Haultain Research
Trying to Defend Maduro’s Legitimacy
Everything His Defenders Want You to Forget
On Saturday, January 3, Venezuela’s dictator, Nicolas Maduro, was apprehended and removed.
Maduro’s weekend was ruined rather decisively. Brazil’s Lula, Nicaragua’s Ortega, Cuba’s Díaz-Canel, and Mexico’s Sheinbaum have also had their weekends spoiled, though not as severely as Maduro. The collapse of Venezuela’s Bolivarian model implicates the entire Latin American left that defended it.
These leftist leaders, their allies, defenders, apologists and enablers will claim legitimacy: the same for those in Canada. I expect folks like former NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, current leadership hopeful Avi Lewis, and leftist Liberal Lloyd Axworthy to salute Maduro’s martyrdom. They will insist Maduro was Venezuela’s rightful president, removed by imperial intervention. I will confess to being skeptical of all the cartel and drug allegations because I have not seen the evidence, and I will suspend judgment on those. But perhaps a brief reminder of what legitimacy meant under Maduro’s rule would help clarify matters for his apologists.
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Hugo Chávez won genuine elections in 1998. Whatever one thinks of his socialist policies, he commanded popular support. But Chávez systematically dismantled the institutions that made those victories meaningful. He packed the Supreme Court in 2004, neutered the National Assembly, and turned the National Electoral Council into an appendage of his government. He also began the systematic destruction of Venezuela’s once-thriving economy and silenced the free press through a campaign of intimidation, license revocations, and outright seizures. When he died in 2013, he bequeathed Maduro a constitutional facade concealing authoritarian machinery and an economy already in decline.
Maduro inherited power through a special election that international observers questioned from the start. The margin was suspicious, less than two percent in a country where Chávez had won by double digits. From that ambiguous beginning, Maduro’s “legitimacy” rested increasingly on force rather than consent.
The 2015 legislative elections revealed the charade. The opposition won two-thirds of the seats in the National Assembly in a landslide. Maduro’s response demonstrated his understanding of legitimacy: the Supreme Court stripped the Assembly’s powers, declared it in contempt, and transferred legislative authority to a newly invented Constituent Assembly in 2017, an entirely undemocratic body stacked with regime loyalists that nobody outside Caracas requested.
Venezuela hasn’t conducted a remotely credible election since. The 2018 presidential election was so farcical that even sympathetic governments refused to recognize it. Major opposition parties were banned. Leading candidates sat in prison or exile. The Electoral Council moved the date to disadvantage opponents. Turnout figures defied basic arithmetic. International observers stayed home rather than legitimize the spectacle.
The pattern repeated in 2024. Maduro declared victory despite exit polls showing opposition candidate Edmundo González winning by over thirty points. When the opposition published detailed precinct-level results demonstrating Maduro’s defeat, the regime responded with mass arrests, disappeared activists, and unleashed paramilitary groups against protestors. Over 24 people died in the crackdown. The regime arrested over 2,000 people, including children as young as fourteen, charged with terrorism.
Behind the electoral theatre lies comprehensive repression. The regime imprisoned opposition leader Leopoldo López for organizing peaceful protests. María Corina Machado, who won the opposition primary with ninety-three percent, was barred from holding office. Edmundo González fled to Spain to avoid arrest. Countless others vanished into Venezuela’s archipelago of unofficial detention centers.
Independent journalism has been systematically destroyed. Chavismo drove critical media outlets into bankruptcy through arbitrary currency controls and discriminatory advertising restrictions. The regime refused newsprint to opposition newspapers, seized television stations, and forced radio broadcasters off the air. Journalists face arrest on fabricated terrorism charges for reporting unflattering facts. Those who persist work in exile or risk disappearance. What remains is state propaganda and silence.
Maduro’s thuggish behaviour extended beyond Venezuela’s borders. He launched a populist irredentist claim on two-thirds of neighbouring Guyana, the Essequibo region, threatening a free country with territorial annexation to distract from domestic failures. The move combined nineteenth-century imperialism with twenty-first-century demagoguery. Lest Canadian leftists be tempted to dismiss Maduro’s imperial claim to a neighbour’s territory as trivial, remember how Canadian progressives lost their heads and tore their garments at Trump’s mere suggestion that Canada should become an American state. Maduro printed and distributed official state maps of Venezuela that included most of Guyana as part of Venezuela. He held a sham referendum claiming overwhelming support for annexation, then began military buildups along their border. This wasn’t rhetorical provocation. It was preparation for conquest (see my post on the subject from December 2023).
