After a decade spinning in a maelstrom, we’re headed straight into a hurricane.

The Trudeau Liberals’ hegemonic hold on Canada’s political, cultural and economic life is now officially and formally winding down. Parliament has been prorogued until March 24, although it isn’t certain that Canada will have a new Parliament with a new prime minister even by June, when Canada is supposed to be hosting the G7, by which time the Liberals are expected to have a new leader too.

Who knows. We’ll get there. Justin Trudeau will be gone, but this is what you should bear in mind as Canada careens and lists and tumbles out of this mess.

The world’s first “postnational state” that Trudeau inaugurated in 2015, with the able assistance of Dominic Barton’s McKinsey & Company and all the resources the Canada-China Business Council threw at the project, was never intended to be some four-year thing to be evaluated by voters in the ordinary course of events.

It was built to be permanent. Its undoing will require one hell of an effort, and in the meantime Donald Trump’s inauguration – a $150 million extravaganza funded by Pfizer, OpenAI, Amazon, Meta and a constellation of cryptocurrency firms – is set for January 20.

That’s just two weeks away, and Trump has pledged to impose what would be a crippling 25 percent tariff on goods from Canada and Mexico “on Day 1” unless measures regarding flows of illegal migrants and drugs are somehow stopped.

We’ll see. The thing is, on Day 1, Canada’s federal government will be locked in the interregnum between the Trudeau epoch and Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s new “common sense” order. We’re sitting ducks.

What would a Conservative Great Leap Forward look like?

Poilievre deserves much credit for correctly diagnosing the several possibly fatal wounds the Justin Trudeau decade has inflicted on this country. About that, here’s something I found fascinating over the holiday hiaitus.

It would be worth your time to take in Poilievre’s conversation with Dark Web archdruid Jordan Peterson over the weekend, and then have a listen to the year-end remarks of the lonesome American socialist warlord Bernie Sanders.

Going by my own 90-minute encounter with Peterson a couple of weeks ago I can say that it isn’t easy to keep the conversation going exactly along the lines one might prefer. Not to criticize Peterson’s interviewing style but I can’t fault Poilievre for failing to get into any number of the the existential dysfunctions Canada is enduring.

Even so, Poilievre comes off more like an intelligent and slightly nerdy Canadian version of Bernie Sanders than the doofus Canadian iteration of Donald Trump that the Liberals and New Democrats have so strenously tried and failed to make him out to be.

Fun example: On Saturday, the NDP MP Peter Julian attributed Poilievre’s popularity to a “massive foreign interference strategy. . . the only reason Pierre Poilievre is leader of the Conservative Party right now.” He didn’t say this while drunk in a private conversation among fellow NDPers. Julian said this publicly, on the insufferable Elon Musk’s X, drawing on a thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory from last August.

At least the Conservatives are not crazy people

Today, the Feast of the Epiphany, is the anniversary of the Trumpist insurrection of January 6, 2021, an event that remains an open and profoundly embarrassing wound among Americans. I fully realize that there are some yobbish Putin fanciers at the outer fringes of Canada’s Conservative Party, but give me a break.

Can you imagine Canadian Conservatives storming Parliament Hill, smashing windows and breaking down doors and baying for blood? Of course you can’t. And you certainly can’t imagine Poilievre even coming close to countenancing such conduct, so don’t even try.

I don’t carry any water for Poilievre, but I am persuaded that he’s genuinely and sincerely concerned about the wretched state of affairs to which working-class Canadians have been reduced. Besides, Poilievre isn’t just the best alternative we’ve got. He’s the only alternative. Jagmeet Singh’s New Democrats are a caricature of the party they inherited, so here we are.

My National Post readers and this newsletter’s subscribers will know that I am not bubbling with optimism that Poilievre’s remedies can possibly heal what Canada has sustained. Without getting into all that, I’ve had my say, and while Poilievre’s overall analysis of the Trudeau era’s calamities is grounded in hard facts and driven by empathy, his “Axe the tax, Build the homes, Fix the budget, Stop the crime” remedies are woefully insufficient to the circumstances of the real world.

For starters, the immediate crisis a Poilievre government will face is the major cause of the economic dislocation we’re facing, and he’s been quiet about it: It’s not just that Canada’s housing and jobs economies have no room for roughly three million people in this country who are here on various kinds of “temporary” status. It’s more like 4.9 million people whose visas are going to expire before the end of this year.

