sharp rise in homelessness has brought this debate into focus, especially after a shocking report from the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

The report outlined a dramatic rise in homelessness, noting an increase of 107% between 2020–2022 and 2024. Ontario alone recorded more than 85,000 people experiencing homelessness in 2025.

Homelessness has grown to the point where the Commission now calls it a human rights crisis. The report clearly identifies the problem. The solution, however, is far less clear. The Commission reflects what many Canadians instinctively believe: when there is a problem, government spending should fix it.

Yet there is little evidence that this spending and these programs have solved the problem in any meaningful way.

Over the past decade — especially since COVID — Canada has undertaken one of the largest expansions of social policy in its modern history.

Federal and provincial governments deployed tens of billions toward poverty reduction, housing stability, and homelessness prevention. Through income transfers, eviction moratoriums, emergency benefits, and large housing programs, policymakers promised to protect the most vulnerable and maintain social stability during an unprecedented disruption.

However, the results tell an uncomfortable story that many Canadians seem reluctant to confront, in part because Canada remains a deeply pro-welfare society. How long will Canadians tolerate the economic burden created by these policies? Especially future generations who will inherit the cost of today’s political decisions.

Despite this surge in intervention, key indicators have moved in the opposite direction. Housing affordability has fallen to historic lows, homelessness has risen sharply, and a growing share of working Canadians now live in financial precarity.

According to Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada’s Everyone Counts 2024 report, nearly 60,000 Canadians experience homelessness on any given night. This is nearly double the level observed just six years earlier, before COVID. Even more striking is the shift in severity: unsheltered homelessness, including encampments, increased from 14% in 2018 to 28% in 2024.

These trends did not occur in the absence of government action. They occurred during a period defined by aggressive spending and intervention — market restrictions, prolonged lockdowns, eviction moratoriums, income replacement programs, and large housing subsidies — all intended to reduce poverty and prevent homelessness.

The central question is no longer whether governments acted, but whether their actions addressed root causes or instead distorted the systems they were meant to stabilize.

The pandemic period offers a useful lens for examining this divergence. Lockdowns and economic restrictions hit lower-income workers hardest, particularly those in service sectors. At the same time, asset prices — especially housing — rose rapidly. This dynamic widened the wealth divide: those with assets saw their balance sheets grow, while those without faced rising costs and declining stability.

While it remains difficult to isolate how many people were pushed into poverty or homelessness directly because of these policies, the broader pattern is clear. Economic disruption combined with housing inflation increased vulnerability across large parts of the population. These were policy choices, though many remain uncomfortable acknowledging that fact. Inflation is a policy choice, not an act of God or nature.

COVID itself did not dictate these decisions. Lockdowns, the closure of small and medium businesses deemed “non-essential” while large corporations remained open, curfews, quantitative easing, and near-zero interest rates all contributed to the domino effect of regressing socioeconomic conditions we all see today.

These conditions also coincided with rising mental health problems. Drug and alcohol abuse increased alongside depression and suicide, driven by isolation, fear, and financial strain. This aligns with data showing homelessness nearly doubling since 2019, according to the Everyone Counts 2024 report.

This raises a basic question: if spending and intervention increased so dramatically, why did outcomes continue to worsen?

A common assumption is that poverty and homelessness persist because governments have not spent enough — that more funding would produce better results. But this assumption deserves scrutiny.

Federal homelessness spending alone has increased roughly 374% compared to the previous decade, averaging more than $561 million annually through programs such as Reaching Home, alongside billions more committed through recent budgets. Yet the persistence — and growth — of the problem suggests the relationship between spending and outcomes is far from linear.

Figure 1. Actual & Planned Spending on Homelessness Programs

People assume that more government spending is always the solution, yet in business we know that spending does not equate to results or success. So why does this fantasy correlation prosper in the political realm?

How did we get to a place where we believe politicians with short-term objectives and little to no understanding of basic economics trick us into allowing them to keep expanding debt, which we citizens must bear without holding accountability for those failures?

According to the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s 2024 Federal Spending to Address Homelessness report, achieving a 50% reduction in chronic homelessness would require an additional $3.5 billion PER YEAR, Meanwhile, Budget 2024 proposed $1 billion over four years to stabilize Reaching Home, plus $250 million over two years to address encampments and unsheltered homelessness.

Notice the pattern — more intervention, more spending, and the promise of improvement.

The continued rise in homelessness despite increased spending raises another question: what is the government actually doing with the money? To explore this, we can look at Red Deer as an example.

In 2019, Red Deer launched what it called an ambitious plan to end homelessness. The plan proposed spending $273 million over five years. At the time, the city had an estimated 150 homeless individuals — implying a cost of roughly $1.82 million per person.

The justification was that 1,800 additional people were at risk of homelessness, and the city wanted to act proactively. In practice, this meant preparing housing capacity rather than preventing homelessness upstream.

The more realistic conclusion is that when governments announce spending to “address homelessness,” they often mean managing homelessness — not reducing the number of people who become homeless, but transitioning them into publicly funded systems after the fact.

It is therefore not surprising that two years after the end of this five-year plan, homelessness in Red Deer continues to rise and the city struggles to keep up with shelter demand.