The economic destruction represents perhaps the most damning indictment of Chavismo’s legitimacy. Venezuela was once Latin America’s most prosperous country, built on the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Chavismo reduced it to a catastrophe through systematic mismanagement, corruption, and plain ideological stupidity. The regime nationalized productive industries and handed them to incompetent cronies. It imposed price controls that guaranteed shortages. It printed money to finance spending until the currency became worthless. Oil production, the economy’s foundation, collapsed under corrupt management and chronic underinvestment. A country that should have rivalled wealthy Gulf states instead produced mass starvation and the flight of millions of its citizens.
While Venezuelans starved, Maduro stole billions from his own people to prop up the equally murderous and illegitimate Sandinista regime of Nicaragua for twenty years. Venezuelan oil subsidies kept Daniel Ortega in power even as shortages at home grew desperate. The regime exported revolution while its citizens couldn’t find toiletries and medicine. This wasn’t solidarity. It was theft dressed as internationalism, just like Claudia Sheinbaum is doing today with Mexican oil to support the Cuban régime.
The humanitarian catastrophe speaks to the absence of legitimacy. Over 7.7 million Venezuelans, more than a quarter of the population, have fled the country. This exodus dwarfs Syria’s refugee crisis on a per capita basis. People don’t ever flee legitimate governments in such numbers.
Those remaining behind face conditions incompatible with the legitimacy of government. Inflation reached 1.7 million percent at its peak. The average Venezuelan lost twenty-four pounds between 2017 and 2018, not from dieting. Hospitals lack basic medicines. Electricity fails regularly. Violence turned Caracas into one of the world’s most dangerous cities. Oil production collapsed to levels last seen in the 1940s despite Venezuela holding the world’s largest proven reserves.
Despite Venezuela’s imperialist claims on Guyana and Maduro’s involvement in several countries in the region pushing “Socialism for the Twenty-First Century,” the regime’s defenders invoke non-interference and anti-imperialism. They ignore that legitimacy requires more than avoiding foreign intervention. A government that tortures opponents, rigs elections, and starves its population forfeits legitimacy regardless of Washington’s position.
Maduro himself abandoned the pretense. When asked about recognizing his defeat in 2024, he responded: “Whoever messes with me, dries up. Whoever messes with Maduro, dries up.” Leaving aside that psychologists have written volumes about people who refer to themselves in the third person, this is the language of gangsterism, not democratic governance.
The contrast with genuine democracy illuminates the distinction. Democratic governments lose elections and transfer power. They don’t imprison opponents for organizing protests (even if Justin Trudeau didn’t get the memo for this one). They don’t ban political parties for winning too decisively. They don’t require citizens to show proof of loyalty to the government to access food. They don’t produce refugee crises rivaling war zones. They don’t threaten neighbours with territorial conquest. They don’t silence journalists for reporting inconvenient truths.
Venezuela under Maduro represents democratic forms emptied of democratic content, what political scientists call competitive authoritarianism. Elections happen, but the regime controls enough of the process to guarantee outcomes. Opposition exists, but within strict boundaries that the government determines. The result is the corpse of legitimacy dressed in democratic clothing.
Those defending Maduro’s legitimacy should specify what the word means. If it means controlling the military and police, then every dictator qualifies. If it means following constitutional procedures, then the procedures themselves must be legitimate, not the hollow rituals of a rigged system. If it means representing the people’s will, then Venezuela’s refugee exodus and repeated opposition victories render the claim absurd.
Legitimate governments don’t need to disappear teenagers for protesting. They don’t need to falsify vote counts (by thirty points). They don’t generate the largest refugee crisis in Western Hemisphere history. They don’t reduce their people to starvation while sitting on vast oil wealth. Whatever Maduro represents, legitimacy isn’t it.
