AUBUT: To leave or stay, that is the question

 https://www.westernstandard.news/opinion/aubut-to-leave-or-stay-that-is-the-question/72424

How Ottawa's unchecked power, bilingualism bias, and constitutional failures have pushed Alberta toward independence — or something bolder.

 

Published April 2, 2026 

R.T. Wells recently had an interesting, at least to me, take on independence, Alberta style. He is 100% correct that what took place in Quebec is different. Very different. In Quebec’s case, the result was not really independence so much as leverage through extortion. Transfer payments are one of the clearest examples. 

In the case of Quebec, it was never about going separate ways. It was, and still is, all about getting special privileges without earning them. Take language, for example. Every time I looked up what “culture” meant, it never included language. The two are related, yes, but they are not the same thing. Lots of countries share a common culture or civic identity without sharing a single language. Switzerland has four national languages. Belgium has three official languages. Spain has regional languages alongside Spanish. Yet each remains a distinct nation.

No, Quebec has always wanted the best that Canada had to offer without the associated costs. To do that, it has made extortion a science. I remember well when Maclean’s declared Quebec the most corrupt province in Canada. Quebec’s reputation for scandal did not come from nowhere. A couple of highlights from too long a list include the Charbonneau inquiry and the SNC-Lavalin scandal. The record speaks for itself.

So what was the result? The rest of Canada must kowtow to every Quebec demand. Want to work for the federal government? Too often, supervisory or management roles require fluency in both official languages, whether warranted or not. We have a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, as well as a Bill of Rights. Discrimination is supposedly not condoned, yet, thanks to Quebec being the main driver, it is.

You may be wondering why I bring this point forward. Sure, my last name is French in origin. My father spoke the Canadian dialect, but not at home. I am pretty adept at learning a lot of different things, but I have always struggled with language to the point that the only class I ever failed was French. For many years, I was embarrassed by that fact. Obviously, no longer, as I do not condone extortion, no matter the reasons given to try to legitimize it.

As for Alberta, I lived there for three years, and it left me with many positive memories. The beauty of the Rockies. The friendliness of the many people I met there, especially the drivers. To illustrate, soon after arriving in Edmonton to continue my education at the University of Alberta, my wife and I were standing on a street corner wondering where we should go next. We were not trying to cross, but standing back from the curb. Even so, drivers from both directions stopped to let us cross. We waved them off but appreciated the kindness given without demanding it. That was something we had not experienced back in Northwestern Ontario, where we had come from.

We bought our very first brand new automobile there, an early model Honda Civic. No sales tax to complicate the purchase. What was on the sign was what we paid. And our oldest son was born there and is now back in the province, as are several other family members. We loved Alberta then and still do.

Yet we left. Why, you may ask? Simply because the part of Northwestern Ontario where both my wife and I grew up is a place we love. We are on the north edge of Lake Superior. Lakes, rivers, and small streams abound. As does wildlife. I especially had, and still have, a passion for the outdoors. That is why I became a geologist. And where we live still provides us both with enjoyment. But at a cost.

Over the years, I have come to despise government overreach. It has pained me terribly to realize that Canada was built on a shaky foundation at best. As I described in my previous essay, The Divergent Paths of Liberty and Loyalty, I did not fully appreciate until recently how few real checks and balances Canada has against those determined to strip away rights and freedoms.

Many Canadians gripe about the Americans, but that is often jealousy, to borrow Heinlein’s phrase, “a symptom of neurotic insecurity.” I have never made it part of who I am to be insecure by refusing to acknowledge strengths and weaknesses, whether my own or those of others. I usually sit on the sidelines observing, analyzing, and processing what I see and hear. As a result, I have come to greatly admire the American Constitution and its related Bill of Rights, both designed to limit government.

Here in Canada, all we really have are limits on us. In practical terms, we do not truly own even land in the full sense people imagine. Yes, a person can hold a title. But use of that land remains subject to taxation, zoning, land-use controls, and expropriation powers. So when Canadians talk about ownership, they too often confuse possession with true control. 

For a long time, Canadians did not really have too many issues because those we elected usually at least tried to represent us, the people. But beginning, I would say, about fifty years ago, things started to change. Those in government did more and more to make themselves wealthy and place themselves above the law. At the same time, they enacted more and more legislation to take away what rights we felt were truly ours, freedom of speech and the right to protect oneself being two examples.

The American Constitution was built on one major concept: do not trust government, because in the hands of the wrong people, bad things can happen. That was based on a thorough study of history beginning with the origins of what is now called democracy. A system whereby citizens get to select who rules them by giving each person an equal vote. But a vote only has real value when the voter has skin in the game. If you have something to lose, you are more likely to pay attention and vote accordingly. If you have little or nothing at risk, then “free” becomes very appealing, especially when someone else will be forced to pay for it. That is how democracy becomes a tool for legalized plunder and, eventually, tyranny by the majority.

How do you protect yourself from that happening? By having checks and balances. In the United States, they have three primary branches of government: the executive, the legislative, and the judicial. Each is meant to keep the other two under control. Then there is another layer. The legislative branch is itself divided into two houses. One reflects popular majorities. The other gives the states, including smaller ones, a voice that can check the passions of the moment and the sheer weight of numbers. A bill must pass both houses. That is not perfect. Nothing designed by man is. But the Americans at least understood the danger and built checks on top of checks. 

As for meaningful checks on federal power in Canada, I cannot think of one. Yes, formally we have a Senate, but it is now too often a partisan rubber stamp. Legally, bills must still pass both the House of Commons and the Senate before receiving royal assent. In practice, the Senate has far too often served as cover rather than a real barrier when one was needed. 

The only true check we had was the Fifth Estate, the independent media. But that is, in essence, gone, as too much of it has allowed itself to become a bought-and-paid-for shield for whichever faction it chooses to favour.

That brings us back to Alberta, a province that is supposed to have jurisdiction over its own economy, natural resources, and education, to name three examples. Yet for far too long, the federal government has taken control where it should not. And what has there been to stop it? Nothing. 

As former US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter stated, “If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny.” That is uncomfortably close to the situation we now live in, where party machinery, cabinet discipline, and a Senate that too often falls into line leave far too much power concentrated in the hands of those few we have elected. 

Over the last decade, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms has proven to be a worthless piece of paper as a restraint against a determined government. Unlike the US Constitution, it does not limit what those in power can do. Instead, Section 1 tells the story of how our rights are subject to “reasonable limits.” But who gets to decide what is reasonable? The very system seeking power.  “Reasonable” is one of those weasel words that means whatever those in authority need it to mean at the time. Thus, in Canada, those who govern decide, and not we, the people. 

So, is Alberta justified in questioning the experiment in constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy? I believe so. Our system has no real internal restraints and far too many excuses for expanding central power.