Self-interest is a basic principle of human behaviour, and governments are not exempt from it. Governments must justify their existence, and so must the NGOs that depend on government funding. If a government-funded shelter sees homelessness decline, its funding may also decline. That creates incentives that do not always align with solving the problem permanently.

With this in mind, it is notable that the 2019 Red Deer plan was not the first attempt to end homelessness there. An earlier five-year plan launched in 2014 aimed to end homelessness by 2018. The 2019 plan followed when that goal was not achieved.

Recently, Red Deer announced a third plan beginning in 2026 called Project Nexus, involving a range of publicly funded programs, including addiction support, healthcare services, and temporary and long-term housing.

Despite hundreds of millions in spending across multiple plans, homelessness continues to rise. Rather than eliminating homelessness, governments appear to be building permanent bureaucracies to manage it. Big business for the Welfare State.

It is therefore unsurprising that the NDP has now elected a leader proposing to double down on this approach with even more expansive federal programs.

Avi Lewis claims his platform will “end homelessness” through coordination across all levels of government. Yet, as the Red Deer example shows, even at smaller scales, governments have struggled not only to end homelessness but even to reduce it.

Understanding poverty and homelessness in Canada requires looking beyond headlines and intentions. It requires examining policy design, incentives, and unintended consequences — in other words, basic economics.

If the goal is not simply to manage poverty but to reduce it, then the key question is no longer how much governments spend, but whether the current intervention model can solve the problem at all.

Is welfarism truly the solution?

“Emergencies have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have eroded. Once suspended, it is not difficult for those who assume emergency powers to ensure the emergency never truly ends.”

- Friedrich August Von Hayek

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Canada isn’t falling apart because of a few bad decisions, but because the system is built to expand state power at every opportunity.

In Episode 160 of The Blendr Report, Bruce Pardy explains that the problem is not bad leadership or flawed policy but the model itself. Canada has become a managerial state.

A country built on the rule of law is meant to restrain power. Laws apply evenly, Governments act within defined bounds, and Individuals are left to make their own choices, for better or worse. But what we have now is something else. The state doesn’t just enforce rules—it shapes outcomes. It intervenes, adjusts, corrects, and expands.

And it rarely pulls back.

You can see it in the numbers. Government spending makes up a massive share of economic activity. Entire industries operate under protection, subsidy, or quiet coordination with the state. Telecom, banking, airlines, even parts of education—they don’t behave like open markets but managed systems.

It looks private but it isn’t.

That same logic has spread into law. The shift from rule of law to rule by law is subtle, but once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Laws are no longer stable guardrails. They’re tools. Flexible, expandable, selectively applied.

During COVID, rules could change overnight. Not through long legislative process, but through announcement. Press conferences became policy and directives became law. That is how the system truly works.

At the same time, enforcement has become uneven. Small violations are punished quickly and consistently. Miss a technical rule, pay the fine. But larger breakdowns—violent crime, institutional failure, corruption—are often ignored. Pardy describes this as a kind of anarcho-tyranny. Tight control at the bottom and looseness at the top.

Meanwhile, most people go along with it.

That may be the hardest part to confront. The system persists because it is supported. Not always consciously, but culturally. Canadians have been taught to expect solutions from the state. More services, more protection, and more intervention. Each demand expands the same machinery that limits them.

Even the legal foundations are shifting. Property rights, once assumed to be stable, are becoming conditional. Court rulings and political frameworks like UNDRIP are introducing competing claims over land and ownership. The details are complex, but the direction is clear: certainty is being replaced with negotiation.

And a system without clear ownership is a system open to control.

None of this fits neatly into left versus right. That frame is too narrow. What we’re really looking at is a divide between those who believe society should be managed, and those who believe it should be constrained. Canada chose management.

Reversing that isn’t a matter of electing different people. It would require rethinking the role of government itself, which requires a cultural shift.

If you’re interested in hearing the rationale behind this perspective, Listen to The Blendr Report EP160 on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Rumble.

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Pierre Poilievre opposing the $90 billion Liberal high-speed rail project has caused quite the controversy. And if you look at who’s screaming the loudest, the reason becomes obvious pretty fast.

The Laurentian Elite who loot Canadian taxpayers stand to gain BILLIONS from this project. They want major backlash against anyone who threatens their impending goldmine of corruption. The media, the consulting class, the construction lobby, the politically connected firms who always seem to end up with the contracts, need you to believe this is about trains…

BUT IT’S NOT ABOUT TRAINS.

So let’s do the math they don’t want you to see.

The Base Cost

The sticker price is $90 billion. That’s what the Liberals want you to hear. But that number is a fantasy before the first shovel hits dirt.

According to Joe Carson’s Diagnosis Red Tape, for every dollar paid in federal taxes, 26.72% never re-enters the private economy. It’s consumed by bureaucracy. Not fraud or corruption. Just the ordinary cost of government machinery processing money through its own bloated system.

That means a $90B public project carries roughly $24B in administrative overhead baked in from day one. The true taxpayer burden before anything goes wrong: ~$114B.

There are roughly 20 million taxpayers in Canada. That’s ~$5,700 per taxpayer.

All so that 12 million people in the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal corridor can have access to rail.