Thomas Paine understood tyranny’s inevitable arc: “It is from a strange mixture of tyranny and cowardice that exclusions have been set up and continued. The boldness to do wrong at first, changes afterwards into cowardly craft, and at last into fear.” Maduro’s political career traced this trajectory precisely (He was a bus driver before becoming a trusted Chávezista). The boldness of rigging elections descended into the cowardly craft of disappearing children and silencing journalists, before collapsing finally into pure fear. In his final weeks as dictator, Maduro watched US naval forces mass off Venezuela’s coast, the warships a daily reminder that his regime’s end approached. The man who threatened to invade Guyana cowered as real military power gathered on his shores. The disappeared activists, the imprisoned children, the exiled opposition leaders, the silenced journalists, the paramilitary thugs, all had served one purpose: maintaining his power through fear. But when Venezuelans voted overwhelmingly against him despite the risks, and when American ships appeared on his horizon, fear consumed the fearmonger himself. What remained was precisely what Paine identified: order without consent, government by fear alone, is power without legitimacy that ends as it inevitably must, in the coward’s capture.
As Xavier Milei, Argentina’s legitimate president, likes tosay: “Que viva la libertad, carajo!”
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Marco Navarro-Génie
The Longer Ottawa Delays the Needed Reforms, the Worse It Will Be
Over the past decade, Sweden has undertaken one of the most consequential reversals of immigration and multicultural policy in the Western world. Once celebrated as a moral exemplar of openness, Sweden has moved deliberately toward tighter immigration controls, stricter citizenship requirements, and a civic integration model that places social cohesion above ideological fashion. These reforms emerged not from whim but from a sober political will issuing from social conditions that the Swedish state could no longer manage under existing policy.
Canada today exhibits many of the same underlying conditions that drove Sweden’s course correction, yet its ruling elites lack the wisdom and the courage to change course. Those conditions have been building since at least 2015 and have intensified since the 2020-22 COVID policies. Yet Canada remains immobilized by doctrine, woke culture, ideologically captured institutions, and entrenched incentives that reward delay. The contrast is revealing.
1. Sweden’s Immigration, Citizenship, and Multicultural Reforms
Sweden’s reforms are anchored in the political framework established after the September 2022 election, most notably through the Tidö Agreement. Named after Tidö Castle where the four right-of-centre party leaders negotiated, the agreement set out a program to reduce asylum immigration, tighten family reunification, strengthen enforcement and returns, and raise the threshold for acquiring citizenship. The document runs more than 60 pages and contains nearly 200 reform proposals.
The agreement explicitly targets a “paradigm shift” in Swedish asylum policy. Refugee quotas were slashed from 5,000 per year to just 900. Family reunification rights were reduced to the minimum permitted under EU law. The agreement signals that Sweden will no longer be more generous than its international legal obligations require.
Citizenship reform sits at the centre of this shift. A government inquiry released in January 2025 proposed extending the required period of residence from five years to eight. It introduced stricter self-sufficiency expectations and tightened criminal and conduct standards through an “honourable lifestyle” requirement, which extends the waiting period before an applicant who has committed a crime can be admitted as a Swedish citizen. The proposal also expands citizenship testing to include not only Swedish language proficiency and civic knowledge but also additional areas such as the role of media in society and children’s rights. These legislative amendments are proposed to enter into force on 1 June 2026.
Administrative reforms already require in-person identity verification and expanded documentation for citizenship applicants. Proposals are underway to permit revocation of citizenship in cases of fraud, “system-threatening crime,” or serious national security threats. In September 2025, a government commission proposed revoking permanent residence permits previously granted on asylum-related grounds, requiring affected individuals to obtain citizenship, qualify for a temporary permit, or leave the country by 2027.
Since 2022, approximately 40 legislative proposals have been presented in this restrictive direction, covering naturalization, detention, return, deportation, duration of re-entry bans, and incentive structures for voluntary repatriation. The Social Democrats, the largest opposition party and architects of the 2015-16 policy changes, now advocate a similar migration policy. The political consensus has shifted.
Multiculturalism has not been repealed, but it has been demoted. It is no longer a governing ideology but a social reality managed through integration requirements. Swedish policy now stresses adaptation to Swedish norms rather than state accommodation. Citizenship is treated as the culmination of integration, not a shortcut to it.
2. The Conditions That Forced Sweden’s Hand
Sweden did not change course because restraint became fashionable. It pivoted because conditions became operationally intolerable.
The most visible trigger was organized crime. Sweden experienced a sustained rise in gun violence tied to criminal networks, particularly in urban and suburban areas. Gun violence began increasing in the mid-2000s and accelerated sharply from 2013 onward. By 2022, Sweden recorded 391 confirmed shootings and 63 people killed by gunfire, its bloodiest year of gun violence in modern times. The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brå) reports that Sweden’s gun homicide rate stands at approximately 4 deaths per million inhabitants, compared to a European average of 1.6. In 2023, 53 people were shot dead, the second-highest number ever recorded.
