New Man, Same Old Plan: Mark Carney’s Net-Zero Ambitions Remain an Existential Threat to Canada’s Economy

Builders, developers and politicians have all avidly pursued LEED certification of major buildings and housing over the past several decades. Meant to be the pinnacle of “green” construction standards, LEED demands not just energy efficiency but the pursuit of many nakedly ideological goals like public transit use and even social equity. And its effects go far beyond virtue signalling and woke positioning. As this investigation by engineer Greg Wilson reveals, not only does LEED certification drive up construction costs and make housing affordability even more problematic, but buildings constructed to display its contradictory desires often consume more energy than traditional ones. Wilson calls for a return to sanity and a true form of sustainability: buildings that work well and will last for centuries.

That free speech has been fundamental to Judaism for over 3,000 years is especially admirable considering the innumerable anti-Semitic attacks that uncontrolled public discourse has emboldened over the centuries. The courage it takes to defend that principle in present-day Canada is beginning to fray, however, as prominent Jewish organizations like B’nai Brith Canada are backing Ottawa’s recurring expansion of “anti-hate” laws – most recently with the Combatting Hate Act and Online Harms Act. But such legislative cudgels never work, writes Lynne Cohen in this originally reported essay – and often end up being used to batter their original proponents. Seeking safety behind the power of the state, Cohen argues, is exactly the wrong approach. Free speech can be messy, unpleasant – and very hard to extend to one’s enemies – but the alternative is far worse.

If you want to learn the truth about a time and place, it would make sense to ask some of those who were there. In this heartfelt memoir, Elaine Ayoungman Clifton, who was born into the Siksika First Nation near Calgary, tells a story today’s activists don’t want you to hear. Far from an instrument of repression and evil, the Indian Residential School she attended for a decade was warm and welcoming, the teachers caring and conscientious. They instilled in her a love of reading, did not try to crush her language and culture, and did not try to separate her from her large family. “I am grateful for what they taught me and the care, friendship and love they gave to me over many years,” Ayoungman Clifton writes. If Canadians really want to respect the lived experience of all Indigenous people, hers is an authentic voice we should listen to.

Canada’s education system from kindergarten through post-graduate university has been captured by ideological pedagogy that is at best pointless and at worst harmful to students. But don’t blame only the teachers. In this insider’s look at our dysfunctional system, educator Renaud-Philippe Garner argues that teachers and faculty are too busy and too distracted by meddlesome administrators, confrontational parents and barely-controllable classrooms to be fully committed woke warriors. Instead, they’ve been captured by charlatans peddling nonsense and evidence-free learning practices, and they’re simply going along to get along. Too bad our children and youth are the ones who suffer most.

The 2015 movie The Big Short offered Hollywood’s take on the 2007 subprime mortgage disaster, which triggered a devastating collapse in American house prices. What’s left for a sequel is how all those foreclosed houses later became rental properties, creating an important new option for families priced out of the housing market. While corporate-owned rental housing came to inspire prodigious political outrage in both Canada and the U.S., Peter Shawn Taylor looks beyond the emotion to discover the compelling practical advantages it provides. With Canada’s housing crisis showing no signs of abating, low- and middle-income families in particular stand to benefit from what corporate rental housing providers can deliver.

Cast in metal and set atop concrete, the life expectancy of a statue ought to be far longer than that of the human being it represents. Not anymore. In 2015 Picton, Ontario held a party to celebrate the installation of a life-sized sculpture of Canada’s first prime minister on its Main Street. Less than six year later, Sir John A. Macdonald’s statue was gone, packed up amid a moral panic over Canadian history. Author Jerry Amernic, who was involved in recent efforts to bring the statue back, takes readers behind the scenes to reveal how the town turned its back so quickly on the man it once celebrated as a favourite son. And Amernic outlines the long and painstaking process required to bring common sense back to the public recognition of Canada’s greatest heroes.

Plenty of critics weighed in on last month’s stock market debut of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, questioning the staggering valuation of a company that has yet to turn a profit, and evidently miffed that its oddball founder is now the world’s first trillionaire. But what is most remarkable – and most important – about SpaceX, writes Gleb Lisikh, is how it has launched a revolution in space. By driving down the costs of lifting objects into orbit by multiple orders of magnitude, Musk’s reusable rockets have sparked a new industrial space age that appears set to transform the economy and the way we live. And has already revived excitement, optimism and a sense of adventure for a new generation. With a special Editor’s Introduction, this final installment of C2C’s series marking the U.S.’s 250th anniversary shows how individual ingenuity unleashed in a country offering the freedom to risk it all is once again changing the world.