Already a hard sell. But here’s the problem….

THINGS NEVER GO ACCORDING TO PLAN!

Bent Flyvbjerg is an Oxford professor who has assembled one of the largest megaproject database in the world: 16,000+ projects across 136 countries going back to 1910. His findings are disheartening to say the least.

91.5% of megaprojects go over budget, over schedule, or both. The mean cost overrun is 62%. And less than 1% of megaprojects are completed on time, on budget, and deliver the benefits promised.

One percent.

According to long time friends of the Liberal Party, McKinsey & Company, rail projects specifically go over budget by an average of 44.7%, and their demand is overestimated by 51.4%.

Applied to Alto: $114B × 1.447 = ~$165B. That’s ~$8,250 per taxpayer.

Meanwhile, the Liberals’ projected $35B yearly GDP increase?

If demand is overestimated by half, which is exactly what the data says happens, that’s closer to $17B.

Remember that number because it will become important later.

The Eglinton Precedent

You don’t need to look at Oxford databases or McKinsey reports to understand what’s coming. You just need to look at Toronto.

The Eglinton Crosstown LRT was originally projected at ~$5B.

Final cost: $13B.

It took 15 years of construction.

Businesses along the corridor were destroyed.

Communities were wrecked by noise, dust, and road closures for over a decade.

This isn’t conjecture—I lived on Eglinton for five years during the construction. I saw it firsthand, and I even worked for a business that went under because of it.

Premier Doug Ford refused to hold an inquiry and nobody was held accountable.

The Eglinton Crosstown is 19km long. Alto is ~1,000km. That’s 53 times longer.

The Eglinton Crosstown cost $684M per kilometre. If Alto hit a similar per-km cost, you’d be looking at $684B. That’s obviously absurd — but the directional point is devastating. Canada just proved, in real time, in its largest city, that it cannot build 19km of light rail on time or on budget. The proposed answer is to build 1,000km of high-speed rail?

The Eglinton’s cost multiplied by 2.6×. Apply that same factor to Alto: $114B × 2.6 = ~$296B.

That’s ~$14,800 per taxpayer.

Now Add Corruption

Everything above assumes the money is merely wasted through incompetence. But Canada has a well-documented history of something worse.

The Charbonneau Commission (a provincial inquiry that ran from 2011 to 2015) established that mafia-linked cartels inflated Montreal public contract prices by up to 30%. A retired government whistleblower told the Globe and Mail in 2009 that the Mafia controlled roughly 80% of road contracts in the Montreal region, with prices inflated up to 35%. Economists estimated that up to $500 million was misappropriated in Montreal alone between 2004 and 2009.

And it hasn’t stopped. As recently as 2024, the top five firms captured 76% of infrastructure contract value in the sector, with estimated overcosts of at least $40 million in a single year — approximately 20% above fair market price.

Then there’s the “Green Slush Fund” scandal. The Auditor General found 186 conflicts of interest at Sustainable Development Technology Canada, with an estimated $150-390M in misappropriated funds. That’s roughly 17-45% of the fund’s total approvals funnelled to insiders. Board members were approving grants to each other’s companies. The bonus structure incentivised rapid disbursement without oversight. When Conservatives demanded documents, the Liberals shut down Parliament rather than hand them over.

Applied to Alto’s $90B base: $15-40B in corruption.

Applied to the Eglinton-style $296B scenario: $50-133B in corruption.

BUT IT GETS WORSE

Everything above treats this project as though the government has $90 billion sitting in a vault. It doesn’t because Canada is running deficits.

That means THIS PROJECT WILL BE FINANCED WITH DEBT.

And debt has interest…

The Canada 30-year government bond yield currently sits at ~4%. That’s the rate taxpayers will be charged to borrow money over decades to finance this project.

Here’s what nobody in Ottawa wants you to think about: interest compounds during the entire construction period BEFORE A SINGLE DOLLAR OF GDP BENEFIT IS GENERATED. Every year, the government borrows billions more to keep building. Every year, interest piles onto the previous years’ borrowing. By the time the last rail is laid, the total debt is already far larger than the sticker price.

Alto’s own timeline projects full completion by 2043 — roughly 15 years of construction. Let’s run those numbers for each scenario.

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Canada’s decline is becoming something people can no longer ignore in their day-to-day lives.

Over the past decade, GDP per capita has largely stagnated while government spending has continued to expand. At the same time, quality of life indicators have moved in the wrong direction. Canada has fallen from 5th to 25th on the World Happiness Report, healthcare wait times have stretched to nearly 29 weeks, and food bank usage has doubled since 2019.

What stands out most, however, is not just the decline itself but how unevenly it is being experienced.

Older Canadians still rank among the happiest in the world, while younger Canadians fall far down the list. The contrast is difficult to ignore, and it points to something deeper than a temporary economic cycle.

For older Canadians, rising asset prices have largely offset the broader economic slowdown. Many own homes that have appreciated significantly, and their cost of living, while higher, remains manageable relative to their accumulated wealth. For younger Canadians, the same dynamics have had the opposite effect. Housing prices in cities like Toronto now sit at roughly 12 times average household income, with Vancouver even higher.

Over time, that changes how people relate to the future.