The problem extends beyond shootings. In 2024, police recorded 317 bombings, more than double the number in 2023. Gang-related explosions rose from 149 incidents in 2023 to 317 in 2024. Media estimates suggest that more than 60,000 people may be connected to organized criminal networks. These networks developed the capacity to recruit minors, intimidate witnesses, launder money, and exploit welfare systems. Swedish authorities began describing the phenomenon as “system-threatening crime,” signalling that the problem had moved beyond ordinary policing into a challenge to state authority itself.
Parallel social fragmentation deepened the multicultural strain. Swedish police identified “vulnerable areas” marked by low employment, weak language integration, limited trust in institutions, and the presence of informal authority structures. As of 2024, approximately 65 such areas exist nationwide, housing around 550,000 people, or 5 percent of Sweden’s population. In the most serious “particularly vulnerable areas,” now numbering 19, police report that the situation makes it “difficult or almost impossible” for them to fulfill their mission. Parallel society structures exercise their own form of justice and control. Residents show widespread disinclination to participate in legal processes, and systematic threats and violence target witnesses.
Schools and social services struggled to enforce standards. Emergency services adapted their behaviour by ensuring proper backup, entering areas via alternative routes, or reversing vehicles to enable quick departure if needed. In 2017, police estimated that 40 percent of residents in vulnerable areas had not completed primary education, and less than half of 15-year-olds in Gothenburg’s especially vulnerable areas qualified for secondary education.
Equally important was the collapse of elite credibility. For years, Swedish political and cultural elites insisted that crime and integration failure were unrelated to migration volume or composition. As evidence accumulated, public trust eroded. Immigration policy became inseparable from questions of public order, welfare sustainability, and state capacity.
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3. Canada’s Comparable Conditions Since 2015
Canada’s deterioration since 2015 has been real, cumulative, and measurable. It is not identical to Sweden’s experience, but the conditions increasingly rhyme with it.
Crime severity in Canada has risen since 2015, as measured by Statistics Canada’s Crime Severity Index. After a temporary decline in 2020 due to the initial lockdowns, crime severity rose again, with three consecutive years of increases through 2023. The Index decreased 4% in 2024, the second decrease in a decade. The pattern is not linear, but the direction since 2015 is unmistakable. Canada has not enjoyed the sustained improvement in public safety that many citizens still assume is the norm. Several categories of violent crime increased in the post-2020 period, including extortion, which rose 35% in 2023 for the fourth consecutive year.
Canada’s organized crime problem is extensive and deeply embedded. Unlike Sweden’s highly visible gang warfare, much of Canada’s organized crime operates through fentanyl production and trafficking, large-scale auto theft rings exporting vehicles overseas, money laundering through real estate and trade-based schemes, and human trafficking and labour exploitation. This criminal economy is less spectacular but more corrosive. It fuels addiction, distorts housing markets, normalizes fraud, and erodes confidence that the rules apply evenly.
The opioid crisis illustrates the scale of this harm. More than 53,000 Canadians have died from apparent opioid toxicity since January 2016. In the first half of 2025, an average of 21 people died each day. These deaths are not abstractions. They exert sustained pressure on policing, emergency medicine, hospitals, and social services, while feeding criminal networks that thrive where enforcement is slow and authority fragmented.
Canada’s social services have simultaneously degraded. Housing supply failed to keep pace with demand well before the COVID event. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation estimates that restoring affordability levels last seen in 2019 will require between 430,000 and 480,000 new housing units per year for the next decade. This represents an approximate doubling of the current pace of home construction. In 2022, CMHC originally estimated Canada needed 3.5 million additional units by 2030 to restore affordability to early-2000s levels; by 2025, the agency had to scale down its target, effectively acknowledging that early-2000s affordability was no longer realistic. Rapid population growth fuelled by migration after 2020 collided with that shortage, producing rising rents, collapsing affordability, and growing homelessness, including among working Canadians.
Healthcare systems face persistent strain. Emergency departments report rising volumes and extended lengths of stay, with staffing shortages exacerbated by draconian vaccination mandates compounding delays. Schools and municipal services struggle with overcrowding, language integration demands, and infrastructure deficits. These pressures are now structural, not temporary.
