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Inclusion and Disorder: Unlearned Lessons from Palestinian Protests
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Tuesday (October 7 , 2025), two years after the Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians, mobs gathered across Canadian cities to honour their “martyrs.” At Concordia University in Montreal, administrators closed the downtown campus after two agitators, neither students nor staff, were arrested carrying incendiary devices. The university president wrote to the community expressing “sadness” for the disruption, affirming that Concordia “values inclusion, compassion, and the right to peaceful expression.” She explained that the closure was taken to “ensure the safety of all members of our community” amid the “heightened tension” surrounding the day. The tone was heavy with empathy and the vocabulary of inclusion, yet the act itself was exclusion by necessity. An institution that proudly celebrates tolerance and has repeatedly looked the other way when violence visited it, could no longer tolerate its own openness.
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This was no isolated disturbance. It exposed a country that has lost the ability to distinguish between rights and indulgences. Every person in Canada, citizen or not, enjoys freedom of expression under the Charter. But the right to speak is not the same as the right to intimidate free citizens or to steer the ship of state. Political influence, whether through organized protest or lobbying, is the privilege of citizenship. That distinction once defined the sovereignty of the Canadian electorate. Canadians blur it and obscure human decency at their peril.
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When non-citizens, including refugees and temporary residents, take to the streets to influence policy or intimidate authority, they step beyond expression into the political arena. Such demonstrations are not exercises in speech but acts of pressure. When they honour the maniacal murdering militancy of a terrorist organization or directly menace Canadian citizens, they move from persuasion to coercion. To allow that is to confuse liberty with licence.
Defending the boundary between speech and influence is not xenophobia. It is democratic hygiene. The right to shape the national direction belongs to those who share in its civic burdens and shoulder the responsibility to maintain order. Citizenship is a contract of mutual responsibility, not a costume of convenience.
The larger question is whether a liberal democracy can endure if it loses the will to defend itself from those who despise it or openly call for its demise. Canada’s cult of inclusion has become a moral weakness. As I wrote in Inclusion as Exclusion, revolutionaries begin by invoking “the people” and end by deciding who among the people must be silenced. The illusion of harmony soon gives way to the machinery of coercion. Once inclusion loses its grounding in reason and character, it collapses into sentimental tyranny.
Canada’s political class long ago traded prudence for performance. It mistakes sympathy for justice and emotion for policy. Justin Trudeau’s politics of feeling rested on the belief that those he pitied are too delicate to survive disagreement (For the rest, there is the Emergencies Act). This insecurity explains his fascination with inclusion campaigns and his instinct to brand dissenters as extremists. It also explains why, when he told Donald Trump that a tariff might destroy Canada’s economy, Trump concluded that any country undone by a tariff was not a serious country, let alone a country worthy of partnering with to defend hemispheric security.
Carney’s response has been to hide behind Europeans. A country unwilling to stand for itself isn’t a real country.
The same weakness shapes our handling of protest movements. When radical Islamists celebrate blood-lusting massacre, Canada’s leaders speak of understanding. When women object to being erased by gender politics, they speak of diversity. When immigration overwhelms cities, they call it growth. Compassion has become the disguise of decay.
Sweden provides a mirror. For decades it was the symbol of multicultural virtue, convinced that tolerance alone could reconcile every difference. Then came crime, social division, and collapsing trust. Sweden finally admitted the obvious: generosity without limits destroys cohesion. The country began to rebuild.
Sweden tightened its asylum rules, limited access to certain welfare benefits, and moved to make citizenship a clearer boundary for political rights and privileges that residency alone does not confer. Foreign nationals may speak, worship, and assemble, but they may not direct the country’s political course. Sweden continues to protect the right to protest under constitutional guarantees, though demonstrations may be restricted if they amount to incitement, threats to public order, or agitation against protected groups. These measures are not cruelty but recovery. They remind Swedes that harmony depends on shared norms and that tolerance must have boundaries.
Canada refuses the lesson. It continues to pursue immigration at a scale that strains housing, infrastructure, and wages. The policy is an attempt at a moral display, not governance. Citizens who question it are called intolerant. The insult replaces argument and conceals failure.
In this climate inclusion no longer means participation. It means obedience. It demands surrender to ideology rather than respect for difference. At Concordia, administrators claimed to protect community by closing classrooms. In Ottawa, the government preaches equality while enforcing privilege by category. The result is exclusion parading as virtue.