There are three options available: fix the government in Canada, extricate oneself from Canada to form an independent country, or join the United States of America. The first is designed never to happen. The second is fraught with its own dangers. At least the third has a constitutional framework already established, and the US remains by far our largest trading partner. 

In short, if I were living in Alberta, I think you already know what I would do.

 

AUBUT: Two courts said Trudeau broke the law — will the Supreme Court let him get away with it?

 https://www.westernstandard.news/opinion/aubut-two-courts-said-trudeau-broke-the-law-will-the-supreme-court-let-him-get-away-with-it/72325

The Freedom Convoy may be gone, but the precedent set by the Emergencies Act invocation threatens every Canadian's right to protest.

 

Published March 30, 2026

 

In February 2022, the Canadian federal government made the historic decision to invoke the Emergencies Act for the first time since it was passed in 1988. That fact alone should have caused caution. This move was intended to provide the government with temporary, extraordinary powers to deal with protests in several locations across Canada that were causing significant disruptions, particularly in Ottawa. This was not an ordinary policing step. It was the use of extraordinary federal power against Canadians protesting federal policy. The convoy began in opposition to the vaccine mandate imposed on cross-border truckers and grew into a broader protest against pandemic restrictions and government overreach. All in an effort to get the attention of Ottawa and the ruling Liberal party. Whether one agreed with every tactic used or not, the grievance itself was political, public, and plainly directed at Ottawa. There was little public sign that Trudeau or his cabinet wanted to hear and answer the convoy’s grievances.

The contrast with Justin Trudeau’s treatment of other protests is hard to ignore. In June 2020, he joined an anti-racism protest on Parliament Hill and took a knee. During the Wet’suwet’en rail blockades that disrupted transport across Canada in 2020, he called for patience, dialogue, and mutual respect. Yet when the protest was aimed directly at his own government, the tone changed. Rather than negotiate, he thought it best to denounce.  Rather than being patient, he decided emergency power was warranted.

That contrast becomes even more serious when placed beside Canadian history. The Emergencies Act was enacted in 1988 to replace the old War Measures Act, which had been condemned as too broad and too dangerous to civil liberties. During the October Crisis of 1970, the FLQ kidnapped James Cross and Pierre Laporte, with Laporte eventually being murdered. That was a genuine campaign of political violence. Even then, the use of sweeping state power remained deeply controversial. Parliament later replaced the War Measures Act with the Emergencies Act precisely to prevent a repeat of that kind of overreach.

That is why the 2022 invocation remains so troubling. No comparable campaign of terror existed. There was disruption, obstruction, noise, and in some places, unlawful conduct. But after reviewing the record, both the Federal Court and the Federal Court of Appeal concluded that the government did not meet the legal threshold required to invoke the Act. In plain language, Ottawa used a law designed for true national emergencies in circumstances that did not lawfully justify it.

The legal challenge unfolded entirely within the Federal Court system. This is because the Emergencies Act is a federal law, and when citizens or organizations want to challenge a decision made by the federal government or its cabinet, they must go to the Federal Court, a court specifically designed to handle cases involving federal laws and the actions of federal officials.

The process began when several groups, including the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Canadian Constitution Foundation, filed for a judicial review. They argued that the government did not have a valid reason to use such extreme measures and that the situation did not meet the strict requirements set out in the law. They believed that the government’s actions were an overreach of power. The Attorney General argued that the protests were a serious threat to public order and national security. That was the government’s claim. But in a free country, allegations are not proof, especially when compared to the circumstances of the 1970 October Crisis. Canadians are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. The Cabinet did not need criminal convictions before acting. But it did need reasonable grounds to believe that the legal threshold in the Emergencies Act had been met. That is a lower standard than a criminal trial, yet it is still a real legal test. The government failed it. When the Emergencies Act was invoked on February 14, 2022, the government relied heavily on claims of threats and violence, especially from Coutts. Later criminal proceedings did not uphold the most serious allegations in the form first presented to the public. That does not mean nothing unlawful happened. It does mean the government acted on a picture that later proved less clear and less solid than first claimed.

Still, the real legal question was not whether the government could point to fear, tension, or isolated wrongdoing. It was whether the Cabinet had reasonable grounds to believe that a public order emergency existed and that ordinary laws were not enough. On January 23, 2024, Justice Richard Mosley ruled that the answer was no. The government appealed. 

The case was reviewed by the Federal Court of Appeal. The federal government argued that the initial ruling by Justice Mosley against them was based on a misunderstanding of the law. The Federal Court of Appeal does not hold a new trial where witnesses testify again; instead, a panel of judges reviews the written record and the legal arguments presented by both sides to determine if the lower court made a mistake in its legal reasoning. This process is essential because it allows for a higher level of scrutiny on whether the government acted within the strict boundaries set by Parliament when they created the Emergencies Act. If this court agreed with the original decision, the government's action would remain legally unreasonable; if they disagreed, they could overturn the lower court's ruling, which would then likely pave the way for a final appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. The Federal Court of Appeal did hear the federal government’s appeal and dismissed it on January 16. It confirmed that the invocation of the Emergencies Act was unreasonable, beyond the government’s legal authority, and that parts of the measures infringed sections 2(b) and 8 of the Charter.

That is what makes the next step so important. On March 17, the federal government sought leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. The Court must now decide whether this case needs another hearing after two lower courts have already ruled that the Act was used unlawfully. The argument for hearing it is simple: the Court may wish to give final guidance on the limits of emergency power. The argument against hearing it is just as simple: two courts have already drawn a clear line, and reopening the case risks weakening that line instead of strengthening it. 

Add to this the problem of appearance. In comments published on April 9, 2022, Chief Justice Richard Wagner described what happened on Wellington Street as “the beginning of anarchy” and said some people had decided to “take other citizens hostage” and “take the law into their own hands.” Those remarks do not decide the case on their own. But they do raise a fair question about whether the Court should be especially cautious in taking this appeal at all, and whether Wagner should sit on it if leave is granted. At the very least, the Court should avoid any step that makes Canadians think the result was decided before the hearing began. 

The issue is now plain. In Canada, people are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Allegations, rumours, and political fear are not enough. The old War Measures Act became a warning about what happens when a government reaches too quickly for extraordinary power. The Emergencies Act was supposed to be the lesson learned. It was supposed to impose restraint, raise the bar, and make sure that what happened in 1970 could not be repeated under a different name.

Yet in 2022, that line was crossed. Ottawa reached for a law meant for true national emergencies and used it against a political protest that two courts have now found did not meet the legal threshold. That is why this case matters far beyond one convoy, one prime minister, or one moment of national anger. If the safeguards written into the Emergencies Act can be pushed aside when they become inconvenient, then they are not safeguards at all. They are window dressing. The Supreme Court should not blur that line. It should leave it in place, because to do otherwise would be “An Act Too Far.”