Immigration acts as a stress multiplier rather than a sole cause. Population growth has outpaced housing, healthcare, transit, and education capacity. Asylum and temporary resident processing inventories have grown substantially in recent years. Integration expectations remain modest relative to the intake scale.
Public trust erodes quietly, but it erodes under the weight of intimidation by ideological and propagandistic smears of racism. Citizens lower their expectations, adjust their behaviour, and accept disorder as background noise. That adaptation is an early signal of institutional retreat.
4. Canada Remains Paralyzed
Despite these conditions, Canada has not adopted reforms comparable to Sweden’s. The paralysis has multiple, reinforcing causes.
Political entrenchment matters. The same federal party governed from 2015 to early 2025, the period during which many deterioration indicators emerged or intensified, including rising crime severity, prolonged housing unaffordability, growing asylum backlogs, and visible strain across social services. Continuity of power blurs accountability. Structural problems are reframed as inherited, masked as global, or treated as administrative rather than as the predictable outcomes of sustained choices.
Electoral incentives deepen inertia. Immigration policy is closely tied to coalition management in major urban centres in Central Canada, where immigrant communities represent important and growing voting blocs. This is not a claim of illegitimate influence, although serious questions about foreign interference remain unresolved. It is at least electoral arithmetic. Policies perceived as restrictive or enforcement-oriented carry political risk in constituencies where immigration is framed as identity affirmation rather than capacity-limited policy. That risk favours symbolism over structural reform. Canada developed a government that governed through symbolic pronouncements rather than solutions.
Narrative lock-in reinforces the problem, fuelled by a press captured by the federal state through direct subsidies. Immigration and multiculturalism have acquired moral status. Evidence of failure is treated as miscommunication rather than misdesign. Housing shortages become funding debates filled by recurrent promises that never materialize. Crime becomes an optics problem. Service strain becomes a funding argument. The possibility that intake exceeds integration capacity is excluded early from acceptable discourse.
Canada’s advocacy and consultative ecosystem further narrows the space for reform. Many organizations operate within frameworks that assume continued high immigration and expansive accommodation. They do not set policy, but they shape the environment in which policy is evaluated. They, too, are clients of the state.
Urban concentration also matters. The benefits of high immigration accrue disproportionately to metropolitan labour markets and asset-owning sectors. Many of the costs fall on municipalities, renters, younger cohorts, and strained service systems with limited fiscal autonomy. This asymmetry reduces urgency. The wealth and generational gap between beneficiaries of the status quo and those bearing its costs is remarkable.
Jurisdictional fragmentation, often exploited as a political tool, compounds paralysis. Immigration is mostly federal in practice, though it is constitutionally shared. Housing, healthcare delivery, policing resources, and social services are largely provincial or municipal. Lower levels of government see their planning and programmes sabotaged by federal policy that operates without regard for downstream consequences. Responsibility diffuses easily. Problems in Ottawa are treated as separate files rather than as interacting consequences.
Finally, time horizons work against reform. The benefits of high intake are immediate: labour supply, headline GDP growth, and short-term fiscal flows. The costs accumulate slowly: degraded services, entrenched criminal economies, weakened trust. Electoral systems reward short-term stability over long-term repair.
5. Anticipating the Objections
Several objections predictably arise whenever Canada’s immigration and integration failures are raised. They deserve direct answers for the conversation to move forward.
Canada is not Sweden. That is true in the narrow sense and beside the point in the larger one. The comparison is not about copying policies but about recognizing patterns. Organized crime exploits weak enforcement wherever it finds it. Housing shortages follow population growth that outpaces supply in any market. Social trust erodes when citizens experience disorder and declining services while being told that concern itself is the problem. Geography does not repeal capacity limits.
Crime and social strain are unrelated to immigration. This objection mistakes interaction for causation. Immigration does not create every problem. It amplifies existing weaknesses when intake exceeds the capacity of integration and enforcement. Sweden learned this when welfare systems and policing were stretched beyond what trust-based governance could sustain. Canada’s experience since 2015 shows the same interaction at work, compounded by misguided movements to defund police.
Economic benefits justify current levels. Immigration does contribute to labour supply and headline GDP. What is disputed is the assumption that aggregate growth equals public benefit. When gains concentrate in asset inflation and low-wage labour supply, while costs are borne through housing unaffordability, service overload, vanishing productivity growth, and weakened enforcement, social consent erodes.
