Ego Over Everything: How the Progressive Fixation on Identity Perverts the Arts

Why were our forebears more adventurous than we are today? Was it just that they had more empty space to explore, no GPS or instant communications to keep them safe, no social welfare state to protect them? It’s all that and more, writes Murray Lytle. The derring-do of days past, he argues, sprang from a value system that admired courage and saw risk-taking as a social virtue – even a duty – that could expand knowledge and build a better world as well as protect the nation. Lytle urges our society to shake off its smothering safety culture and rediscover a sense of adventure.

Indigenous land acknowledgements have become so common that many Canadians no longer give them a second thought – simply accepting a kind of tuneless new national anthem before events of all sorts. And that’s why they’re so dangerous. The enforced conformity and compelled speech they depend on are not just threats to individual freedom, writes George Ramsay, they also create a divisive moral hierarchy based on race. In this originally reported story, Ramsay delves into the dangers posed by Canada’s broader shift to enforced verbal compliance, reveals the inspiring stories of a few brave souls who have dared to challenge this social tyranny and offers practical tips on how the rest of us can fight back too.

Generation Z should know better than anyone the risk that technology poses to personal privacy. They are after all the first generation to grow up entirely in the digital age. Jessica Nwaefidoh knows from personal experience how vulnerable your most intimate information can be. With companies anxious to profit from everyone’s personal data, politicians happy to play along for their own selfish reasons and most people willing to sacrifice their own privacy for convenience, amusement or just to get by, Nwaefidoh argues that it’s time to fight back. The right to be left alone, she finds, requires constant vigilance – and she offers some practical tactics to reclaim that right.

Older generations often roll their eyes when young people seek to blame them for their woes. But if Canada’s Gen Zers feel betrayed by the Boomers, they are right to do so, argues Gwyn Morgan. Years of irresponsible fiscal and regulatory policies have hamstrung the Canadian economy and left younger generations facing a bleak future of stagnant wages, rising taxes and shrinking opportunities. A former business leader who created more than his share of jobs and prosperity during his long corporate career, Morgan casts a worried eye over the next generation – and offers sympathy for the situation they’re inheriting.

Ireland’s Ryanair will fly you from London to Geneva for $49. Flying from Calgary to Vancouver – a shorter trip – likely will set you back four times as much. Canadians suffer some of the highest-priced, least-convenient and most unpleasant airline service in the world, and mainly for one reason: forestalled competition. In fact, creating barriers to prevent any meaningful competition has been the main goal of Canadian airline policy since the formation of Trans-Canada Air Lines in 1937. Simon Michell explains how this sorry situation came to be and reveals how opening up our skies – as so many other countries have already done – would make things much better for us all.

Canada, the old saying goes, suffers from too much geography and too little history. That ratio is getting even more out of whack. Since the election of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2015 and gathering speed following allegations of mass graves in Kamloops in 2021, many of Canada’s most important historical figures have been erased in a tidal wave of cancellations and repudiations – all driven by a mob of woke activists uninterested in the true facts of Canada’s past. But as Jerry Amernic discovered while researching a book on historical revisionism, there are still those who believe Canadians can handle the truth. And they’re working hard to rescue our nation from the history hijackers.

For years now the Left has shown itself eager to claim hatred as the motive for anyone who opposes its worldview. This impulse has become a poisonous social force – elevating identity politics, quashing freedom, driving cancel culture and threatening the very foundation of Western liberal democracy. But where did it come from? Collin May, a former Chair of the Alberta Human Rights Commission who himself experienced cancellation, explores the deep origins in this thoughtful and wide-ranging essay. From Ancient philosophers and early theologians through Renaissance scholars and fashionable modern intellectuals, May traces this dark pathology’s evolution and explains why it’s so dangerous.

It’s a rare and beautiful thing to see Canada’s courts strike a blow for individual freedom, but that’s what happened in an Ottawa courthouse last month. In a ringing and powerfully-reasoned decision, the Federal Court of Appeal found the Justin Trudeau government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act during the 2022 Freedom Convoy protests violated the law and the Constitution. Civil rights lawyer Christine Van Geyn, who was in the thick of the nearly four years of litigation the event triggered, explains why the court agreed that Trudeau’s actions constituted a draconian abuse of power – and why its ruling could prove a historic victory for Canadian civil liberties.