The rule of law, a crowning achievement of Western civilization, rests on restraint. Rights are reciprocal, not infinite. When inclusion is detached from responsibility, that reciprocity dissolves. What begins as compassion ends as coercion. Sweden learned through hardship that multiculturalism without integration breeds division. Canada insists on not learning it the expensive way.
The remedy is simple, though not easy. We must restore the distinction between citizen and non-citizen, between expression and manipulation, between inclusion and indulgence. A country exists to defend the liberty of its people, not to exhibit the moral vanity of its ruling classes. That would require courage, a quality seldom visible in present leadership.
The defense of liberty is not an act of hostility. It is an act of self-respect. A confident country knows who belongs, what it stands for, and what it will not tolerate. Does Canada? Sweden, sobered by experience, has remembered this truth. Canada, lost in woke sentimental fog, must rediscover it or continue drifting toward the soft despotism of its own good intentions.
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The jobs promised by the thousands never arrived. The debacle of Trudeau’s gamble in the EV sector offers a dire warning about Carney’s plans to “invest” in the economy of the future.
Every age invents new names for old mistakes. Ours calls them investments. Before the Carney government reluctantly unveils its November budget and promises another future paid for in advance, Canadians should remember Ingersoll, one of the last places their leaders tried to buy tomorrow.
In December 2022, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told Canadians that government backing would help General Motors turn its Ingersoll plant into a beacon of green industry [See image above]. “We made investments to help GM retool this plant,” he wrote online, “and by 2025 it will be producing fifty thousand electric vehicles per year.” [That would mean 137 vehicles each day, or about six vehicles every hour]. It sounded like renewal. Supposedly, this was how the innumerate prime minister was building the economy of the future. In truth, it became an expensive demonstration of how progressive governments love to peddle rampant spending for sound strategy (1)(2).
On the whole, the Trudeau government boasted of having pledged over $50 billion in subsidies to various companies in the EV sector, some of which are failing and most of which are scaling down and exporting production capability to the US. The much-promised benefits have not materialized (3).
The specific Ingersoll plan began with 259 million dollars from Ottawa through the Strategic Innovation Fund and the Net Zero Accelerator. Ontario matched it with another 259 million. The half-billion-plus subsidy financed the plant’s switch from gasoline-powered Equinox production to BrightDrop electric delivery vans. Added to that were the usual incentives: research credits, accelerated write-downs, and energy subsidies. The promise was the mythical creation of thousands of “good middle-class jobs” (4)(5).
At the time, the CAMI Assembly plant employed about two thousand workers. When it closed for retooling in 2022, employment fell to almost none. The reopening in 2023 restored roughly 1,600 across two shifts. A year later, as orders slowed, one shift was cut and employment fell to about 1,300. By early 2025, layoffs cut the number to around eight hundred, and by October that year, when GM confirmed the end of BrightDrop production, fewer than seven hundred remained. The workforce had collapsed by nearly two-thirds from its pre-electric-vehicle conversion level. In statistical terms, two of the three employees the PM used for the photo-op in Ingersoll three years ago are unemployed today. That’s some economic performance.
The numbers expose the illusion. With 518 million dollars in public funds and only about 3,500 vans built in 2024, taxpayers paid about 148 thousand dollars for each vehicle GM produced. Counting only the federal contribution still yields $74,000 per van. Divided by the remaining jobs, the subsidy works out to more than half a million dollars per worker. The arithmetic refutes the fantasy of Prime Minister Trudeau’s speeches (10).
We are in 2025. Today is the future the Liberals promised the country. Neither Ottawa nor Queen’s Park will dwell on the above-stated facts today. When Crown Royal closed a plant in 2024, Premier Ford posed before the cameras and dumped a bottle of whisky to protest lost jobs. Now that a multinational massively subsidized by his own government has cut its workforce in Ingersoll by two-thirds, he will not torch a van or denounce General Motors from the front steps of Queen’s Park. It is easier to rage at private enterprise than to admit one’s own complicity (11).
The failure in Ingersoll was entirely predictable. Government enthusiasm outran commercial sense. The BrightDrop vans entered a market already filled by cheaper competitors in the United States and Asia. Demand never met expectation. Parking lots filled with unsold inventory. A company that lives by numbers did the rational thing: it slowed production, cut staff, and left. The Canadian taxpayer, bound by law and habit, stays behind to pay the bill (12).
The story reveals the weakness of Canada’s industrial policy and the ignorance of its political class. Instead of creating conditions for enterprise, such as reliable energy, stable regulation, and moderate taxes, progressive governments spend on applause. They judge success by the number of jobs announced, yet those very jobs vanish once the cameras go home. When the invoices arrive, they are paid by citizens, not by those who made the promises.
