Opinion
Does Scottish gov’t turmoil signal the end of the ‘green’ agenda’s stranglehold on Europe?
Former Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf
From LifeSiteNews
By Frank Wright
‘Green’ politics is now understood as a campaign for electoral and national suicide. With the coming European elections the writing is on the wall for globalist ‘progressives’ across the continent.
The First Minister of Scotland, Humza Yousaf, quit on live television on April 29, following the collapse of his left/Green Party coalition government. A power sharing agreement between his bizarrely named Scottish National Party (SNP) and the Greens was broken over the SNP’s retreat on Net Zero commitments.
Despite his camera savvy assertions, Yousaf’s departure has nothing to do with either duty or principle, which he stressed in the speech announcing his resignation. It is the result of a feared public backlash against higher taxes, over-regulation, and the madness of progressive “green” policies which prefigures a European political realignment.
READ: Net Zero’s days are numbered? Why Europeans are souring on the climate agenda
Yousaf’s coalition with the Greens fell apart because his SNP had recognized that the extreme Net Zero agenda was unrealistic, and could deliver only electoral suicide. The SNP under Yousaf had abandoned its “decarbonization targets” in early April, with Green co-leaders Lorna Slater and Patrick Harvie describing Yousaf’s attempts to ditch extremely unpopular policies as “an act of political cowardice” and a “betrayal.”
As a result, the Greens withdrew support from the SNP, which fell one seat short of a majority in 2021. A new deal with a new leader is unlikely, and the chaos spells doom for the SNP with an election coming this year. The SNP remains in power – for the time being – albeit in a minority government.
Wider lessons for globalist ‘greens’
The lesson from Scotland is that the liberal parties of Europe face electoral meltdown. A recent report from the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) warned of a “sharp right turn” following EU elections in June:
Inside the European Parliament, a populist right coalition of Christian democrats, conservatives, and radical right MEPs could emerge with a majority for the first time.
The future spells doom for the doomsayers, it seems, with the globalist agenda under severe threat. The existence of the globalist EU itself may be threatened, with Unherd saying in December that this decade may be the EU’s last.
The ECFR report continued:
This ‘sharp right turn’ is likely to have significant consequences for European-level policies, which will affect the foreign policy choices that the EU can make, particularly on environmental issues, where the new majority is likely to oppose ambitious EU action to tackle climate change.
The attempt of the SNP to avoid electoral oblivion has only made it fall faster. It is an example which will be nervously observed from the once-dominant power in Europe.
Germany next?
The SNP’s partnership in power with the “green” zealots mirrors that of the government of Europe’s former economic and industrial powerhouse, Germany.
The crisis-hit Scholz administration relies on the support of a Green party whose policies have not only devastated the economy with deindustrialization, lockdown debt, and soaring energy prices, but have also, as in Scotland, advanced a raft of extremist “progressive” issues, such as the promotion of the “trans” movement, opposition to border and immigration control, with both Green parties pursuing policies strongly resented by the public.
Scotland’s Greens sought to ban wood-burning stoves, and Germany’s Greens were met with similar outrage with their decision to ban gas-fired central heating, and mandate the use of heat pumps. Yet the money for the subsidies required has run out – as “green” policies have helped to destroy the economy.
The Greens succeeded in closing the last of Germany’s nuclear power stations in August 2023, but the policy of replacing home heating which works with an expensive alternative that does not, was met with widespread opposition.
As a result, it is not just heat pump sales that have plummeted in Germany, but the sales pitch of the international “green” lobby.
Faced with defeat in the European elections, which the ECFR blames on “national parties start[ing] to respond to the changing opinions of their voters,” many parties of the liberal establishment are rowing back on Net Zero commitments – as well as on other issues beloved of the shock-haired shock troops of “progress.”
The face of globalist progressives
The co-leader of the Scottish Greens is Patrick Harvie, whose social media accounts notify readers that his pronouns are he/him.