With another Canada Day having passed, it’s a good time to reflect on the patriotic fervour sweeping the country. In P.M. Szpunar’s estimation, much of it is nothing to be proud of. From performative “Buy Canadian” campaigns to booing U.S. children on visiting sports teams, too many Canadians have responded to American swagger with self-righteous sneering, assuring themselves their country is wiser, kinder and more civilized. This even as the southward flow of Canadian money, talent and innovation accelerates. Self-indulgent anti-Americanism is not just lazy and immature, argues Szpunar, it’s counter-productive, distracting Canadians from the real work of addressing our own weaknesses and rebuilding our strengths. A serious country should want better.

As America celebrates its 250^th anniversary, it is worth taking a fresh look at the U.S. Declaration of Independence to rediscover how the principles embedded in this foundational document have provided the basis of a free society for a quarter-millennium. More than just a demand for freedom, and no mere list of grievances, David W. Livingstone regards the Declaration as a work of genius that speaks to all of humanity. In the worldview it propounds, human equality comes first, individual rights are intrinsic to that principle, and governments don’t “grant” rights but instead are formed to protect rights that every person already holds. The “truths” that America’s Founders proclaimed to be “self-evident”, Livingstone writes, have endured because they are true – and will continue to shine as a beacon for all.

Whether Canadians fear or favour artificial intelligence, they can’t stop it. AI’s transformative power in making so many things faster and easier will doubtless cause pain, says veteran Canadian business leader Gwyn Morgan, but it will also provide generational opportunities Canada must seize. The Prairie region, especially, has the abundant land and energy needed to build the massive AI data centres that will power the future. Some workers are at risk, Morgan concedes, but AI will create opportunities as well, particularly in the skilled trades. AI might just transform our labour force into one where more workers do real things for real people.

With Alberta headed for a vote on having a vote on independence, many Canadians may think the threat of separation has evaporated. Or that it’s a long way off. Or that, in any case, Ottawa’s Clarity Act will shut it down and protect the federation. But in the concluding instalment of their series (read Part I here and Part II here), George Koch and Jim Mason explode that delusion. The Act is more likely to increase the “Yes” vote which, they predict, will trigger more political wrangling, more bad faith and bitterness, possible civil unrest and even the province’s annexation by the U.S. The consequences, in other words, are dire no matter which side you’re on.

The House of Commons once had an effective law in front of it that laid out clear steps to assure that any provincial referendum on independence would be democratic and any negotiations after a “Yes” vote would be fair. But it wasn’t the current Clarity Act – it was a bill put forward by the Opposition Reform Party in 1996, and the Liberal government chose to ignore it. Instead, it passed its own legislation designed to crush support for any subsequent secession movement. In Part II of their series on what the Clarity Act means to today’s debate over Alberta’s future, George Koch and Jim Mason delve into the Act’s origin story and explain why it’s so blatantly stacked in favour of Ottawa – and how that could inflame separatist sentiment and undermine the federalist cause.

Multi-factor verification. Customer surveys. SMS alerts. Endless online check-ins. Technology was supposed to free up our time for better things. Instead, it has created endless obstacles to getting anything done. Plus there’s the constant impact of government regulations and questionable safety measures that further rob us of our valuable time. Peter Shawn Taylor looks at the absurd and annoying ways that 21^st-century life ties us up and grinds us down. While some examples seem faintly comical, taken together they comprise what Taylor argues is a micro-productivity crisis of national proportions that is no laughing matter.

Proponents of independence for Alberta seem to believe the federal Clarity Act provides a sure pathway to secession should they win a referendum vote. But as Jim Mason and George Koch explain, the Act is less pathway than political minefield. It demands a clear question with a clear majority vote – but offers no criteria for either. It provides no instructions on how separation negotiations should proceed, but it does allow other provinces, Indigenous groups and others to intervene. And it assigns virtually all decision-making to Ottawa. It is, Mason and Koch find in the first of this two-part series, a formula not for resolution but deadlock, virtually certain to frustrate any constitutional effort to secede. Almost like it was designed that way.

Artists once understood they were serving something greater than themselves – truth, beauty, memory – things universal and transcendent. No longer. In a culture where imagination is cast as “cultural appropriation” and exploitation, what matters is not art but the artist. Ego, self-regard and “lived experience” are paramount. In this searing critique, T.G. Kelemen uses recent examples of cancellation in the arts to explain how “progressive” pieties have inverted the very foundation of the arts, fuelling not just a culture war, but a war on culture.