You can push yourself to earn more, take on more responsibility, and delay gratification, but there is a threshold where the basic milestones, such as owning a home, starting a family, and building something stable, move out of reach for the average person. When that happens at scale, it doesn’t just affect finances but perspective as well.

When people can’t see a path forward, work begins to feel disconnected from progress, and the long-term incentives that hold a society together start to weaken. Family formation declines, fertility drops, and the sense of direction that once came with building a life becomes harder to maintain.

Policy responses have struggled to address this shift in any meaningful way.

Take housing. Ontario’s decision to remove the HST on new homes may save buyers up to $130,000, but it does not lower the cost of building. Development charges have risen dramatically over time, and margins for builders remain tight. In practice, policies like this often lead to higher prices rather than increased supply, as developers adjust to capture part of the savings.

The same structural issue appears in immigration policy. A recent Auditor General report found that more than 153,000 potential immigration violations were flagged in a single year, yet fewer than 4,100 were investigated. Over 98 percent went untouched. Revealing a with known gaps and almost no enforcement.

Across these areas, the pattern is consistent. Policies are introduced that address symptoms, but the underlying incentives remain unchanged. Housing remains constrained, costs remain elevated, and the pressures on younger generations continue to build. The result is a steady shift in expectations.

Older Canadians look at the present and assume things will stabilize, because they always have. Younger Canadians look at the same data and see a trajectory that is harder to reverse. They are not just reacting to where things are but where things appear to be going.

And that difference in perspective is beginning to define the country.

Listen to The Blendr Report EP159 on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Rumble.

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We always heard when we were young that “curiosity killed the cat.” But now, as an adult, I find myself asking a different question: what killed curiosity?

The sheer number of my peers who have become completely incurious astounds me. The way many of them have shown themselves susceptible to state and ideological propaganda completely blows my mind.

I would blame the school system for failing to equip my peers with the critical thinking skills needed to bypass propaganda, but I’m increasingly convinced the system was not ineffective — it was very effective at carrying out its actual objective.

It does not seem to me the school system my peers and I went through was ever designed to enable critical thinking, curiosity, individual thought, or the pursuit of truth. Instead, it seems to lead people toward the conclusion that there is only one right answer to a question, one solution to a problem, and one correct way of doing things.

I started noticing what set people apart when it came to critical thinkers and what I would call the NPCs of society. Independent people and entrepreneurs, I noticed, had far less tendency to believe false narratives. These were often the people who questioned COVID policies, did their own research, distrusted official messaging, and doubted the effectiveness of certain government mandates.

However, when I went to the OSAP protest in downtown Toronto and debated protesters on their positions, something else revealed itself to me — something I had started noticing more broadly among people who disagreed with my positions. Many of them were highly educated and placed enormous weight on institutional validation when deciding what positions people should hold in society.

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Then I thought back to an interview between Dr. Jordan Peterson and Dr. Simone Gold. Dr. Gold spoke about her experience as a doctor and the structure of medical school. She described many of her peers as incurious after news of COVID became widespread. When she tried to discuss it at work, many colleagues seemed uninterested in examining it deeply, particularly in discussions around treatments such as hydroxychloroquine.

She described doing her own independent research on the drug and asking colleagues whether they were considering it for their patients. According to her account, they showed little interest at the time. Then in March, after Donald Trump publicly mentioned hydroxychloroquine and media coverage turned sharply negative, she said many of those same colleagues suddenly became very vocal about how bad it supposedly was.

She also spoke about how medical school taught students much like any other school. Students were presented with material by a teacher — the authority figure. They were told to take notes, memorize the information, learn it, and reproduce it on exams. She highlighted that students were largely led to ask only approved questions, and that there was little true critical thinking, particularly in the first two years.

People who went through the school system often see nothing strange in this. Many believe this is simply how school should function. But Jordan Peterson pointed out the implicit assumption underneath this structure: what you are taught is presumed correct, and your role is to learn it and demonstrate possession of that knowledge.

That kind of thinking may function inside the boundaries of a classroom. The real world does not operate like that.

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The Chinese Communist Party has spent fifty years building a deeply entrenched influence network in Canada.

In Blendr Report Episode 158, I sat down with Canadian historian and national security analyst Dennis Molinaro to discuss how the CCP operates with near impunity inside our borders. Not with tanks and troops but relationships, incentives, and systems we assumed were benign.

The story starts in the 1970s, when Canada formally opened relations with the People’s Republic of China. What seemed like diplomacy and trade created access. And access, when paired with strategy, becomes leverage.

Molinaro walks through how that leverage has grown over time.

It begins with business. Early intermediaries helped Western companies enter Chinese markets, acting as gatekeepers between two systems. But those relationships did more than open trade—they built dependency. Once economic ties are in place, influence follows. Not always through direct pressure but through quiet alignment of interests.

From there, the focus expands into academia.

Canadian universities, like many in the West, operate on openness. But that same openness can be abused. Programs tied to Chinese state interests have offered funding, partnerships, and access, often with conditions attached. Intellectual property flows outward, sometimes legally, sometimes less so. And when civil research overlaps with military use, academia and national security become intertwined.