No amount of tax-axing is going to deal with this, and you’d need something along the lines of a Mao-era Great Leap Forward to “build the homes” to house them all in residential markets that would be even vaguely affordable for most people. And to do that you’d have to tear down Canada’s cities and build a grim Leninplatz on top of each heap of rubble.

Here’s just one other little thing that could stand in the way of any effective legislative agenda that Poilievre might want to embark upon. Almost all the current occupants of the Upper Chamber are senators appointed by Justin Trudeau. So, that’ll be fun: on top of everything else, the prospect of forcing a constitutional crisis just to get anything done.

Not to be dreary, but about the brokenness, but see Notes on the Coming Disturbances, and a earlier assessment: Nearing Nine Years Since Year Zero, So there’s all that.

It’s not just Canada that’s broken. It’s the Liberal Party.

To build the new postnational state in place of what we’ve been badgered to understand as the genocidal old-stock white supremacist settler-state patriarchy that Trudeau so gallantly set out to save from itself, the Liberal Party had to be refashioned to serve as the conduit to Parliamentary power and privilege. See It’s 2025. Welcome to the Thunderdome.

Bear in mind that Justice Marie-Josée Hogue’s Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions is expected to issue its final report before the end of this month. The inquiry’s long-delayed and filibustered timetable had anticipated that Hogue’s proposed structural changes would be in place well before what was presumed to be an October 2025 federal election.

Here’s the thing about that. Never mind that owing to Team Trudeau’s rewriting of the party constitution we still don’t know who elected Trudeau to the leadership of the Liberal Party in the first place, and there’s been no inquiry into the massive infusions of weirdly coordinated Mandarin-bloc donations to Trudeau’s own riding association warchest in the aftermath of his 2015 capture of a Parliamentary majority.

See: Liberals are leaving an ungodly mess for Poilievre’s Conservatives to clean up; New report details just how easily China can mess with Canadian elections. In that piece, and in the Thunderdome newsletter, I refer at length to the findings in this in-depth analysis published by the Canadian International Council: Beyond general elections: How could foreign actors influence the prime ministership?

While all the talking-head punditry and chat-show panelists are preoccupied with speculation about just who might emerge as Justin Trudeau’s successor, here’s just one fact that has gone unnoticed. If you simply happen to be domiciled even temporarily in this country, you only have to be 14 years old to cast your vote for the next leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.

All for now.

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2025 Federal Election

Post election report indicates Canadian elections are becoming harder to secure

Published on September 16, 2025

Todayville

Dan Knight

Chief Electoral Officer Stéphane Perrault highlights strong participation and secure voting, but admits minority politics, rising costs, and administrative pressures are testing the system’s limits.

Monday in Ottawa, Stéphane Perrault, Canada’s Chief Electoral Officer, delivered a long press conference on April’s federal election. It was supposed to be a victory lap, record turnout, record early voting, a secure process. But if you listened closely, you heard something else: an admission that Canada’s election machinery is faltering, stretched thin by a system politicians refuse to fix.

Perrault touted the highest turnout in 30 years, 69 percent of eligible voters, nearly 20 million Canadians. Almost half of those ballots were cast before election day, a dramatic shift in how citizens take part in democracy.

“Twenty years ago, less than 7% voted early. This year, nearly half did,” Perrault told reporters. “Our system may have reached its limit.”

That’s the core problem. The system was built for one decisive day, not weeks of advance voting spread across campuses, long-term care homes, mail-in ballots, and local Elections Canada offices. It’s no longer a single event; it’s an extended process that stretches the capacity of staff, polling locations, and administration.

Perrault admitted bluntly that the 36-day writ period, the time between when an election is called and when the vote happens, may no longer be workable. “If we don’t have a fixed date election, the current time frame does not allow for the kind of service preparations that is required,” he said.

And this is where politics collides with logistics. Canada is once again under a minority government, which means an election can be triggered at almost any moment. A non-confidence vote in the House of Commons, where opposition parties withdraw support from the government, can bring down Parliament in an instant. That’s not a flaw in the system; it’s how parliamentary democracy works. But it leaves Elections Canada on permanent standby, forced to prepare for a snap election without knowing when the writ will drop.