The causes he supports are an object lesson in how Net Zero is not the only crazy agenda aggressively pushed by the Greens, whose policy platform is increasingly seen as electorally toxic. He is a self-described member of the so-called “LGBTQ+ community,” identifying as “bisexual.”
Like many progressive fanatics, he strongly supports the futile and avoidable destruction of the population and nation of Ukraine.
Here he is in 2020, championing the prescription of hormones and surgery to sexualized children as “trans healthcare.”
I wish I could say it was shocking that an MSP today called on the First Minister to instruct the NHS to withdraw trans healthcare from young people.
Trans healthcare already suffers from unacceptably long waits, even for referral. Greens will continue to push for improvement. https://t.co/9iXwQ8zmUz
— Patrick Harvie 🇪🇺🌈 (@patrickharvie) December 10, 2020
Naturally, he repeatedly describes Christians with disdain, labelling the Christian Institute as a “hate group.” The institute “campaigns for “the furtherance and promotion of the Christian religion in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.”
The NSS recently agreed that after his latest outburst the racist historian David Starkey had to be removed as an Honorary Associate. They accepted that his racism was a red line. Why should homophobia, transphobia and misogyny be treated any differently?
— Patrick Harvie 🇪🇺🌈 (@patrickharvie) July 31, 2020
As Britain’s Telegraph reported, explaining the background to the collapse of Yousaf’s SNP-Green coalition:
Harvie’s determination to indulge his permanently-angry purple-haired activists even at the expense of the Scottish Government’s credibility was probably the last straw for many senior SNP ministers, if not for Yousaf himself.
Harvie is a strong advocate of abortion. He and his party describe the reminder that the lives of unborn children have value as “misinformation and intimidation,” as they seek to afford “dignity and privacy” to women killing their children, “as they are at every other medical procedure.”
SPUC, the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, pointed out that the measure to legally enforce “buffer zones” around abortion facilities was “opposed by 70 percent” of the Scottish public.
The Greens in Scotland, as in Germany, vehemently oppose any attempt to control mass migration – however weak and belated.
The Greens have also refused to alter their stance on the now discredited notion of “gender affirming care” for children.
Against scientific advice, the Greens prefer to support the views of the “trans community,” saying “lived experience” is a better guide to reality than the clinical evidence that prescribing hormones and surgery to confused children is wrong, and causes irreversible harm.
The U.K.’s Cass Review, published in mid-April, cited a lack of “evidence based guidelines,” noting that pro-transgender organizations such as WPATH had exerted considerable influence in the adoption of the Dutch Pathway – a template which resulted in rapid access to hormones and surgery including for children.
Cass said in her introduction, “Although some think the clinical approach should be based on a social justice model, the NHS works in an evidence-based way.”
The rejection of the fast track to “puberty blockers” mirrors a similar preference for evidence-based decisions in Western electorates.
The Godless, nation-wrecking policies of national suicide have produced enough evidence of the motives, methods, and monumental disaster of the globalist Green agenda. It is anti-natalist, pro-open borders, anti-family, and seeks to promote the sexual distortion of the lives of what few children we still have. In a final irony, is also destroying the economic prosperity on whose subsidies it relies for its own survival.
Happily, “green” politics is now understood as a campaign for electoral as well as national suicide. This realization has spelled the end of the appalling Scottish coalition government, and with the coming European elections the writing is on the wall for globalist “progressives” across the continent.
Humza Yousaf’s left/Green government was just the first Green-backed coalition which has ended in disaster. It will not be the last. For the reality based community, the best news is yet to come.
Canada’s assisted-death regime has reached a point most people assumed was dystopian fiction and it’s doing so with bureaucratic calm. A woman in Saskatchewan, Jolene Van Alstine, suffering from a rare but treatable parathyroid disease, has applied for MAiD not because she is dying, but because she can’t access the surgery that would let her live.