Reform risks intolerance. This contention confuses enforcement with animus. Sweden’s reforms are based on conduct, compliance, and capacity, not ethnicity or belief. Citizenship thresholds, benefit conditions, and removal enforcement apply by rule, not identity. Treating immigration and citizenship as policy instruments rather than moral symbols is governance, not exclusion.
Canada lacks the legal room to act. This overstates constitutional paralysis. The Charter constrains means, not ends. It requires proportionality and fairness, not the passivity we see daily. The COVID period showed what governments can do and how they can circumvent obstacles when they want something done. Canada retains broad authority over intake levels, enforcement priorities, benefit conditions, and citizenship criteria. The authority needs to be exercised.
These problems are temporary shocks. Canada’s crime trends since 2015, its housing supply gap, its opioid death toll, and its enforcement backlogs are cumulative indicators. But ten years of waiting for them to correct themselves is not prudent (That strategy already failed in the fiscal sphere). It is abdication.
These objections do not defeat the necessity for reform. But they explain the paralyzing delay.
Conclusion
Sweden changed course when a critical and courageous mass of citizens concluded that the state could no longer guarantee cohesion under existing policies. Does Canada have the necessary courage and critical mass to push for similar solutions?
Sweden’s reforms were not driven by hostility to newcomers. They were driven by a sober recognition that inclusion without enforcement and generosity without reciprocity corrode the foundations of a liberal state. Sweden concluded that immigration must align with integration capacity, that citizenship must mean something, and that social trust cannot be sustained by slogans alone.
Canada faces the same choice. Since 2015, crime severity has risen, organized criminal economies have embedded themselves more deeply, housing affordability has collapsed, healthcare systems have strained, and institutional trust has weakened. Since 2020, these pressures have intensified. None of this requires panic. It requires honesty and the courage to face reality.
Meaningful reform is not anti-immigrant, as Sweden has demonstrated. It is pro-citizen and pro-integration. A system that enforces its rules, sets clear thresholds, and aligns intake with capacity is fairer to newcomers and to those of us already here. It offers membership rather than ambiguity, and belonging rather than permanent precarity.
Sweden chose boundaries before its institutions failed. Canada theoretically still has that option. But it lacks the courage to act, the willingness to accept limits and the sobriety to tell the truth about trade-offs. There is room for Canada’s long-established immigrants to take the lead in advocating for these reforms, which the timid Laurentian elites aren’t fit to correct. A serious country does not confuse moral posture with policy, or delay correction until ideological dysfunction hardens into a norm.
The question is not whether Canada needs reform. It is whether it will choose reform deliberately, or be forced to adopt worse policies later under even worse conditions.
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Beware of government promises that arrive gift-wrapped in moral certainty.
The pattern repeats across the sector: subsidies extracted, production scaled back, workers laid off, taxpayers absorbing losses while executives collect bonuses and move on, and politicians pretend that it never happened. CBC isn’t asking Justin Trudeau, Katherine McKenna or Steven Guilbeault any questions about it. They are not asking Mark Carney.
Buy an electric vehicle, they said, and you will save the planet, no questions asked. Justin Trudeau and several of his ministers proclaimed it from podiums. Environmental activists, often cabinet members, chanted it at rallies. Automotive executives leveraged it to extract giant subsidies. For over a decade, the message never wavered: until $50 billion in public money disappeared into corporate failures, and the economic wreckage became impossible to ignore.
Prime Minister Mark Carney, himself a spokesperson for the doomsday culture, inherited the policy disaster from Trudeau and still clings to the wreckage. The 2026 EV sales target sits suspended, a grudging acknowledgment that reality refused to cooperate with radical predictions and Ottawa’s mandates. Yet the 2030 and 2035 targets remain federal law, monuments to a central-planning exercise that delivered the opposite of what it promised.
Their claims were never quite true. Electric vehicles were pure good. They were marketed as unconditionally cleaner than conventional cars, a transformation so obviously beneficial that questioning it invited accusations of climate denial. Government messaging suggested switching to an EV meant immediate environmental virtue. The nuance, the conditions, and the caveats were conveniently omitted from the government sales pitch that justified tens of billions of your money into subsidies for foreign EV manufacturing and corporate advancement.