 

AUBUT: A path forward - Canada’s ‘postnational’ experiment is failing

 https://www.westernstandard.news/opinion/aubut-a-path-forward-canadas-postnational-experiment-is-failing/71973

From Justin Trudeau’s identity vacuum to pandemic overreach, how Canada lost its cultural core and why restoring fairness and the rule of law is the only way back.

 

Published March 22, 2026

 

In December 2015, soon after becoming Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau described Canada to The New York Times Magazine as a “postnational” state, adding: “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.” He then pointed to shared values such as openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, and to pursue equality and justice. 

He intended that as praise, but for me, I heard it as a warning. There is no such thing as a country without a core identity, as that is what makes every country unique. Any country that has forgotten its culture or has been taught to be ashamed of it is in a dangerous condition because it leaves citizens unmoored and leaves institutions free to treat people as inputs to be managed rather than citizens to be served.

For most of my life, being Canadian meant something that needed no explanation. It meant kindness for others because in a hard country, decency is not optional. It meant cooperation because winter does not care about ideology. It meant strength and fortitude because distance and climate punish weakness. It meant a quiet confidence in law because fairness is the only authority that can hold a vast land together. No one was supposed to be above the law, and the law was supposed to embody fairness rather than serve as a tool of politics.

Those traits were not sentimental but the practical needs of our nation. Neighbours helped neighbours because they had to and because everyone was expected to carry their share. “Pay it forward” has obvious benefits in a hard land. You just never know when you will be the one needing help. When that expectation is present, kindness does not become naivety, and cooperation does not become coercion. It becomes mutual reliability, which is the true foundation of a free society.

If you want a cultural snapshot, think of the instinct Canadians once took for granted: when trouble hits, you help. Many Canadians saw that spirit captured in stories like Come From Away. It felt familiar because it was familiar. It matched what many of us were raised to believe about ourselves. You can debate whether we always lived up to that ideal, but the ideal mattered. It set a standard. It was who we were. It was core to being “Canadian.”

A key part of that standard was the rule of law. In the British tradition, law is supposed to bind rulers and ruled alike. Canada was not founded on revolution, but it was founded on the idea that lawful authority is legitimate only when it is restrained, fair, and accountable. That is why Canadians admired institutions that appeared to practice restraint and impartiality. When citizens believe the law is fair, they will accept hardships, disagreements, and even mistakes. When they believe the law is selective, legitimacy collapses quickly.

Canada’s political evolution has also always contained an unresolved tension between local life and distant power. Municipal government is the most responsive because consequences are immediate and visible. The provincial government is more distant but still tangible. Federal power, in a country as large as Canada, is the most remote and therefore the easiest place for unaccountability to hide. As the population has concentrated in a few large metropolitan regions, federal incentives have increasingly aligned with those regions, leaving many rural and smaller urban communities feeling ignored.

Until the 1990s, many Canadians still believed that, whatever our differences, the system broadly worked and broadly cared. The 1980s were hard economically, but hardship did not automatically breed cynicism. People endured because they believed the rules were still the rules and that effort still mattered. The 1990s changed the tone. Canadians began to notice that moral language was increasingly used to justify administrative control, and that important choices were being made in ways that felt insulated from ordinary accountability.

A concrete example of Canada’s incremental shift toward control is the firearms policy. Handguns have required registration in Canada since 1934, long before the current era. In 1995, the Liberal government passed Bill C-68, the Firearms Act, expanding licencing and requiring the registration of all firearms, including non-restricted long guns. The long-gun registry component was later repealed, but the 1995 moment still mattered symbolically because it signalled a widening assumption that citizens must be tracked and licenced, not merely governed by clear and equal law.

Where the downward slide became impossible to ignore for many Canadians was 2020. The COVID-19 period became a stress test of Canadian civic culture. Reasonable people can disagree about which public health measures were necessary, which were excessive, and which were mistakes made in real time. But there is a deeper issue that cannot be waved away: large numbers of Canadians came to believe that a fundamental line was crossed, and that the crossing was morally justified by officials and socially enforced by neighbours.

For clarity, I use the words “vaccine” and “vaccination” only in their older sense: a product that stimulates the immune response, is safe, and is effective. Where those criteria are not met, I will not use language that implies otherwise.

For decades, Canadians were told that bodily autonomy and personal choice are bedrock principles. Yet during the pandemic, vaccine status became a social sorting mechanism. Access to travel, employment, and ordinary participation was restricted for many people, and the moral justification often shifted from public health to moral condemnation. For those who declined “vaccination,” the experience was not simply a policy disagreement. It felt like purposeful targeting. It felt like a country that had abandoned its own ethic of fairness and had replaced it with permission to punish dissenters. For many citizens, that was the Rubicon moment. A line that should never have been crossed was crossed.

That rupture did not end when restrictions eased. Trust does not bounce back on command. Once a society learns that it can exclude a segment of its own citizens under the banner of safety or virtue, it has taught itself a habit that will be used again. The lesson is not that Canada became “fascist” overnight. The lesson is that a society can become comfortable with unequal treatment under the law, and then deny it happened.

The convoy and the federal response amplified this rupture. Again, reasonable people can differ on the protests themselves. But the legal and institutional aftermath is instructive. On February 17, 2023, the Public Order Emergency Commission released its final report and concluded that the threshold for invoking the Emergencies Act had been met. On January 23, 2024, the Federal Court ruled that there was no national emergency justifying the invocation of the Act, that the decision was unreasonable and ultra vires, and that certain measures infringed Charter rights. In law, the term ultra vires, meaning ‘beyond the powers,’ describes actions taken by the government outside the authority granted to it. In a system governed by the rule of law, even well-intentioned actions are invalid if the power to act was never lawfully granted.

On January 16, 2026, the Federal Court of Appeal dismissed the government’s appeal and upheld that the invocation was unreasonable and ultra vires, and that Charter infringements occurred.

Two things can be true at once. An inquiry can find that a government acted within a broad threshold, and courts can later find that the legal standard was not met and that rights were infringed. What matters for civic cohesion is what happens next. When citizens see extraordinary measures used, see courts find those measures unlawful, and then see no meaningful accountability or acknowledgement, trust corrodes further. The rule of law is not merely about winning a case. It is about the culture of restraint that prevents extraordinary powers from becoming normal tools.

This is the point at which many Canadians ask the hardest question: Can Canada still be saved, or have we gone too far?