The result? Sixty percent of voter information cards were mailed late this year because Elections Canada couldn’t finalize leases for polling stations on time. Imagine that, more than half the country got their voting information delayed because the system is clogged. And that’s when everything is supposedly working.

The April election cost an estimated $570 million, almost identical to 2021 in today’s dollars. But here’s the kicker: Elections Canada also spent $203 million just to stay ready during three years of minority Parliament. That’s not democracy on the cheap. That’s bureaucracy on retainer.

Perrault admitted as much: “We had a much longer readiness period. That’s the reality of minority governments.”

No Foreign Interference… But Plenty of ‘Misinformation’

Canada’s top election official wanted to make something perfectly clear: “There were no acts of foreign interference targeting the administration of the electoral process.” That’s the line. And it’s a good one… reassuring, simple, the kind of phrase meant to make headlines and calm nerves.

But listen closely to the wording. He didn’t say there was no interference at all. He said none of it targeted the administration of the vote. Which raises the obvious question: what interference did occur, and who was behind it?

Perrault admitted there was “more volume than ever” of misinformation circulating during the 2025 election. He listed the greatest hits: rumors that Elections Canada gives voters pencils so ballots can be erased, or claims that non-citizens were voting. These are hardly new — they’ve appeared in the U.S. and in Europe too. The difference, he said, is scale. In 2025, Canadians saw those narratives across more channels, more platforms, more communities than ever before.

This is where things get interesting. Because the way Perrault framed it wasn’t that a rogue actor or a foreign intelligence service was pushing disinformation. He was blunt: this was a domestic problem as much as anything else. In his words, “whether foreign or not,” manipulation of information poses the “single biggest risk to our democracy.”

Perrault insists the real danger isn’t foreign hackers or ballot-stuffing but Canadians themselves, ordinary people raising questions online. “Information manipulation, whether foreign or not, poses the single biggest risk to our democracy,” he said.

Well, maybe he should look in the mirror. If Canadians are skeptical of the system, maybe it’s because the people running it haven’t done enough to earn their trust. It took years for Ottawa to even acknowledge the obvious , that foreign actors were meddling in our politics long before this election. Endless commissions and closed-door reports later, we’re told to stop asking questions and accept that everything is secure.

Meanwhile, what gets fast-tracked? Not a comprehensive fix to protect our democracy, but a criminal investigation into a journalist. Keean Bexte, co-founder of JUNO News, is facing prosecution under Section 91(1) of the Canada Elections Act for his reporting on allegations against Liberal candidate Thomas Keeper. The maximum penalty? A $50,000 fine and up to five years in prison. His reporting, incidentally, was sourced, corroborated, and so credible that the Liberal Party quietly dropped Keeper from its candidate list.

If people doubt the system, it isn’t because they’re gullible or “misinformed.” It’s because the government has treated transparency as an afterthought and accountability as an inconvenience. And Perrault knows it. Canadians aren’t children to be scolded for asking questions, they’re citizens who expect straight answers.

But instead of fixing the cracks in the system, Ottawa points the finger at the public. Instead of rebuilding trust, they prosecute journalists.

You don’t restore faith in democracy by threatening reporters with five years in prison. You do it by showing, quickly and openly, that elections are beyond reproach. Until then, spare us the lectures about “misinformation.” Canadians can see exactly where the problem lies, and it isn’t with them.

The Takeaway

Of course, they’re patting themselves on the back. Record turnout, no servers hacked, the trains ran mostly on time. Fine. But what they don’t want to admit is that the system barely held together. It was propped up by 230,000 temporary workers, leases signed at the last minute, and hundreds of millions spent just to keep the lights on. That’s not stability. That’s triage.

And then there’s the lecturing tone. Perrault tells us the real threat isn’t incompetence in Ottawa, it’s you, Canadians “sharing misinformation.” Excuse me? Canadians asking questions about their elections aren’t a threat to democracy, they are democracy. If the government can’t handle people poking holes in its story, maybe the problem isn’t the questions, maybe it’s the answers.

So yes, on paper, the 2025 election looked like a triumph. But listen closely and you hear the sound of a system cracking under pressure, led by officials more interested in controlling the narrative than earning your trust. And when the people running your elections think the real danger is the voters themselves? That’s when you know the elastic isn’t just stretched. It’s about to snap.