Subsidy breeds its own demand. Once one firm is rewarded, others line up to ask for the same. Lobbying replaces competition. Politicians, afraid to seem heartless, keep writing cheques. Each new administration claims to be more strategic than the last, yet the pattern persists. Canada announces, subsidizes, and retreats. No country ever bought its way into competitiveness, and none ever will.
Trudeau once said his government had “bet big on electric vehicles.” Betting big with other people’s money is not vision but gambling. The wager was not on technology or productivity but on narrative, on the naive idea that a moral intention [to save the planet] could replace market reality. The result was fewer jobs, a product the market did not want, and a claim of success that no longer convinced anyone. But Ontarians gave him their vote for it (1).
Premier Ford deserves no exemption. He campaigned on fiscal restraint and common sense, then followed Ottawa’s lead as if confused by his own rhetoric. His government’s matching subsidy gave the federal scheme the appearance of consensus; he legitimized the scheme. When it failed, he shared the liability and the silence. To underwrite failure once is an error; that they keep repeating it for political cover while the public supports them is folly (11).
Industrial policy in a free society should respect the limits of government competence and resist the fantasy of juvenile ideology. The state can uphold contract law and ensure that citizens have the skills to compete. It has a mixed record in building infrastructure. It cannot direct markets better than those who live or die by them. When it tries, it presents the size of a grant for the value of a result. Governments announce job numbers because they are visible. Productivity and value creation are not. Yet it is productivity that sustains work and dignity, not the temporary employment that disappears when the subsidy runs out or when the companies betray the deal.
The Ingersoll experiment also exposes a moral weakness that the public often falls for. Spending is treated as proof of caring. Subsidy is renamed investment (more on this coming soon). Failure is described as transition. When costs rise and goals vanish, the story is rewritten as a necessary learning curve. Yet nothing is learned, because the same people who lost public money yesterday are trusted with more tomorrow. That is not innovation but inertia.
A free economy does not need bribery to breathe. It requires the discipline of risk and the liberty to fail without dragging a country with it. Ingersoll was not undone by technology but by conceit. Prosperity cannot be decreed, and markets cannot be commanded into obedience.
That was Trudeau, the current PMO occupants will say. But Mark Carney has mastered the same rhetorical sleight that defined Trudeau’s industrial crusade. Spending becomes “investment,” and programs become “platforms.” Ahead of his first budget, he has declared that his government would “catalyze unprecedented investments in Canada over the next five years,” even as he announced departmental cuts and fiscal restraint. He will invest more and spend less, they say. The vocabulary of ambition disguises the contradiction. Billions for housing, energy, and “resilience” are presented not as costs but as commitments to a “higher” economic purpose. His plan for a new federal housing agency with thirteen billion dollars in start-up capital is billed as an investment in the future, though it is, in substance, immediate public spending under a moral banner (13)(14) they had dragged for years.
Carney’s speeches in Parliament and before cameras follow the same pattern of incantation. “We can build big. Build bold. Build now. Build one Canadian economy,” he told the House in June. In October, he promised that “the decades-long process of an ever-closer economic relationship between the Canadian and U.S. economies is over … we will invest in new infrastructure and industrial capacity to reduce our vulnerabilities.” The cadence of certainty masks the absence of limits, just like Justin’s promises. It’s hubris without ability. In their minds, announcing “investment” becomes a synonym for action itself, and ambition replaces accountability (15).
The structure of this rhetoric is identical to the Ingersoll fiasco. Then, as now, the government announced a future built on “investment,” fifty thousand vehicles a year, thousands of secure jobs, abundant prosperity and a greener tomorrow. Vast sums of money were spent supposedly to create that future before a single market test was conducted. Instead, the result was fewer jobs and no market at all.
Carney’s program of “building the future economy” repeats that template: promise vast returns from state-directed spending, redefine subsidy as vision, and rely on tomorrow to conceal today’s bill. The vocabulary of investment has become the language of evasion, reflecting its etymological origins in the Latin “investire,” which originally meant “to clothe.” In the way that politicians use it today, it is a return to its meaning of concealment. It has become a way to describe the use of public money without admitting the massive risk of loss.
As the Carney government prepares its first budget, Canadians should remember what happened when their leader last tried to buy a future with lavish “investment.” Another round of extravagant spending promises is already upon us: new partnerships, new funds with new names, new assurances that this time will be different.