There are Canadians, especially in regions that feel persistently ignored, who now argue that Canada is structurally beyond repair. They point to the dominance of Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver in federal outcomes, and to the reality that a critical mass of population and economic power is concentrated far from where many Canadians live and work. They argue that the distance between the governed and governors has become too large, and that the federation has become a machine that serves concentrated interests while using national unity language as cover.

That diagnosis should not be dismissed. But neither should the risks of disintegration. History offers examples of peaceful transformation and examples of violent fragmentation. A Velvet Revolution is possible when people share enough moral centre to demand change without turning neighbours into enemies. Balkanization becomes likely when politics collapses into competing identities and mutual suspicion. Canada’s best hope is to avoid both nihilistic fragmentation and coercive centralization by rebuilding a shared standard of fairness and responsibility.

So what is the path between where we are and where we need to be?

It begins with the recovery of culture, not as ethnicity or ideology, but as civic ethic. Canada does have a culture. It is the ethic of kindness joined to responsibility, cooperation joined to independence, and law joined to fairness. If Canadians stop believing that ethics is real, the country becomes only an administrative zone. If Canadians recover it, the country becomes governable again.

Restoration requires four practical commitments.

First, restore equal application of the law. Not a perfect law, but a law that is visibly impartial and binds those who wield it. Selective enforcement and double standards are poison in a large country. If citizens believe rules apply only to the governed, they will withdraw their consent.

Second, restore subsidiarity. Decisions should be made as close as possible to the people affected. This is not an argument for chaos. It is an argument for accountability. The closer the government is to citizens, the harder it is for officials to hide behind abstractions, and the easier it is for citizens to see and influence outcomes.

Third, restore dignity through responsibility. Compassion is not the removal of burden. It is the provision of fair conditions under which people can carry it. A society that replaces responsibility with dependency does not become kinder. It becomes resentful, brittle, and easily manipulated.

Fourth, restore a Canadian story that is honest and usable. Not propaganda, not shame, but a narrative that explains why a hard country required mutual reliability, why the rule of law mattered, and why fairness was once understood as the precondition for peace.

If Canadians can do these things, Canada can be saved without destroying itself. If Canadians cannot do these things, then the pressure for radical options will grow, whether anyone wants that or not. The choice is not between comfort and change. The choice is between deliberate reform and eventual rupture.

The first step is the same step any recovering alcoholic must take: admit the problem. Canada’s problem is not that we disagree. Canada’s problem is that we no longer share a standard of fairness and restraint that makes disagreement survivable. The path forward is to restore that standard, and with it, to restore belief in ourselves.

 

AUBUT: The province without treaties — how BC broke Canada’s land compact

 https://www.westernstandard.news/opinion/aubut-the-province-without-treaties-how-bc-broke-canadas-land-compact/71915

A century of delay, judge‑made law, and political avoidance have left BC at the breaking point of Canada’s promise of legal and territorial certainty.

 

Published March 18, 2026 

 

British Columbia sits at the sharpest edge of Canada’s unfinished land question. Much of the rest of the country moved, however imperfectly, through treaties that exchanged claims of title for reserves, annuities, harvesting rights, and later modern agreements. BC largely did not. Its historic treaties were limited mainly to the 14 Douglas Treaties on parts of Vancouver Island and Treaty 8 in the northeast. The result was a province with reserve lands but, in most places, without the wider territorial settlement that treaties elsewhere were meant to provide. Delay, uncertainty, and litigation followed, where a more orderly settlement might have been possible.

The lack of treaties in BC was not simply an accident. Treaty-making did not continue after 1854, and the colonial government under Joseph Trutch moved away from James Douglas’s earlier approach. Historical summaries from federal and provincial sources acknowledge that BC was unwilling to recognize First Nations land rights in the broader way adopted elsewhere, while Trutch reduced reserve lands and denied Aboriginal Title. The consequence was that BC continued to create reserves while avoiding the larger question of territorial settlement.

It also explains why reserves in BC cannot be taken as proof that the title was resolved. For most of the province, reserves were not created by treaty. The Indian Act defines a reserve as land vested in the Crown and set apart for the use and benefit of a band. In BC, the constitutional basis after Confederation was Article 13 of the Terms of Union, and the Supreme Court has described reserve creation there as a federal-provincial process requiring Crown intention and practical steps. Reserve creation and treaty settlement were separate matters. BC pursued the former while postponing the latter.

I am a geologist, not a lawyer, and I do not live in British Columbia. That does not place these questions beyond my reach. It means I have had to approach them the way I approach any difficult subject: by asking questions, following the evidence, and trying to understand how the present situation came to be. One question in particular has stayed with me for years. Why does British Columbia, unlike so much of the rest of Canada, have so few treaties and so little to show for more than a century of delay in resolving that fact?

Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 changed the legal terrain by recognizing and affirming existing Aboriginal and treaty rights, but it did not define them in operational terms. Much of the working law was then developed by the courts. Canadian common law allows judges to develop doctrine through precedent, and that is what occurred with fiduciary duty, honour of the Crown, and the duty to consult. Those phrases do not appear in section 35 itself. The Supreme Court developed them through cases such as Guerin, Sparrow, Haida, and Mikisew. In legal method, that is, common-law development. In political terms, it means that much of the machinery now governing land, consultation, and reconciliation was judicially constructed rather than clearly enacted by legislators.

The present conflict in BC is where that unfinished history meets modern judge-made doctrine. In August 2025, the BC Supreme Court in Cowichan Tribes v. Canada recognized Aboriginal Title over about 732 acres in southeast Richmond. Richmond described the ruling as placing Aboriginal Title ahead of fee simple ownership, and legal summaries note that the court rejected the argument that Crown grants of fee simple had permanently displaced Aboriginal Title. Instead, the court treated Aboriginal Title and fee simple as capable of coexisting, though not without tension, and left reconciliation to be worked out where they conflict.

That matters because fee simple has long been treated as the strongest ordinary private estate in land. BC’s Property Law Act says land remains an estate in fee simple in the owner, and the Land Title Act says an indefeasible title is conclusive evidence that the registered owner is entitled to an estate in fee simple, subject to listed exceptions. Fee simple is not imaginary, but neither is it absolute. It exists under statute, under the Crown grant, and under the possibility of expropriation or overriding constitutional limits. The Cowichan ruling tests whether an ordinary registered title can remain untouched when an Aboriginal Title claim succeeds over the same land.

BC’s long failure to settle title has therefore become a conflict among multiple rights-holders, not simply between indigenous claimants and the Crown. Richmond appealed. Tsawwassen First Nation also appealed, arguing that the ruling affected land and fishing areas within its own treaty and traditional territory. Then, on February 20, 2026, Canada and Musqueam signed agreements intended to recognize Musqueam’s rights and title within Musqueam territory and deepen Musqueam’s role in fisheries and stewardship. Within days, Squamish and Tsawwassen objected that the materials appeared to overlap with their own territories or treaty lands. Once the title is recognized incrementally, bilaterally, and without comprehensive settlement of overlaps, an advance for one group is easily seen as a threat by another.