This is where Molinaro highlights a key concept: civil-military fusion. In China, the boundary between civilian institutions and the military is thin. What looks like academic cooperation can, in some cases, feed directly into state objectives.

One of the most eye opening parts of the discussion is the role of the United Front Work Department. Which is an arm of the CCP tasked with cultivating relationships abroad. Its goal is to build ties with influential people and organizations, shape narratives, and align outcomes over time. Not through overt control but influence that feels voluntary.

Molinaro also details cases of transnational repression. Which include intimidation, threats, and pressure directed at individuals living in Canada. Dissidents, activists, and members of diaspora communities have reported harassment that reaches beyond borders.

What makes this conversation is the response. Or lack of one.

While countries like the United States and Australia have taken more aggressive steps to counter foreign interference, Canada has been slower to act. The issue is often framed as a trade-off between economic ties and national security, as if the two cannot coexist.

Molinaro rejects that belief. A nation does not preserve prosperity by ignoring risk. You preserve it by understanding the environment and acting accordingly.

Canada is not immune to global power dynamics. And the systems we pride ourselves on, such as open markets, open research, and open society, only work when paired with awareness and restraint.

If you want to understand how this all fits together, including the history, the mechanisms, and where it may be heading, you can listen to The Blendr Report EP158 on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Rumble.

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Canada’s political class spent the past week demonstrating just how fragile the country’s “democratic” institutions have become.

Three separate developments: an “anti-hate” bill pushed through Parliament, an MP crossing the floor to strengthen the Liberal government, and testimony from a former CBC anchor—paint a troubling picture of the country’s political trajectory. Each story on its own would raise serious questions. Taken together, they highlight a political system that is becoming increasingly insulated from public accountability.

The first issue concerns Bill C-9, which MPs voted to advance after halting months of debate. Supporters say the bill is meant to combat rising hate crimes. Critics argue it risks eroding free expression. The most contentious change removes a long-standing Criminal Code exemption protecting individuals who quote religious texts from hate-speech prosecution.

This change may sound technical, but the principle matters. Liberal democracies traditionally protect speech even when it is uncomfortable or unpopular. Once governments begin regulating expression based on whether someone feels offended or targeted, the line between preventing harm and policing opinion becomes difficult to maintain.

The concern is not simply about one bill. It is about the broader direction of lawmaking. The legislation would make it easier to prosecute “hate” propaganda, create new criminal offences around displaying certain symbols, and remove the requirement that the attorney general approve some hate-related prosecutions before charges are laid.

When combined with subjective definitions of intent or symbolism, such powers invite uneven enforcement.

At the same time, another development in Ottawa revealed how easily parliamentary representation can shift without voter input. Nunavut MP Lori Idlout crossed the floor from the NDP to join Mark Carney’s Liberals, bringing the government within two seats of a majority.

Floor-crossing is legal in Canada, but the practice remains controversial. Voters elect representatives under a particular party banner and policy platform. When that representative changes sides without seeking a new mandate, constituents are effectively represented by a party they may not have chosen.

In a parliamentary system, these changes can alter the balance of power in government overnight. With three upcoming by-elections, the Liberals could soon secure a majority—giving them the ability to pass legislation with far fewer constraints.

Finally, testimony before Parliament from former CBC journalist Travis Dhanraj raised fresh concerns about the country’s publicly funded broadcaster.

Dhanraj alleged that internal editorial control limited which political guests could appear on programs and that questioning these practices led to professional consequences. He described a centralized system where decisions about political interviews were tightly controlled and dissent within the organization was discouraged.

For a broadcaster that receives roughly $1.4 billion in public funding each year, the credibility of its editorial process is critical. Public trust depends on the perception that coverage is fair, transparent, and open to competing viewpoints.

When critics argue that the broadcaster increasingly reflects the priorities of the government that funds it, the problem becomes larger than one newsroom dispute. It becomes a question about the health of the country’s information ecosystem.

You can’t have democracy without friction—open debate, competing viewpoints, and the constant pressure of accountability.

When those forces weaken, the system may continue functioning on paper. But the substance of democratic governance begins to erode.

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The Liberal government has a bad—and I believe intentional—habit of introducing legislation framed as ensuring safety, but which ultimately gives the government excessive power to take away the freedoms of Canadians.

I see these laws as a kind of “Trojan horse,” based on the story of the Greek warriors in the Trojan War. Disguised as a gift, with the aim of lowering the guard of the receiver, what appears harmless on the outside can conceal a much greater threat within. When you finally look inside, you may find something far more dangerous than expected, such as, the fall of a nation like the story depicts.

Recent developments suggest these Liberal Trojan horse bills may no longer need to be hidden. They may now pass into law with little resistance, whether it is what Canadians voted for or not.

At this point, it appears increasingly likely that Mark Carney’s Liberals will secure a majority government—not through a fair and free election, but with the help of floor crossers from the Conservative and NDP parties.

His government currently holds 170 seats, with three by-elections approaching. If the Liberals win two of those three races—which appears likely—they will reach the 172 seats required for a majority. With that, they will be able to pass any legislation they wish, provided it is approved by the Senate.

The floor crossing of NDP MP Lori Idlout has effectively ensured a Liberal majority government. Two of the three ridings in the upcoming by-elections are already Liberal strongholds.