But it will not be different. Judging by all the pre-budget warnings that “sacrifices will need to be made,” it will be worse. In that warning, Carney presupposes that the elderly who have been choosing between eating and heating their home, mothers standing in line at food banks, the record MAiD users, and the young people who have lost hope of emerging out of parental basements to dwellings they can own have all been lying on a bed of roses this last decade of Liberal rule.
The Ingersoll debacle, a foolishly ideological $500-million-plus gamble, is emblematic, of course. It is just the tip of the Liberals’ iceberg of waste. So when you hear Prime Minister Carney tell Canadians they must prepare to sacrifice, remember the long string of Ingersolls his party has gifted this country in recent years. The path of sacrifice the Liberals want now Canadians to walk is paved with the rubble of their own multibillion-dollar blunders.
Every age invents new names for old mistakes, almost as a way to excuse them, and then moves on, but ours invents new names and keeps making the same one over and over again. Entitled hubris knows no bounds.
The Liberal government is already messing up the economy of the present, and they badly botched the economy of the recent past. When using the same strategy clothed in varying language, the economy of the future will not fare better.
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The trick lies in the word “investment.” By separating “operational spending” from “capital investment,” Ottawa can now reclassify expenditures, moving them from one column to another without changing the underlying reality. A deficit remains a deficit.
Next week, Ottawa will table its first budget in nearly two years. The government has already told us what to expect. In October, the Department of Finance announced a new “Capital Budgeting Framework” that would allow Canada to “spend less so it can invest more.” The phrasing sounds prudent. It is not. It is a linguistic sleight of hand designed to obscure what the government is actually doing: spending more while pretending to exercise restraint.
The older meanings of the two words reveal the moral inversion. To spend, from the Latin dispendere, meant to weigh out and let go. It implied the careful release of what one possessed, whether money, time, or energy. In Old English and Middle English, to “spend” one’s life or strength was to pour it out, knowingly and finitely. There was gravity to the act; what was spent was gone. To invest, by contrast, came from the Latin investīre: to clothe or cover. Before it became a financial term, it referred to the ceremonial act of placing robes upon a monarch or knight, endowing them with office or honour. In its financial sense, to invest was to “clothe money” in a venture, expecting return. The first word carried finality; the second, expectancy. Spending ended a possession; investing disguised it in the promise of future gain.
From these roots, the moral difference is clear. Spending belongs to the household, measured, finite, and real. Investing belongs to the court, symbolic, ceremonial, and often self-flattering. When a government calls its spending “investment,” it does not change the transaction; it changes the costume.
The gradual adoption of this vocabulary by governments is an old habit dressed as innovation. For two decades, Ottawa has been learning to speak the language of investment as disguise. Budgets that once tabulated “program spending” now announce “investments in Canadians.” Under the Trudeau governments, tax credits and subsidies were cast as “investments in innovation.” The Canada Infrastructure Bank was sold as “leveraging private investment” rather than public debt. Even emergency COVID programs were justified as “investing in recovery.” The word became a universal solvent, dissolving distinctions between cost, borrowing, and speculation.
This year’s government has merely made the trend official. In October, the Department of Finance released Modernizing Canada’s Budgeting Approach, explaining that the new Capital Budgeting Framework would “distinguish day-to-day operational spending from capital investment.” The document asserts that this will “guide decisions and help prioritize. The trick lies in the word “investment.” By separating “operational spending” from “capital investment,” Ottawa can now reclassify expenditures, moving them from one column to another without changing the underlying reality. A deficit remains a deficit. Borrowed money is still borrowed. But call it investment, and suddenly it carries the glow of foresight and responsibility. The government plans to balance its operating budget while continuing to borrow for capital projects. The ledger will grow, but the language will comfort.
This is not merely bad accounting. It is a deliberate corruption of language in service of political evasion. And it reveals something deeper about how modern governments govern: not through honest argument but through the manipulation of words.
Ottawa has been perfecting this costume for two decades. Budgets that once listed “program spending” now announce “investments in Canadians.” Tax credits became “investments in innovation.” The Canada Infrastructure Bank was sold as “leveraging private investment,” not public debt. COVID emergency programs were justified as “investing in recovery.” The word became a universal solvent, dissolving the distinction between cost, borrowing, and speculation.
This year’s framework makes the habit official. The October document from Finance Canada promises that the new approach will “guide decisions and help prioritize investments that generate long-term benefits for Canadians, such as major projects, housing, clean energy, and infrastructure.” The tone is managerial and assured. The assumption goes unexamined: that one can divide the public purse into virtuous investment and wasteful spending, and that the government possesses the wisdom to know the difference.