Government delay has compounded this problem. Canada and BC have long acknowledged that treaties are the main instrument for achieving certainty, yet BC has reached very few of them relative to the scale of unresolved claims. Canada’s comprehensive claims policy since 1973 has aimed at certainty in ownership, use, and management of lands and resources. The made-in-BC treaty process began in 1992 for the same reason. Governments have known for decades what the problem was.

This is also the setting in which equal citizenship becomes harder to describe in simple terms. Canada now operates with differentiated legal regimes. Reserve lands are held by the Crown for the use and benefit of bands rather than in ordinary fee simple by individual residents. Aboriginal and treaty rights are constitutionally protected in ways that ordinary property rights are not. Some modern treaty nations have moved beyond parts of the reserve framework into treaty settlement lands and self-government structures, while others remain under the Indian Act. Those differences are real and substantial, and they are increasingly difficult to reconcile with a single understanding of citizenship, property, and jurisdiction.

That tension has been sharpened further in British Columbia by the province’s adoption of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act in 2019. The Legislature did not literally transfer law-making authority to the United Nations, but it did require the provincial government to take measures to align BC laws with the UN Declaration, and it authorized agreements involving joint statutory decision-making and, in some cases, indigenous consent before certain statutory powers are exercised. BC has therefore chosen to use an international declaration as a framework for provincial law and policy. That raises a serious question about democratic accountability and about how much authority a province should anchor in standards developed outside Canada’s own legislative process.

The harder question is what fairness now requires. It cannot mean pretending the problem does not exist. It also cannot mean allowing governments or courts to proceed with one bilateral arrangement at a time while neighbouring First Nations, third-party owners, and municipalities are left to guess at the legal effect. A fair path forward would require an honest recognition that BC left title broadly unsettled, a comprehensive process for dealing with overlapping claims before recognition instruments are signed, statutory rules for the treatment of good-faith fee simple owners who acquired land under the ordinary land-title system, and movement away from indefinite reserve dependency toward clearer local accountability, whether through modern treaties, self-government arrangements, or other legislated structures that define ownership, jurisdiction, taxation, and services in plain terms. The objective should be certainty.

Has Canada backed itself into a corner? To a degree, yes. Section 35 cannot be altered by ordinary legislation, and Parliament cannot broadly amend the Constitution on its own. At the same time, the courts have built doctrines around section 35 that governments now treat as operational law. There is therefore no simple legislative exit. That does not make a solution impossible, but it does mean the solution must be political, legislative, and negotiated. Comprehensive settlements, legislation clarifying the effect of title recognition on third-party interests, and a willingness to confront overlapping claims before they become crises would all be part of any serious response.

The sovereignty issue should also be stated accurately. King Charles III is not Canada’s head of state as the sovereign of Great Britain. He is the King of Canada. Canada’s difficulty is not foreign rule. It is domestic constitutional coherence. A country can live with unresolved tensions for a long time, but not indefinitely if land ownership, jurisdiction, consultation, title, and competing indigenous claims remain unsettled in major regions.

That is the central point. BC’s refusal to settle the title did not remove the issue. It deferred it. The courts later gave legal force to unresolved claims, but without creating a comprehensive settlement mechanism. The conflict is no longer abstract. It affects fee simple owners, municipalities, ports, resource projects, treaty nations, non-treaty nations, and overlapping claimants. A just path forward is still possible, but only if Canada stops treating reserve creation as though it settled title, stops relying on courts to finish what governments declined to do, and treats certainty in land and jurisdiction as a national necessity rather than an indefinitely postponed task.

 

AUBUT: When ideology replaces truth, persecution follows

  https://www.westernstandard.news/opinion/aubut-when-ideology-replaces-truth-persecution-follows/70636

The enemy-making instinct behind totalitarianism, cancel culture, and political violence.

 

Published on: 

25 Jan 2026

 

Every ideology that seeks to reorganize society from above must identify an enemy. This is not a rhetorical accessory. It is the structural requirement of all collectivist systems. A population cannot be unified under a single project unless it becomes convinced that someone stands in the way. The enemy provides focus, urgency, and emotional fuel. Without one, the ideology loses its ability to demand obedience. With one, it can suppress dissent, justify coercion, and claim moral necessity. As with a poisoned apple, the poison works only when the apple is held high enough to be admired and the enemy is held low enough to be despised, such that the victim willingly bites the treacherous fruit.

The pattern is embedded in political history. Those who hold out the poisoned apple present themselves as caring and empathic while hiding convictions built on shaky moralizing. Lenin blamed the failures of Russia on “class enemies” and insisted that any resistance to Bolshevik rule proved that the saboteur class still lurked in the countryside. Stalin transformed entire groups into targets through manufactured labels such as “kulak,” a word that originally described relatively prosperous farmers but soon expanded to include anyone the state wished to punish. Mao condemned broad categories of citizens as “rightists,” “bourgeois elements,” or “counterrevolutionaries.” These terms were intentionally vague. Their purpose was not accuracy but flexibility. A regime that governs through ideological purity needs the ability to criminalize anyone who challenges its narrative.

Hitler’s system operated on the same logic. Jews became the universal explanation for every German problem. They were blamed for inflation, unemployment, moral decline, and military defeat despite the lack of causal links. Once the narrative took hold, evidence no longer mattered. The enemy had been identified. The regime did the rest. Pol Pot exemplified the pattern in its most brutal form. His government’s defining belief was that Cambodia needed to be purified by eliminating educated and urban people. The result was a genocide conducted by untrained zealots who viewed intelligence as treason. The enemy was not discovered. It was designed.

The mechanism has not changed in the modern era, even if the vocabulary has. Some political movements that describe themselves as progressive or humanitarian use the word “Nazi” not as a historical category but as a rhetorical weapon, a slang term for National Socialist perverted to imply the opposite. The aim is to convert disagreement into moral crisis. Once someone is defined as a Nazi, there is no need to listen. There is only a need to act. The insistence that all political opponents are fascists or extremists is not an accident. It is a strategy that makes persuasion unnecessary and violence permissible. It is the contemporary form of Orwell’s two minutes of hate. The target shifts, but the instinct does not.

This dynamic exists because collectivist ideologies function on emotion rather than argument. Emotion requires contrast. Narratives require villains. Images and symbols travel faster than facts. A movement framed as a moral struggle can justify policies that would otherwise be indefensible. It can label censorship as protection, repression as compassion, and force as justice. What begins as a campaign for fairness transforms into a crusade against those who stand in the way of fairness. The motives may sound noble, but the results are destructive. The poison is effective precisely because it tastes sweet.