B.C.’s decision to abandon letter grades in favour of four vague “proficiency” categories is the latest example of the move to do away with objective standards throughout Canada’s public education system. Traditional grading methods are too hard on the tender egos of young students, the logic goes. And the possibility of failure is outdated, if not downright racist. Christina Park reveals how this new system is failing parents, who have a right to know how their child is doing, and harming students, who may be denied the help they need. She also uncovers some “gritty optimism” about the possible return of coherent educational standards.

Germany was postwar Europe’s most successful nation – until it was seized by an arrogant leftist ideology that led it down a ruinous path. Its government abandoned safe, zero-emission nuclear power for inefficient wind and solar plus natural gas from Vladmir Putin. It threw open its borders to millions of asylum-seekers with barely a thought to the enormous costs or the difficulties of social integration. Today, at the 11th hour, Germany is at last struggling to turn around its decade of economic decline and social disintegration. In this cautionary tale, Gwyn Morgan sees a profound warning for Canada.

“The whole meaning of life,” famed comedian George Carlin once observed, “is trying to find a place for all your stuff. That’s what your house is, it’s a place for your stuff with a cover on it.” If so, then Canadians should be very concerned about their stuff. Unlike nearly every other modern nation, Canada lacks constitutional affirmation of the right to own property and as protection against its unjust seizure. With a recent B.C. Supreme Court ruling putting the very notion of home ownership at risk, Peter Shawn Taylor seeks out legal opinions on Canada’s surprisingly lax attitude towards property rights, how it differs from other countries and what that means for everyone’s possessions. If Canadians really want to protect their homes, belongings and personal finances, Taylor concludes, now’s the time to get loud.

Canadians frequently criticize U.S. President Donald Trump’s projection of American power. But in the fight against anti-Semitism, Canada could learn a thing or two from our neighbour to the south. In Part One of this series, Lynne Cohen revealed how Canada’s political and civic leaders have chosen to ignore or even abet the hate crimes and abuse Jews have suffered since October 7, 2023. In this second installment, she shows how the U.S. – from the President on down to local officials and law enforcement – has fought back. Where Canada has been cowering and cowardly, the U.S. has resolved to fight anti-Semitism, protect its Jewish citizens and defend Israel’s right to live freely as a Jewish state.

A new year has dawned and, as the light strengthens across the Northern Hemisphere, David Solway reminds us that how we choose to experience our world is at least as important as understanding how it came to be. In the first instalment of this two-part series, the writer illuminated the irreducible paradox at the heart of all theories concerning the universe’s creation, then scrutinized the seemingly unbridgeable gap between quantum physics and the physical world we live in. In Part II he considers an even tougher and, so far, unsolved scientific challenge: gravity. Some of the finest minds in science think it actually is insoluble without some kind of creative intelligence to oversee it. In other words, a miracle. To Solway, the true miracle is the fact of a marvellous world and our freedom to experience and wonder at it.

We’ve long been told that science and religion occupy two incompatible poles – one of reason and fact, the other of faith, superstition and even irrationality. But what if it isn’t so? In this two-part series, David Solway proposes a new Grand Unified Theory of cosmology aimed at bringing science and religion back together. In the opening instalment, Solway illuminates the irreducible paradoxes at the heart of all theories concerning the universe’s creation, then scrutinizes the seemingly unbridgeable gap between quantum physics and the physical world we live in – a gap that nevertheless is bridged into an integrated and orderly reality. What, then, might this say about the apparently irreconcilable differences between 21st century science and theology? Perhaps, Solway ventures, they’re more like two peas in a pod – and should consider forging a new entente to support humanity’s eternal search for Truth.

Canada has seen a troubling rise in anti-Semitism in the last two years. Hatred of Jews is now expressed openly, shamelessly, without restraint – and without consequence for those engaged in it. In part one of a two-part series, Lynne Cohen explains why Canada’s political and civic leaders seem unwilling to call out anti-Semitism or take any meaningful action to stop it. Whether driven by bias, cowardice or cold political calculation, the country’s political class is not just failing Canada’s Jewish population. It is choosing to do so. If the brutal massacre of innocent Jews by Muslim terrorists at Bondi Beach in Australia teaches anything, it’s that allowing anti-Semitism to spread has murderous consequences. Canada should take heed.