Read that again. Not terminal. Not untreatable. Just abandoned by a system that has the audacity to call itself “universal.”
Kelsi Sheren is a reader-supported publication.
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Her assisted death is scheduled for January 7, 2026.
And the country shrugs. Van Alstine described spending years curled on a couch, nauseated, in agony, isolated, and pushed past endurance. The disease is brutal, but treatable a surgery here, a specialist there. The kind of medical intervention that in a functional system wouldn’t even make the news.
But in Saskatchewan? There are no endocrinologists accepting new patients. Without one, she can’t get referred. Without a referral, she can’t get surgery. Without surgery, she loses her life either slowly through suffering, or quickly through state-sanctioned death.
If you’ve ever lived through pain that warps time…
If you’ve ever had your mind hijacked by trauma…
If you’ve ever stared down suffering with no end in sight…
You know how thin the line can get between endurance and surrender.
And that’s why this story hits differently: it reveals how fragile people become when the system meant to protect them becomes an accomplice in their despair.
Canada frames MAiD as empowerment. As compassion. As choice.
But choice is only real when the alternatives are viable.
If your options are slow agony or assisted death, that’s not autonomy it’s coercion with a friendly tone.
Disability advocates, chronic-pain patients, the elderly, and low-income Canadians have been sounding the alarm for years: MAiD is expanding faster than support systems can catch up. Every expansion widens the chasm between the rhetoric of compassion and the lived experience of those who actually need help.
The Canadian Human Rights Commission itself warned that MAiD is being accessed because people cannot get the services required to live with dignity. And dignity matters. Anyone who has lived on the edge knows this: humans don’t just need survival, we need a reason to keep surviving.
When the healthcare system withholds that, death can look like mercy. This is the part polite society doesn’t want to confront.
Canada’s healthcare system is collapsing. Not strained. Not overburdened. Collapsing.
We have a growing list of citizens choosing death because medicine has become a lottery →
• a quadriplegic woman who applied for MAiD because she couldn’t secure basic home-care support
• veterans offered MAiD instead of trauma treatment
• homeless Canadians considering MAiD because they can’t survive winter
And now a woman denied a simple, lifesaving surgery.
At some point, we have to call this what it is: a nation outsourcing its failures to death. I’ve sat with veterans who couldn’t find themselves inside their own minds after war. I’ve watched people suffer silently because bureaucracy didn’t move fast enough to keep up with their pain.
I’ve coached clients who were one dropped ball, one missed appointment, one shut door away from losing the will to fight.
The lesson is the same every time. People don’t break because they’re weak. People break because they’re left alone with their suffering.
Van Alstine wasn’t offered community.
She wasn’t offered care.
She was offered an exit.
And she took it.
Not because she wanted to die but because Canada didn’t give her any path to live.
We need to stop pretending this is compassionate. Compassion is presence. Compassion is support. Compassion is a surgeon who actually exists, a referral that actually happens, a system that catches someone before they fall into the dark.
If MAiD is going to exist, it must be the last, quiet, grave option not the discounted aisle Canada sends you to when the cost of real care is too high.
A society reveals its soul by how it treats the people who can’t fight for themselves.
Right now, Canada is revealing something hollow.
People will debate the ethics of assisted dying forever. Fine. Debate it. But this is the wrong battleground. The real question is this →
What does it say about a country when death is easier to access than medical care?
Until Canada answers that honestly, we’re going to see more names on the calendar scheduled deaths, stamped and approved — for people who didn’t want to die. They just wanted someone to give them a chance to live.
Canada has failed every single citizen, and not a single person seems to care.
KELSI SHEREN
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SOURCE: https://righttolife.org.uk/
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From the Fraser Institute
By Steven Globerman, Joel Emes and Austin Thompson
According to our new study, in 2023 (the latest year of comparable data), typical homes on the market were unaffordable for families earning the local median income in every major Canadian city
The dream of homeownership is alive, but not well. Nearly nine in ten young Canadians (aged 18-29) aspire to own a home—but share a similar worry about the current state of housing in Canada.