Free societies do not operate on this foundation. They rely on institutions that assume disagreement. Parliament exists to mediate conflict. The courts exist to apply the law impartially. Markets exist to coordinate decisions that no government could possibly centralize. A free press exists to expose mistakes. The entire structure of a democratic republic is based on the premise that no group holds a monopoly on truth. The common good emerges from balancing competing interests, not eliminating them. This is why free societies rarely produce organized political violence. They have mechanisms that allow disagreement without destruction.

Collectivist systems cannot tolerate this. They require unity but cannot obtain it voluntarily. The state must therefore identify those who obstruct progress. Once this begins, the logic becomes self-reinforcing. Criticism becomes disloyalty. Dissent becomes sabotage. Skepticism becomes complicity. The ability of a society to correct its own errors is slowly replaced by the political need to preserve the narrative. The poison spreads because it feels righteous. Few recognise the danger until it is too late.

This psychology has resurfaced in various forms across the modern world. The convergence between radical Islamist movements and segments of the contemporary left provides a current illustration. Both define their identity by opposition. For both, the Jews once again serve as the universal scapegoat. This is not because of any coherent political programme but because the Jewish example undermines key ideological claims. Ashkenazi Jews, in particular, have a long history of academic and professional achievement. Their success contradicts the narrative that all inequality stems from oppression. In collectivist frameworks, counterexamples cannot be tolerated. They must be redefined as enemies or removed from view.

This is why competence becomes a threat in collectivist systems. People with expertize undermine ideological certainty. They expose flaws and reveal falsehoods. They provide evidence that contradicts slogans. Consequently, they are among the first to be targeted when ideological purification begins. The Soviet Union imprisoned engineers and scientists who challenged unrealistic quotas. China humiliated teachers who resisted indoctrination. Cambodia murdered people who wore glasses, spoke French, or displayed signs of education. The presence of intelligence was viewed as proof of treason. When ideology governs, truth is the enemy.

It is a mistake to assume this behaviour requires clinical pathology. No political movement relies on a population of psychopaths. It relies on ordinary human traits that exist in all societies. Ambition, envy, and resentment provide the emotional catalysts. Moral certainty provides the justification. Centralized power provides the mechanism. When these traits combine within a system that rewards ideological loyalty over competence, outcomes become predictable. Collective violence becomes an expression of collective virtue. The poison flows through the social bloodstream because people believe it is good for them.

The free society erodes when this process becomes normalized. The change is rarely immediate. It begins with small concessions. People adjust their language to avoid censure. Institutions alter their priorities to avoid controversy. Laws are interpreted through new moral categories. Public debate becomes ritualized. Emotional narratives replace evidence. The enemy-making process becomes routine. The apple looks even more appealing. By the time the poison takes effect, society has lost the ability to recognize what has happened.

This is the core reason why collectivism, in all its forms, cannot coexist with sustained liberty. The issue is not only economics or governance. It is psychology. Systems that require unity must impose it. Systems that impose unity must identify an enemy. And once an enemy is identified, the logic of repression becomes unavoidable. The poison becomes the point.

The path forward begins with recognition. A society must first understand the mechanism before it can resist it. Citizens must recognize when they are being encouraged to hate abstract groups rather than examine concrete issues. They must notice when slogans replace arguments and when moral language is used to silence debate. They must see that unity built on hostility corrodes every institution that depends on trust. A society that identifies the poison can avoid biting the apple. A society that refuses to see the poison will eventually lose the freedom to choose.

There is no single solution that can be imposed from above. The antidote to collectivist psychology cannot be administered by decree. It emerges from a return to the habits that sustain a free society. Truth must be allowed to challenge fashionable narratives. Debate must be protected even when uncomfortable. Institutions must be led by people chosen for competence rather than ideology. Law must restrain authority rather than empower it. Citizens must be encouraged to think rather than instructed to obey. These disciplines preserve self-government.

The first step is always the same. A society must recognise the enemy-making instinct and refuse to accept it. Only then can an appropriate plan be formulated. Only then can a free society remain free.

 

 

AUBUT: The divergent paths of liberty and loyalty, comparing America and Canada

https://www.westernstandard.news/opinion/aubut-the-divergent-paths-of-liberty-and-loyalty-comparing-america-and-canada/69949 

 How Canada chose order over freedom and became a nation of subjects while America became a republic.

 

Published on: 04 Jan 2026

The year 1629 marks the quiet divide that determined the fates of two nations. In the south, the English colonies that became the United States were founded by literate settlers who sought not comfort but freedom. They brought with them the conviction that faith and conscience were their own, that government was to be distrusted and restrained, and that their destiny depended on their own labour and judgment. 

North of that line, what would become Canada was conceived in commerce, not conviction. It existed first as a marketplace for fur, fish, and timber — chartered, regulated, and owned by monarchs and monopolies. The difference was moral before it was political. One society was founded by independent minds; the other by indentured hands.

The Hudson’s Bay Company, granted its royal charter in 1670, made Rupert’s Land a commercial empire under a single corporate crown. Its men were employees, not citizens. Theirs was a world of ledgers, not legislatures. The French voyageurs and coureurs de bois who roamed the interior were hardy and self-reliant, yet politically neutered — subjects of the clergy and traders alike. 

Education, debate, and self-government were not their concerns. Their independence was physical, not philosophical. The contrast with New England could not have been greater. By 1636, Harvard College was already training a new generation of Puritans in theology, logic, and self-rule. The seeds of a republic were sown in classrooms; Canada’s future was measured in pelts and cargo.

This divide finds its philosophical reflection in the English thinkers who framed the modern West. Thomas Hobbes, writing in 1651, envisioned the state as a Leviathan — a necessary monster that protected men from chaos at the cost of their liberty. Order required submission; survival demanded obedience. John Locke answered him a generation later with a vision of natural rights: life, liberty, and property as gifts not of the state but of the Creator, and therefore beyond repeal. Adam Smith completed the trinity by explaining how the invisible hand of voluntary exchange could order society more justly than any government decree. 

The American colonies internalized Locke and Smith; Canada absorbed Hobbes. The result was predictable. The United States built a constitutional republic where power flowed from the people upward. Canada built a managed colony where authority flowed from the Crown down.

The American Revolution was not simply a tax revolt. It was the political expression of literacy and faith in self-government. When the colonists declared independence in 1776, they invoked Locke’s philosophy almost verbatim: that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Canadians, by contrast, remained bound to the idea that legitimacy flowed from monarchy, not from men. The Quebec Act of 1774, which allowed the Catholic clergy to retain its authority in exchange for loyalty to the British crown, sealed that bargain. While Americans fought for liberty, French Canada traded obedience for stability. When the loyalists fled north after the war, they reinforced the habit of deference. The fusion of French clerical control and English loyalism became Canada’s political DNA — a society that prized order, conformity, and politeness above individual conviction.