Bill Blair was the former MP for the riding of Scarborough Southwest. He resigned after being appointed High Commissioner to the U.K. on February 2. In the last election, his riding voted 61.5 percent Liberal, while the Conservative candidate received only 30.6 percent.

It is reasonable to expect the riding will vote in a similar way in the upcoming by-election, securing that seat for the Liberals.

Chrystia Freeland resigned to take an unpaid role as an adviser on economic issues to the president of Ukraine. It seems the Liberals have made a tradition of failing upwards.

Her riding of University–Rosedale voted 64 percent Liberal, with the Conservatives a distant second at 23.5 percent.

These are the only two ridings the Liberal government needs to secure a majority, and it is reasonable to expect that is exactly what it will get.

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After these by-elections, Canada will be governed by what I consider an illegitimate Liberal majority government. Based on the bills they have already attempted to pass, we may move toward something resembling totalitarianism very quickly.

In light of these developments, it is worth revisiting some of the laws and amendments that were only altered or failed to pass because the Liberal government lacked a majority. It is very likely these measures will be reintroduced and passed once the government secures one.

Each of these laws represents, in my view, a reduction in privacy, security, and freedom for Canadians.

Bill C-8 was poised to be one of the most devastating laws because of the sweeping powers it would place in the hands of the Minister of Industry. It would give the minister the authority to direct telecommunications service providers to do anything—or refrain from doing anything—deemed necessary to “secure” the Canadian telecommunications system.

The bill was framed as a necessary step to increase safety for Canadians, but critics argue that, upon closer examination, it would allow the government to decide who can and cannot access telecommunication services in Canada.

If this law passes as written, wireless services in Canada, in any form, could effectively be placed under complete government control.

In this case, the bill would allow the government to force a telecommunications service provider to stop providing services or products to any person the minister deems a threat. This would give the government the ability to remove anyone from internet, telephone, or satellite services.

It would also allow the government to prevent telecommunications providers from receiving products or services from certain individuals or businesses, giving it significant leverage and control over the telecommunications industry.

Anyone who goes against these orders could face serious fines. For individuals, penalties could range from $25,000 to $50,000. In other cases, fines could reach $10 million to $15 million.

In theory, this would give the government powers similar to those seen in China over businesses operating within its borders, where industries can be crippled at any time.

It is no surprise that this bill alarmed many Canadians and led other parties to vote against it. Once the Liberals achieve a majority, however, those parties will no longer have the numbers to meaningfully block such legislation.

For instance, if this bill had been in effect during COVID, businesses that tried to keep operating after being ordered to shut down might not have posed much of a problem for the government. It could have been as simple as cutting off their phone lines and internet access, making it extremely difficult for those businesses to continue operating.

Not only has the government proposed laws that could financially cripple companies and individuals, it has also introduced legislation that could give certain businesses an overwhelming economic advantage.

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War has a way of clarifying the world. It strips away the polite language of diplomacy and reveals the incentives underneath.

That is precisely what we are watching unfold with the escalating conflict between Iran, Israel, and the United States.

For years, analysts spoke about a coming confrontation with Iran as if it were a distant possibility. Now it has arrived. Israeli and American strikes on Iran have pushed the region into a new phase of instability, and the consequences will reach far beyond the Middle East.

At stake is not simply the fate of the Iranian regime. The conflict sits at the intersection of the global energy market, the balance of power between the West and its rivals, and the fragile architecture of international order.

Roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil moves through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow maritime corridor beside Iran’s coastline. Any disruption there would ripple through the global economy overnight. Energy prices would spike. Supply chains would tighten. Nations dependent on imported fuel would scramble for alternatives.

The war is also unfolding within a broader geopolitical struggle. The United States and its allies see Iran as a destabilizing force and a long-time sponsor of terrorism across the Middle East. China and Russia, meanwhile, have treated Iran as a strategic partner within a wider contest against Western influence.

In other words, this conflict is not isolated. It sits inside a larger contest for power.

Against this backdrop, Canada’s political class appears uncertain about how to respond.

Mark Carney recently described international law as a “useful fiction” in a speech at Davos. The comment was accurate in one sense. International law has always lacked enforcement.

Yet as the Iran conflict escalated, Carney quickly began invoking that same international law as a moral authority for condemning military action. The contradiction is hard to miss. If international law is largely symbolic, citing it selectively begins to look less nothing more than political positioning.

Pierre Poilievre, by contrast, has taken a more direct approach. In a recent interview, he framed Iran as a hostile regime and argued that its removal could ultimately benefit both the Iranian people and the West.

Whether that outcome is realistic remains uncertain. History is not kind to regime-change operations. Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan serve as reminders that removing governments often unleashes forces far more chaotic than those that came before.

For ordinary Iranians, the situation is especially bleak. Many oppose their regime but face brutal repression whenever dissent emerges. If the state weakens, they may find themselves trapped between internal collapse and external war.

Wars rarely unfold according to anyone’s plan.

What is certain is that this conflict is reshaping the geopolitical chessboard and Canada will eventually be forced to decide where it stands.