Of course, those worries are justified. According to our new study, in 2023 (the latest year of comparable data), typical homes on the market were unaffordable for families earning the local median income in every major Canadian city. It’s not just Vancouver and Toronto—housing affordability has eroded nationwide.
Aspiring homeowners face two distinct challenges—saving enough for a downpayment and keeping up with mortgage payments. Both have become harder in recent years.
For example, in 2014, across 36 of Canada’s largest cities, a 20 per cent downpayment for a typical home—detached house, townhouse, condo—cost the equivalent of 14.1 months (on average) of after-tax income for families earning the median income. By 2023, that figure had grown to 22.0 months—a 56 per cent increase. During the same period for those same families, a mortgage payment for a typical home increased (as a share of after-tax incomes) from 29.9 per cent to 56.6 per cent.
No major city has been spared. Between 2014 and 2023, the price of a typical home rose faster than the growth of median after-tax family income in 32 out of 36 of Canada’s largest cities. And in all 36 cities, the monthly mortgage payment on a typical home grew (again, as a share of median after-tax family income), reflecting rising house prices and higher mortgage rates.
While the housing affordability crisis is national in scope, the challenge differs between cities.
In 2023, a median-income-earning family in Fredericton, the most affordable large city for homeownership in Canada, had save the equivalent of 10.6 months of after-tax income ($56,240) for a 20 per cent downpayment on a typical home—and the monthly mortgage payment ($1,445) required 27.2 per cent of that family’s after-tax income. Meanwhile, a median-income-earning family in Vancouver, Canada’s least affordable city, had to spend the equivalent of 43.7 months of after-tax income ($235,520) for a 20 per cent downpayment on a typical home with a monthly mortgage ($6,052) that required 112.3 per cent of its after-tax income—a financial impossibility unless the family could rely on support from family or friends.
The financial barriers to homeownership are clearly greater in Vancouver. But, crucially, neither city is truly “affordable.” In Fredericton and Vancouver, as in every other major Canadian city, buying a typical home with the median income produces a debt burden beyond what’s advisable. Recent house price declines in cities such as Vancouver and Toronto have provided some relief, but homeownership remains far beyond the reach of many families—and a sharp slowdown in homebuilding threatens to limit further gains in affordability.
For families priced out of homeownership, renting doesn’t offer much relief, as rent affordability has also declined in nearly every city. In 2014, rental rates for the median-priced rental unit required 19.8 per cent of median after-tax family income, on average across major cities. By 2023, that figure had risen to 23.5 per cent. And in the least affordable cities for renters, Toronto and Vancouver, a median-priced rental required more than 30 per cent of median after-tax family income. That’s a heavy burden for Canada’s renters who typically earn less than homeowners. It’s also an added financial barrier to homeownership— many Canadian families rent for years before buying their first home, and higher rents make it harder to save for a downpayment.
In light of these realities, Canadians should ask—why have house prices and rental rates outpaced income growth?
Poor public policy has played a key role. Local regulations, lengthy municipal approval processes, and costly taxes and fees all combine to hinder housing development. And the federal government allowed a historic surge in immigration that greatly outpaced new home construction. It’s simple supply and demand—when more people chase a limited (and restricted) supply of homes, prices rise. Meanwhile, after-tax incomes aren’t keeping pace, as government policies that discourage investment and economic growth also discourage wage growth.
Canadians still want to own homes, but a decade of deteriorating affordability has made that a distant prospect for many families. Reversing the trend will require accelerated homebuilding, better-paced immigration and policies that grow wages while limiting tax bills for Canadians—changes governments routinely promise but rarely deliver.
Steven Globerman
Senior Fellow and Addington Chair in Measurement, Fraser Institute
Joel Emes
Senior Economist, Fraser Institute
Austin Thompson
Senior Policy Analyst, Fraser Institute
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