This heritage shaped not only politics but culture. Where the American mythos celebrated the rebel and the pioneer, Canada’s national symbols praised diligence and virtue within bounds. The beaver became the emblem of a people industrious, compliant, and cooperative. The Mountie — epitomized by the cartoon figure Dudley Do-Right — embodied honesty, kindness, and service to authority. 

These were admirable qualities, but they were the virtues of servants, not citizens. Canadians once took pride in them, seeing in such characters their own decency. Only later did it become clear that these traits, left unbalanced by a spirit of liberty, form the psychological foundation of a managed state.

Over time, both nations drifted from their origins. The United States, despite its revolutionary birth, allowed the creeping advance of bureaucracy and collectivism. Canada, never having known a revolution, mistook government management for moral progress.

Socialism took root by redefining compassion as compulsion. It promised a classless society but delivered a uniform one — equal only in dependence. Canada embraced this earlier and more completely than its southern neighbour, dressing the old Crown paternalism in modern bureaucratic language. Free enterprise survived, but only as a licenced privilege. The state decided who could build, who could sell, and who could speak.

The pattern is as old as Hobbes’s Leviathan and as predictable as Smith’s invisible hand. When power centralizes, the hand disappears, and coercion replaces consent. The socialist ideal claims to elevate the collective, but it merely replaces the priest with the planner and the monarch with the minister. The moral inversion is complete when labour itself becomes property of the state. Canadians are told they “own” their labour, yet nearly half of its fruit is confiscated before it reaches their hands. Property ownership, too, is an illusion: under Crown law, all land is held in “fee simple,” a perpetual lease from the sovereign. The Magna Carta promised that even the king was subject to the law, but in Canada that principle stops at Parliament’s door. Legislators stand above the rules they impose. The law binds the governed, not the governors.

This condition is not fascism in the cinematic sense — there are no jackboots in Ottawa — but it meets Mussolini’s definition precisely: “Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism, because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” That merger defines modern Canada. Its banks, media, and energy sectors function as extensions of government policy. Its universities echo official ideology. Its elections change the faces but never the fundamentals. The parties differ in slogans but share a conviction that the citizen exists to be managed. Canadians mistake civility for freedom because they have never had to fight for either.

Ayn Rand, writing from the vantage point of exile, warned that socialism is the politics of envy disguised as virtue — the systematic sharing of misery. Her prophecy has been realised not only in the obvious failures of Marxist states but in the slow suffocation of societies that thought themselves immune. Canada’s bureaucratic socialism is more polite than Soviet communism but no less corrosive. It rewards conformity, punishes excellence, and flatters dependency. The bureaucrat becomes the new aristocrat, immune from consequence and rich in moral pretence. The citizen, conditioned to gratitude, confuses servitude for security.

The United States, for all its flaws, still contains remnants of its Lockean soul — a reflexive suspicion of authority and a belief that rights are inherent, not granted. Yet even there the infection spreads. The welfare state, born of compassion, now breeds resentment. The Leviathan that Hobbes envisioned to keep men safe from each other has re-emerged in digital form, watching, measuring, and managing in the name of safety. Both societies now stand at a crossroads where freedom survives only in rhetoric. Canadians have reached that point first because their political structure was designed for it. When you begin as subjects, you end as managed assets.

A truly democratic society requires more than ballots. It requires that those who vote bear the cost and consequence of their decisions. Locke’s concept of property was not merely material — it was moral. Ownership confers responsibility; responsibility produces restraint. When those without stake outnumber those with, democracy becomes an auction of stolen goods. Adam Smith’s invisible hand ceases to function because the market is no longer voluntary; it is coerced through taxation and regulation. 

Socialism thrives in that soil because it promises equality through the redistribution of responsibility. The result is predictable: the capable withdraw, the incapable demand more, and the state expands to mediate the misery it created.

Canada illustrates this with clinical precision. Its citizens, convinced of their moral superiority to the brash Americans, have allowed the state to absorb every function once left to families, churches, and associations. The promise of universal welfare has produced universal dependency. The child is raised by bureaucrats, the elder sustained by subsidies, and the worker trapped by taxes. The reward for honesty and diligence — the very traits once celebrated in the national character — is to subsidize the indolence of others. The invisible hand has been shackled, and the Leviathan smiles.

Yet none of this was inevitable. The same human capacity for self-government that built one half of the continent exists in the other. The difference lies in what each society chose to believe about itself. Americans, at least at their founding, believed they were free men capable of governing themselves. Canadians believed they were good men who needed to be governed. That single assumption still defines the boundary between liberty and loyalty.

Today both nations stand in moral debt to their own origins. The American experiment survives only so long as its people remember that freedom is not granted by law but limited by it. Canada will remain trapped in the Crown’s shadow until its citizens reclaim the spirit of Magna Carta and apply it not to kings but to their modern equivalents in government, media, and bureaucracy. The lesson is eternal: when authority ceases to be answerable to those it governs, it becomes tyranny — whether draped in robes, uniforms, or business suits.

The hope, faint but real, is that enough Canadians will rediscover what freedom actually means. It is not the right to obey different masters every four years, but the refusal to be mastered at all. The path back begins where it always has — with truth spoken plainly, property defended fiercely, and government restrained ruthlessly. Anything less is submission by another name.

Alan Aubut is a retired geologist, based in Nipigon.

 

 

AUBUT: Trudeau, Freeland, and Carney turned credentials, identity, and symbolism into substitutes for governing competence

https://www.westernstandard.news/opinion/aubut-trudeau-freeland-and-carney-turned-credentials-identity-and-symbolism-into-substitutes-for-governing-competence/69817

 The death of merit and how Canada lost its compass.

 

Published on: 26 Dec 2025

  

The decline of merit is the story of modern Canada. It began as a slow corrosion under Justin Trudeau, whose rise was fuelled by name recognition and emotional politics rather than achievement. It deepened under Chrystia Freeland, who turned fiscal management into performance art. And it has continued under Mark Carney, whose credentials might suggest competence but whose actions have proven the opposite. These are not isolated examples; they are milestones on a national journey away from merit and toward mediocrity.

Meritocracy is not a privilege but a safeguard. It ensures that those entrusted with power can understand and manage the systems that sustain a country. In the private sector, failure leads to replacement; the incompetent are fired, not re-elected. In politics, failure now often leads to promotion. A government cabinet should resemble a company’s board of directors — people with relevant skills able to provide the guidance needed for success, not failure. A functioning democracy depends on one principle above all: that responsibility should be earned, not gifted, and that credentials without competence are as dangerous as charisma without integrity.