The Reality Ottawa Is Hiding
Research documented the conditional nature of EV benefits for over a decade, yet Ottawa proceeded as if the complexity didn’t exist. Studies from China, where coal dominates electricity generation, showed as early as 2010 that EVs in coal-dependent regions had “very limited benefits” in reducing emissions compared to gasoline vehicles. In Northern China, where electricity generation is over 80% coal-based, EVs could produce lifecycle emissions comparable to or even higher than those of conventional cars. A 2015 Chinese study found that EVs generated lifecycle emissions that were only 18% lower than those of gasoline vehicles, compared to 40-70% reductions in regions with cleaner grids.
Volvo began publishing transparent lifecycle assessments for its first EV in 2019, making it the first major automaker to document the significant upfront emissions from battery production publicly. Their 2021 C40 Recharge report, released during the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, revealed that manufacturing an EV produces 70% more emissions than building a comparable conventional vehicle. But there are no CBC reports about that. The Volvo report showed that an EV charged on a coal-heavy global grid required 68,000 to 110,000 miles of driving to break even with a conventional car, potentially more than half the vehicle’s usable lifetime. For drivers with low annual mileage in regions with dirty electricity grids, that breakeven point could take six to nine years to reach, if ever.
Battery manufacturing location proved enormously consequential. Production in China, powered by coal, generates 60-85% higher emissions than manufacturing in Europe or the United States. Yet Canadian subsidies flowed to companies regardless of where batteries were made or where vehicles would be charged. The federal government committed over $50 billion without requiring the environmental due diligence that should precede such massive public investment.
The Canadian government never acknowledged Volvo’s findings. Not once. A search of federal policy documents, ministerial statements, and environmental assessments from 2019 forward reveals no mention of the lifecycle complexities Volvo documented. Ottawa’s silence on inconvenient research speaks loudly about how ideology trumped evidence in shaping EV policy.
You want to build a pipeline in Canada. There will be 8 to 10 years of red tape and environmental impact assessments. But if you say you want to make EVs, Laurentian provincial premiers and the feds will bend over backwards. They handed over billions while the economy and social conditions in their cities decayed.
The environmental promise was conditional: clean electricity grids, high annual mileage, manufacturing in regions with low-carbon energy, and vehicles driven long enough to offset the massive carbon debt from battery production. Remove those conditions, and the environmental case collapses. The subsidies, however, remained unconditional.
The Subsidies Flow, The Companies Fail
Corporate casualties now litter the landscape. Northvolt received $240 million in federal subsidies to build a Quebec battery plant before filing for bankruptcy protection in November. Lion Electric, Quebec’s homegrown EV manufacturer, burned through $100 million in government support before announcing massive layoffs and production cuts. Arrival, which secured subsidies for its electric van facility, collapsed entirely, leaving taxpayers with nothing but broken promises.
Stellantis and LG Energy Solution extracted $15 billion, the most extensive corporate handout in Canadian history, for their Windsor battery plant. Volkswagen secured $13 billion for St. Thomas. Provincial governments layered on additional incentives. The public investment dwarfed any plausible return, yet the money kept flowing based on environmental claims the government either never bothered to verify or suppressed from its own documents and reports.
Despite this flood of subsidies and regulatory coercion, Canadian consumers rejected the offering. Even with massive incentives, EVs accounted for only 15% of new vehicle sales in 2024, far short of the mandated 20% target for 2026, let alone the 60% demanded by 2030. When federal subsidies ended in early 2025, sales collapsed to 9%, revealing the limited consumer demand. Dealer lots overflow with unsold inventory. Manufacturers scaled back production plans. The market spoke; Ottawa is only half listening.
The GM plant in Oshawa serves as a cautionary tale. Thousands of jobs lost. Promises of green manufacturing jobs evaporated. Workers who believed government assurances that EV mandates would secure their livelihoods found themselves unemployed as companies redirected production or collapsed entirely. The pattern repeats across the sector: subsidies extracted, production scaled back, workers laid off, taxpayers absorbing losses while executives collect bonuses and move on, and politicians pretend that it never happened. CBC isn’t asking Justin Trudeau, Katherine McKenna or Steven Guilbeault any questions about it. They are not asking Mark Carney.
The Central Planning Failure
The EV disaster illustrates why economies run by political offices never succeed. Friedrich Hayek observed that “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” Politicians and bureaucrats in Ottawa do not possibly possess the dispersed knowledge embedded in millions of individual economic decisions. But they think that they do.