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As independent or non-government-funded media has grown, so too has the widespread use of the terms “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorist.” These labels are often applied to narratives and individuals accused of undermining or delegitimizing governments by alleging secret plots carried out by powerful actors. The term first appeared in the New York Times in 1863, describing a belief that British aristocrats were secretly working against the United States during the Civil War. Since then, it has often been used to discredit those spreading unpopular opinions or controversial claims about governments around the world.

Recently, the Media Ecosystem Observatory, run by McGill University and the University of Toronto, released a study detailing the “conspiracy theories” currently circulating on social media in Canada and suggesting ways to combat them. The report refers to these as “anti-institutional conspiratorial claims,” defined as “narratives that transform institutional skepticism into claims of covert elite coordination and harm, often detached from factual evidence.”

In their methodology, they make it clear that the framing used to identify posts pushing a “conspiracy” is “a natural language inference task,” where they “try to find whether the claim follows from the textual content of the post.” In other words, they are not determining whether the claims made in these posts are true or false. They are simply assessing whether the post is making such a claim based on its context.

They collected 14 million posts from prominent Canadian accounts across X, TikTok, Instagram, and Bluesky. The study was conducted on the premise that these “conspiracy theories” challenge the legitimacy of democratic institutions and undermine trust in governing bodies and public officials.

The findings indicate that most of the highly viewed and interacted-with content labelled as conspiracy-related originated from a relatively small number of online creators. Just 100 users accounted for about 68% of the posts, capturing 90% of views and 86% of likes. The study also found that many of these users posted about multiple different “conspiracy theories,” not just a single topic.

The users’ positions on some of these subjects can be misrepresented or generalized. However, the data remains valuable for understanding how many Canadians are beginning to be exposed to different narratives.

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Although only a small number of people actually believe these “conspiracies,” many Canadians are aware of them. The average Canadian surveyed was aware of 3.49 “conspiracies” and believed in 0.91 of those they knew about. Men were significantly more likely than women to both encounter and believe these claims. Younger Canadians aged 18–34 were aware of more “conspiracies” than older groups but were less likely to believe them. Middle-aged Canadians, between 35 and 54, showed average awareness but were more likely to believe them than any other group.

The survey was administered to 1,459 Canadians between October 30 and November 7, 2025. The most prominent theory in terms of awareness concerned health threats, mostly centred around COVID-19. The claim is that the threat was highly exaggerated in order to expand government powers over Canadians and push an untested vaccine intended to harm them. Sixty-three percent of respondents said they were aware of this theory, while only 13 percent said they believed it was true.

The claim most widely believed was the idea that schools are indoctrinating children with radical gender ideology without the knowledge or consent of parents or guardians through programs such as SOGI (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity). According to the survey, 54% of respondents were aware of this claim, while 21% said they believed it was true.

The second most widely believed claim is the idea that elites control the media or that public opinion is manipulated through state-funded media. These claims suggest that mainstream outlets such as CBC or CTV are controlled or biased in favour of governments and powerful actors behind the scenes, often said to be influenced by corporations, the World Economic Forum (WEF), or other elite groups. Polling suggests that 47% of respondents are aware of this claim, while 16% say they believe it.

The five least prominent, though still notable, “conspiracy theories” identified in the study were election fraud, the deep state, digital ID, intentional wildfires, and the climate hoax. Each had about 8% of respondents reporting belief in the claim, with awareness ranging from 46% to 29%.

Unsurprisingly, the social media platform X was the dominant platform for engagement with these ideas, accounting for 70% of the likes and hosting the largest share of posts about them. Users of X were significantly more aware of these claims and were also the most likely to endorse them.

Although Canadians have become more aware of these subjects, that awareness also presents potential risks. Particularly in how these ideas are evaluated and how they may be interpreted by mainstream media and government institutions. We have already seen increased efforts to regulate online speech, along with legislation that raises privacy concerns for Canadians, such as Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act.

Numerous Members of Parliament across political parties have discussed measures to crack down on what they describe as “hate speech.” In the conclusion of the study, the researchers also put forward several troubling recommendations for how to suppress these kinds of narratives.

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I once had a fairy-tale view of Canada.

Growing up in a small town where everyone knew at least one of your relatives and you could go out for dinner without locking the front door, it was easy to believe we were a cohesive, high-trust society. Canada’s global reputation for being “nice” made that story effortless to internalize.

That view has been fading for more than a decade. It hasn’t felt like changing my mind but like waking up from a dream.

The illusion first cracked when I watched a family business install heavier security year after year. It began with cameras, then gates, then heavy equipment blocking entrances at the end of each day.

After moving to the city, I watched the homeless population change. They no longer looked like addicts struggling to get back on their feet but like fentanyl casualties—vacant, barely present, as if consciousness itself were flickering. I began hearing more stories of home invasions. While managing a bar at King and Bathurst, I arrived one morning to find thousands of dollars’ worth of liquor stolen from our storage area.

Then I started paying attention beyond my immediate surroundings. Articles about rising violent crime, extortion becoming routine, and organized criminal networks multiplying.

It all felt abstract. Yes, it was happening… but why?

Then I picked up Wilful Blindness by investigative journalist Sam Cooper and everything clicked: crime has not merely grown in Canada. It has been absorbed into the system.