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The Prime Minister echoed the line in his own announcement: “Budget 2025 will set out our plan to spend less so we can invest more in Canada’s long-term growth.” Read carefully, the statement reveals its own dishonesty. To “spend less” no longer means reducing outlays. It means shifting expenditures into a different category where they escape the stigma of cost. The government intends to continue borrowing, but it will refer to that borrowing by a supposedly more respectable name.
The definition of capital investment is conveniently broad. It includes tax credits, corporate subsidies, and nearly any policy “that contributes to capital formation.” The Fraser Institute and others have warned that this expansiveness allows Ottawa to reclassify politically favored programs as investment, inflating the appearance of fiscal discipline while reducing transparency. A deficit becomes a “generational investment.” A subsidy becomes a “partnership.” Waste is rebranded as “capacity-building.” The language does the work that policy cannot.
Recent history exposes the fraud. Consider the electric vehicle battery subsidies, heralded as “historic investments” in the green economy. Tens of billions were promised. Projects have stalled, been postponed, or quietly abandoned. The so-called green slush fund, officially presented as an investment vehicle for sustainable innovation, turned out to be a network of cronyism and waste. These, too, were dressed as investments. When their failures emerged, the language remained untouched, as though incompetence and corruption could not breach the sanctity of the term.
The alchemy works because language shapes perception faster than arithmetic. “Investment” suggests prudence and reward. “Spending” suggests indulgence and loss. Citizens hear that the government is “investing in Canadians” and imagine return, not depletion. The moral weight of the word does the political work. Accountability fades behind aspiration.
There is a deeper danger here. Words like spend and cost belong to the vocabulary of limits. They remind us that government operates with other people’s money. Invest, as politicians now use it, belongs to the vocabulary of boundless promise. It implies benevolence without constraint, as though the state were a benefactor rather than a borrower. When the government claims to “invest in Canadians,” it implies ownership of the very people whose money it spends. The inversion of subject and object is telling. It reveals the paternalism at the heart of modern technocracy.
George Orwell wrote that political language “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” He understood that the corruption of speech precedes the corruption of thought. When a government renames its spending as investment, it is not simply misdescribing an accounting category. It is reshaping the citizen’s perception of what government may do. If all spending is investment, then any limit on it seems stingy, even immoral. The citizen becomes debtor to a future defined by the state.
The deceit is subtle. No one disputes that bridges or power grids can be sound investments. The deceit lies in the implication that all government activity now yields return, that every expense is productive, every grant visionary. By this logic, no spending is considered waste and no deficit is deemed reckless, as long as it is labelled as an investment. The language abolishes the distinction between consumption and creation, between present sacrifice and future gain. In doing so, it abolishes prudence itself.
Prudence, in the older sense, is not caution for its own sake. It is moral realism: the recognition that resources are finite and choices have costs. The new investment rhetoric invites the opposite illusion. Money, once moralized as investment, appears to carry no weight of trade-off. Ottawa can clothe profligacy in the robes of responsibility. The government that promises to “spend less and invest more” is like a man claiming to drink less whiskey by pouring it into crystal.
The cost of this linguistic vanity is not only fiscal. It corrodes public trust. Citizens sense the dissonance. Deficits widen, taxes climb, promises multiply. When language becomes a substitute for honesty, cynicism follows. A people that cannot trust its government’s words cannot trust its numbers.
The remedy is simple, though seldom easy: call things by their names. Spending is spending, whether on roads, welfare, or research. Some are wise, some are foolish. But none becomes virtuous by relabeling. The duty of government is not to invent euphemisms but to justify expenditures plainly and bear the consequences. That is what accountability means.
Roger Scruton observed that conservatism, properly understood, is “the politics of the tried and tested against the politics of experiment.” In fiscal speech, that means preferring accuracy to allure. A government confident in its stewardship would not fear plain-spoken spending. Only one uneasy with its own excess needs the comfort of investment.
Ottawa’s linguistic reform is therefore not a matter of diction. It is an attempt to alter reality through language, to convert liability into virtue by decree. The danger is that citizens, lulled by investment-speak, will cease to notice the arithmetic beneath. The numbers will grow; the language will glow. By the time the robe is lifted, the treasury will be bare.
That is not a forecast. It is a warning. When governments clothe waste in the garments of investment, they are not modernizing accounting. They are modernizing deceit.
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