Trudeau’s tenure marked the point where Canada began to confuse representation with qualification. His vision of a cabinet “that looks like Canada” was framed as progressive but in truth marked a rejection of merit as the standard for leadership. Diversity of identity replaced diversity of thought. In practice, appointments were made not to balance skill but to project inclusivity. The results were predictable: ministers unable to defend their portfolios, unprepared to handle crises, and uninterested in learning. Policy was replaced by messaging; economics by emotion. Canada’s productivity stagnated, debt ballooned, and the federal bureaucracy expanded without direction. Trudeau’s personal background — thin, theatrical, and devoid of economic or managerial experience — set the tone for an administration that treated governance as an extension of performance.

Chrystia Freeland’s rise within that system symbolised the triumph of narrative over knowledge. A journalist by training, with no formal education in economics or finance, she inherited the most demanding portfolio in government. Her experience in storytelling became a substitute for technical skill. A nation’s budget was treated as a moral tale rather than a balance sheet. Deficits were reframed as “investments,” and fiscal restraint as cruelty. The result was a sustained pattern of overspending that eroded competitiveness and tied the central bank’s hands. During the pandemic, Freeland’s ministry blurred the line between fiscal and monetary policy to the point that the Bank of Canada became a financier of government priorities. Inflation — predictable and predicted — followed.

Freeland’s defenders argue that she is intelligent and articulate, which may be true. But intelligence is not expertise, and articulation is not understanding. Her tenure revealed the cost of political appointments untethered from meritocratic principles. The Finance Minister’s job demands analytical rigour, quantitative discipline, and a grasp of trade, credit, and capital markets. It is not an internship in storytelling. Freeland’s decisions reflected ideological alignment with Trudeau, not economic competence. Canada’s debt load, productivity decline, and regulatory paralysis were symptoms of a government that did not understand how economies grow.

Mark Carney’s ascent was supposed to be the correction — the moment when expertise returned to Ottawa. On paper, he is the ideal candidate: a Ph.D. in economics, former governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, and a veteran of international finance. In practice, his leadership has been technocratic, insulated, and disappointingly familiar. He inherited the Trudeau playbook and followed it faithfully. His government continues to expand spending beyond revenue, entrench overregulation, and subordinate private enterprise to ideological compliance. For all his credentials, Carney has governed like a bureaucrat, not a reformer. His approach to trade, particularly with the United States, has been reactive and ineffectual. His handling of Canada’s fiscal imbalance shows the same disregard for market reality that defined his predecessor’s tenure.

The irony is sharp: a man trained in economics appears not to grasp its simplest law — that prosperity cannot be decreed. Regulation without productivity, spending without growth, and taxation without restraint lead inevitably to decline. Carney’s government has doubled down on the regulatory burdens strangling Canada’s resource sectors, from forestry to energy to mining. These industries once anchored the national economy. Now they are treated as environmental liabilities rather than strategic assets, killing the golden geese that sustained prosperity. The result is visible in stagnating investment, job losses, and regional alienation. An economist who understood comparative advantage would work to restore competitiveness, not bury it under red tape.

What unites Trudeau, Freeland, and Carney is not ideology but detachment from consequence. None have been required to live by the results of their decisions. Trudeau was insulated by privilege, Freeland by narrative, Carney by institutional pedigree. Each rose through systems that rewarded image, loyalty, or credentialism — not performance. Their governance reflects that insulation. Canada is ruled by people who have never had to run a business, balance a budget, or endure the market consequences of failure. Without that grounding, abstract ideals replace empirical judgment.

A true meritocracy selects for competence, not conformity. It does not ask what a person looks like or believes but what they can do. Its test is objective: performance. Canada once upheld that standard. Its civil service, universities, and industries were led by people who earned authority through results. That ethos produced both prosperity and stability. But over the past generation, merit has been redefined as privilege, and excellence treated as exclusion. The result is a governing class that apologizes for success while mismanaging the very institutions that once embodied it.

Reversing this decline requires more than new leaders; it requires new rules. Merit must be measurable. Cabinet appointments should be subject to objective qualification reviews, including professional and academic assessments relevant to their portfolios — much like the rigorous vetting process required for US cabinet nominees. Public accountability must shift from rhetoric to results, with clear, quantifiable performance metrics for ministers and departments. Parliament must reclaim legislative authority from the courts by defining, in law, the boundaries of judicial interpretation. The bureaucracy must be downsized—not for ideology’s sake but to restore responsiveness and competence.

The private sector can no longer be treated as an enemy. Economic sustainability depends on productive capacity, not moral posturing. Canada’s resource industries, once the foundation of its wealth, have been throttled by regulation justified under the guise of “sustainability.” In practice, this has meant exporting opportunity while importing energy, moralizing at home while investing abroad. A government grounded in merit would distinguish environmental stewardship from ideological paralysis. It would recognize that only prosperous societies can afford to protect nature, and that growth and conservation are not enemies but partners when governed by reason.

The re-establishment of merit also requires cultural change. Citizens must again expect competence, not charisma, from those who seek power. Elections must become contests of ability, not contests of identity. That will not happen until voters themselves value knowledge and discipline as civic virtues. The decay of political literacy has enabled the rise of leaders who cannot lead. Rebuilding a culture of meritocracy means rebuilding a public that demands it.

Some may point to Canada’s courts or indigenous policy as separate examples of the same drift. Judicial activism has expanded constitutional principles like “the Honour of the Crown” beyond their legal origins, creating parallel systems of entitlement unmoored from accountability. These are not isolated judicial errors but symptoms of the same failure of governance. When legislatures abdicate their duties to define policy clearly, judges fill the vacuum. The result is the same: power without accountability, decisions without measurable success.

Meritocracy is not elitism. It is fairness in its truest form — the assurance that opportunity follows ability, and that leadership is earned, not inherited or imposed. It is the antidote to both the tyranny of ideology and the chaos of populism. Canada cannot rebuild its economy, its institutions, or its unity without rediscovering that truth.

Just as the Leviathan in myth was meant to guard the depths but eventually turned on them, so too has the modern state grown from protector to predator. Hobbes’s artificial man was built for security, yet through its swelling power it now resembles the dragon from which it once promised shelter. The creature that once guarded order now devours it.

But dragons can be slain, or at least tamed, by citizens who remember that government is their servant, not their master. Restoring merit is the first step in reclaiming that order. Canada’s decline is reversible, but only if its people insist that competence once again be the measure of authority.

When nations forget that principle, decline is inevitable. When they remember it, renewal begins. Canada still has that choice. It is time to make it.

Alan Aubut is a retired geologist, based in Nipigon.