As one veteran investigator in Cooper’s book put it:

“Organized crime doesn’t exist on drugs. It exists on money. Drugs are just the path of least resistance to making money fast. But you have to recycle it to use it. And thus, the profession of money laundering—an extraordinary economy employing thousands of Vancouverites—was born.”

That’s what is important to recognize: crime is not the entire story—money is.

Cartels generate staggering amounts of cash. In 2019, Global News reported that Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel was clearing more than $3 million a day in Canada, according to a former DEA agent.

And Sinaloa is just one organization.

The RCMP now estimates there are more than 4,000 organized crime groups operating in Canada — up from roughly 800 in 2011.

Canada became attractive to international criminals for three simple reasons:

1. A weak immigration system with minimal vetting in key periods

2. Outdated laws and hesitant enforcement

3. Government-run casinos willing to accept massive volumes of cash

Cash is king in underground economies. But it is bulky, risky, and hard to store. So it has to be cleaned.

The process is simple: earn, refine, launder, invest.

First, earning. Mexican cartels ship cocaine north and Chinese criminal networks distribute fentanyl precursors, while small time gangs sell the drugs on Canadian streets.

This creates mountains of cash—mostly small bills—but international criminals don’t want piles of Canadian twenties. They want usable money in Mexico, China, or elsewhere.

And this is where things get interesting.

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After the money is made — whether through drugs, extortion, scams, theft, or other criminal activity — it is deposited into underground banks.

These “banks” are not formal financial institutions. They don’t use wire transfers or the SWIFT system. There is no conventional paper trail. Instead, they operate on mirrored ledgers.

A cartel hands bulk drug cash to a Chinese underground banker operating in Vancouver, Richmond, or Markham.

On the surface, this banker runs what appears to be a legitimate business — a currency exchange, investment firm, “massage” spa, auto shop, restaurant, or trading company. Except the real function of the business is an intermediary.

The underground banker contacts a counterpart in China, Hong Kong, Mexico, or elsewhere. That counterpart releases an equivalent amount of funds in local currency to whoever the cartel designates.

No money physically crosses borders. The books are balanced through debt accounting between underground banking nodes — a private settlement system built on long-standing criminal relationships and trust.

Silver International, an underground bank operating in Canada, is described in Willful Blindness as “a stunning and terrible operation, laundering more than $1 billion each year in Vancouver for Chinese, Mexican, and Iranian crime cartels.”

So at this stage, cartel cash sits inside Canadian underground banks run by Chinese triads. Meanwhile, affiliated networks abroad release matching funds to the cartel.

The question is: what happens to the cash in Canada?

China has strict capital controls. Citizens are limited in how much money they can legally move out of the country each year.

Now imagine you are a wealthy Chinese citizen concerned about political risk. You don’t want the CCP to have the ability to freeze or seize your assets. You want liquidity outside China — preferably parked in foreign real estate.

So you go to the triads. You transfer Chinese currency domestically to an underground banker in China. That banker instructs his Vancouver counterpart to release Canadian dollars to you. Those dollars are the original proceeds of cartel drug sales.

Now the system is complete.

Cartels get their money settled abroad, Chinese elites get Canadian cash in Vancouver, and underground bankers take a cut on both sides.

Everyone wins… except Canadians.

You might think this financial scheme doesn’t affect you but it does—in very real ways.

The wealthy Chinese client receives his transfer in hockey bags of cash, typically small bills collected from street-level drug sales.

He walks into a government casino, buys chips, plays minimally, then cashes out. The money now emerges as casino cheques, bank drafts, or $100 bills wrapped to banking standards. It looks legitimate.

That “cleaned” money then flows into:

• Real estate

• Luxury vehicles

• Development projects

• Loan sharking

• Political donations

• Trade-based laundering schemes

This scheme inflates Canadian assets, pricing our citizens out of markets now dominated by criminal finances.

Police research found that more than 10 percent of Vancouver-area property sales priced over $3 million in 2016 were tied to buyers with criminal records, and 95 percent of those were believed linked to mainland China crime networks.

At this point, you would reasonably ask: why does government allow this?

Three comforting explanations are often offered. First, revenue dependency: casinos are major provincial earners. Second, political naivety: leaders mistook capital inflow for growth. Third, structural blindness: institutions lacked tools or coordination.

But those explanations don’t hold up when you consider Cooper’s reporting:

“Fintrac had provided BC police with evidence of $40 million in suspected casino money-laundering transactions in several years.”

And yet:

“Suspicious transactions in BCLC casinos had surged from 459 in 2011 to 1,013 in 2013. None of these suspicious transaction reports were investigated by the RCMP.”

When a specialized illegal gaming enforcement unit attempted to expand investigations inside casinos, it was disbanded.

“In April 2009, BC’s government did disband IIGET… Pinnock was so disturbed by the decision that he burned his police files.”

This is where responsibility becomes harder to untangle. While provinces profited from casino revenues, the RCMP is federal. So why didn’t Ottawa treat this as a national security threat?

Perhaps part of the answer lies in a scandal.

During his first term as Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau met with Paul King Jin, a businessman based in British Columbia. But Jin was no ordinary businessman. He would later become a central figure in BC’s commission of inquiry into money laundering.

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