Markets aggregate information that no central planner can access. Consumer preferences for vehicle range, charging convenience, and total cost of ownership. Regional variations in electricity generation and the pace of grid decarbonization. Battery technology improvements and supply chain vulnerabilities. Resource constraints and mining capacity. These factors interact in ways too complex for any cabinet planning committee to comprehend, yet Ottawa presumed to mandate outcomes a generation in advance.
Federal ministers with no experience in automotive manufacturing or battery chemistry presumed to direct the transformation of a trillion-dollar industry. Career bureaucrats drafted regulations determining which vehicles Canadians could purchase years hence, as if they possessed prophetic knowledge of technological development, grid decarbonization rates, consumer preferences, and global supply chains.
The EV mandate attempted to force a technological transition. It was an economic coup. Environmental claims proved conditional at best. Billions in subsidies flowed to failing companies. Taxpayers absorbed losses while corporations extracted rents and walked away. It worked well for the corporations, but the coup failed Canadians and Canadian workers. They are not building back better.
Green ideology provided perfect cover for this overreach. Invoke climate emergency, and fiscal responsibility vanishes. Question subsidies and you’re labelled a denier. Point out that environmental benefits depend on specific conditions, and you’re accused of spreading misinformation. The rhetorical shield, aided and abetted by a complicit media unable to see past its own financial interests, allowed government to bypass scrutiny that should attend any massive industrial policy intervention.
The Trust Deficit
As Canadians learn that EV environmental benefits depend heavily on electricity sources and driving patterns, as they watch subsidized companies collapse, as they discover how thoroughly the promise was oversold and how completely Ottawa ignored contrary evidence, trust in government erodes. This badly needed skepticism will spread beyond EVs and undermine legitimate government functions.
It would be good if future government claims about environmental policy face rising skepticism. Corporations wrapping themselves in green rhetoric may be viewed as con artists. Environmental activists who championed these policies may see their credibility destroyed. When citizens conclude their government systematically misled them about costs, benefits, and basic facts while suppressing inconvenient research, liberal democracy itself suffers. But that may not happen at all in Laurentian LaLa-land or in the Pacific Lotusland.
Over fifty billion dollars are distributed among local and foreign industrialists, while tens of thousands live in tents in Laurentian cities.
The EV debacle demonstrates that overselling policy benefits, suppressing complexity, and using ideology to short-circuit debate produce a backlash far worse than honest acknowledgment of nuance would have. The damage compounds when governments commit billions based on conditional environmental claims they never verified, then remain silent when industry-leading manufacturers publish data revealing those conditions.
The Path Forward
Canada needs a full repeal of the EV mandate and a complete retreat from Ottawa directing market decisions. The EV law must be struck, not merely paused. The 2030 and 2035 targets must be abandoned entirely. No new subsidies for EV production (or any other production). No bailouts for failed battery plants. No additional funds for charging infrastructure. And absolutely no subsidies for conventional or hybrid vehicle production justified by the same environmental complexity that should have prevented EV mandates in the first place.
Let markets determine which technologies Canadians choose. If EVs deliver genuine value for specific consumers in specific circumstances—those with clean electricity grids, high annual mileage, and long vehicle ownership timelines—those consumers will buy them without mandates or subsidies. If hybrids or improved conventional vehicles better serve other consumers’ needs, manufacturers will produce them without government direction.
The aggregated wisdom of millions of economic actors making decisions based on their actual circumstances will produce better outcomes than any planning committee in Ottawa. Some Canadians will find EVs deliver environmental and financial benefits. Others will not. Both conclusions can be correct simultaneously, a nuance Ottawa spent $50 billion refusing to acknowledge.
Markets work because no one has to know everything. Central planning fails because someone must. I wish I could say that Ottawa has learned this lesson the expensive way. Or whether Laurentians will remember it at the next election. Or whether the same politicians and bureaucrats who delivered this disaster will identify the next technology to mandate and subsidize, armed with new promises that reality will eventually expose as conditional at best.
But let’s keep our dreams in check. It seems more likely, given their ideological make-up and propensities for certainty, that low-information Laurentian and Pacific Coast voters will go right for the next green-washed fantasy that the feds and provincial governments will put in front of them, provided it is coiled into a catchy slogan.
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