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Health

MAiD should not be a response to depression

Published on September 16, 2025

Todayville

This article supplied by Troy Media.

By Daniel Zekveld

Canadians need real mental health support, not state-sanctioned suicide

If the law Parliament plans to roll out in 2027 had been on the books 15 years ago, Member of Parliament Andrew Lawton says he’d probably be dead. He’s not exaggerating. He’s referring to Canada’s scheduled expansion of medical assistance in dying (MAiD) to include people suffering only from mental illness.

Lawton, who survived a suicide attempt during a period of deep depression, knows what’s at stake. So do others who’ve shared similar stories. What they needed back then wasn’t a government-approved exit plan. They needed care, time, and something MAiD quietly discards: the possibility of recovery.

MAiD, medical assistance in dying, was legalized in Canada in 2016 for people with grievous and irremediable physical conditions. The 2027 expansion would, for the first time, allow people to request MAiD solely on the basis of a mental illness, even if they have no physical illness or terminal condition.

With the expansion now delayed to March 2027, Parliament will once again have to decide whether it wants to cross this particular moral threshold. Although the legislation was passed in 2021, it has never come into force. First pushed back to 2024, then to 2027, it remains stalled, not because of foot-dragging, but due to intense medical, ethical and public concern.

Parliament should scrap the expansion altogether.

A 2023 repeal attempt came surprisingly close—just 17 votes short, at 167 to 150. That’s despite unanimous support from Conservative, NDP and Green MPs. You read that right: all three parties, often at each other’s throats, agreed that death should not be an option handed out for depression.

Their concern wasn’t just ethical, it was practical. The core issues remain unresolved. There’s no consensus on whether mental illness is ever truly irremediable—whether it can be cured, improved or even reliably assessed as hopeless. Ask 10 psychiatrists and you’ll get 12 opinions. Recovery isn’t rare. But authorizing MAiD sends the opposite message: that some people’s pain is permanent, and the only answer is to make it stop—permanently.

Meanwhile, access to real mental health care is sorely lacking. A 2023 Angus Reid Institute poll found 40 per cent of Canadians who needed treatment faced barriers getting it. Half of Canadians said they outright oppose the expansion. Another 21 per cent weren’t sure—perhaps assuming Canada wouldn’t actually go through with something so dystopian. But 82 per cent agreed on one thing: don’t even think about expanding MAiD before fixing the mental health system.

That disconnect between what people need and what they’re being offered leads to a more profound contradiction. Canada spends millions promoting suicide prevention. There are hotlines, campaigns and mental health initiatives. Offering MAiD to people in crisis sends a radically different message: suicide prevention ends where bureaucracy begins.

Even Quebec, normally Canada’s most enthusiastic adopter of progressive policy experiments, has drawn the line. The province has said mental disorders don’t qualify for MAiD, period. Most provincial premiers and health ministers have called for an indefinite delay.

Internationally, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has condemned Canada’s approach and urged the government not to proceed. Taken together, the message is clear: both at home and abroad, there’s serious alarm over where this policy leads.

With mounting opposition and the deadline for implementation approaching in 2027, Parliament will again revisit the issue this fall.

A private member’s bill from MP Tamara Jansen, Bill C-218, which seeks to repeal the 2027 expansion clause, will bring the issue back to the floor for debate.

Her speech introducing the bill asked MPs to imagine someone’s child, broken by job loss or heartbreak, reaching a dark place. “Imagine they feel a loss so deep they are convinced the world would be better off without them,” she said. “Our society could end a person’s life solely for a mental health challenge.”

That isn’t compassion. That’s surrender.

Expanding MAiD to mental illness risks turning a temporary crisis into a permanent decision. It treats pain as untreatable, despair as destiny, and bureaucracy as wisdom. It signals to the vulnerable that Canada is no longer offering help—just a final form to sign.

Parliament still has time to reverse course. It should reject the expansion, reinvest in suicide prevention and reassert that mental suffering deserves treatment—not a state-sanctioned exit.

Daniel Zekveld is a Policy Analyst with the Association for Reformed Political Action (ARPA) Canada.

Explore more on Euthanasia, Assisted suicide, Mental health, Human Rights, Ethics

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