Links - 2nd April 2026 (2 - Pro-Crime Policies: Ukrainian Refugee Iryna Zarutska)

Meme - ""Don't let kids talk about Hitler or else..."
"Or else what?"
"Or else we'll keep releasing schizophrenic lifelong criminals onto the street to kill female white war refugees"
"You'll keep doing that anyway, which is why the kids are talking about Hitler""
"CAREFUL! I GRADUATED FROM REDDIT UNIVERSITY"
PoliMath: "Here is the thing... and I genuinely need conservatives to listen when I say this: When you protect coddled little idiots who joke about Hitler, you are putting people like Iryna in more danger"

The Free Press on X - "Psychiatrist Sally Satel explains why she believes the execution of the schizophrenic man who stabbed a Ukrainian refugee on a train would be an act of cruelty, not justice."
pagliacci the grinch 🎄🎁 on X - "no one who believes this shit can ever explain why these “schizophrenic men” always seem to exclusively target the tiniest women in their proximity. why don’t their “delusions” ever tell them to attack, say, a black man their own size"

Why did nobody? : r/TeenagersButBetter - "Partly because she wasn’t killed by the state, and afaik her killer was brought to justice"
"Technically she was killed by the state. Her killer was spared from prison multiple times by a state appointed judge who helped facilitate the states failed policies."
"Yeah that much different than state officials killing her directly. That's like saying that mass shooting victims were killed by the state because the police ingoned red flag laws against the shooter."
"Nope?... I see the connection but a kid being edgy at school and a person having 10+ cases of breaking the law are WAY different when it comes to being noticable. And it's COMPLETELY the State's job to protect it's people."

Laura Loomer on X - "EXCLUSIVE:  🚨Teresa Stokes, the magistrate judge who let career criminal DeCarlos Brown Jr. walk free before he violently slaughtered Iryna Zarutska in North Carolina, sold chicken wings to drug addicts in 2021 before becoming a DEI magistrate judge in April 2023.🚨   Mecklenburg County Magistrate Judge Teresa Stokes, the DEI Shaniqua magistrate judge who released DeCarlos Brown Jr., the feral career criminal, in January 2025, who was caught on video viciously murdering Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on the Charlotte, NC light rail train last month, sold chicken wings before she became a judge. @LoomerUnleashed  has uncovered an old news clip about Teresa Stokes and her chicken wings.   See video below 👇🏻   Perhaps she should have focused on selling chicken wings instead of unleashing dangerous predators back into our society.  Magistrate Judge and fried chicken restaurateur Teresa Stokes, co-owner of Wing Heaven Sports Haven, openly admitted in a March 15, 2021 interview in Lansing, Michigan with FOX 47 to losing a brother and a nephew to drug addiction in 2020, revealing a clear bias for those struggling with substance abuse—and her statements suggest she extends excessive compassion to such individuals, perhaps too much so in the case of DeCarlos Brown Jr.  Wing Heaven Sports Haven described itself online as a “sober and recovery atmosphere” that catered to drug addicts and criminals before it permanently closed.  The interview also confirmed that Teresa Stokes is co-owner of Pinnacle Recovery Services, a Lansing nonprofit housing program.   Radical leftist judges who are deliberately ignoring our Constitution and common sense are unleashing an uncontrollable violent black crime wave on innocent civilians in our country. These radical activist judges are literally just as dangerous as the killers they are unleashing upon us.  How do you go from selling chicken wings to being a magistrate judge?   This is insane. And it’s one of the most obvious examples of how DEI= DIE.  WATCH 👇🏻"
Time to denounce private prisons and their conflicts of interest

Reform urged as public questions magistrate qualifications after brutal NC train murder - "the judge who reportedly released Brown in January 2025, Magistrate Judge Teresa Stokes, is under fire for allegedly not passing the bar exam... North Carolina is not the only state that allows magistrate judges to not pass the bar exam to serve in their position. According to a study by the Columbia Review, thirty-two states allow judges to serve without a law degree, and seventeen states don't require a judge who presides over eviction cases to have a law degree.  Over 80% of magistrates in North Carolina do not have a law degree, the study shows."

Meme - *Fork in the road*
*Daniel Penny restraining Jordan Neely*
*Decarlos Brown killing Iryna Zarutska*

Meme - "r/DoomerCircleJerk
Memorial for dead Ukrainian immigrant is "Fascist Astroturfing"
Elon Musk and Andrew Tate Backed Fascist Astroturfing on Jefferson and Evergreen
Exactly what it says. The new mural on the corner of Jefferson and Evergreen is part of an Elon Musk and Andrew Tate backed campaign to memorialize Iryna Zarutska in hundreds of murals across the country."
Left wingers love criminals

Megan Basham on X - "Another factor in the death of Iryna Zarutska on Charlotte's light rail--the left-wing MacArthur Foundation giving Mecklenburg county a $3.3 million grant to reduce the jail population. Specifically as part of "racial equity aims. Like Soros' Open Society, the MacArthur Foundation incentivizes local municipalities to make residents less safe by leaving threats like Decarlos Brown on the streets."

Meme - Ivor Cummins: "Netflix is working on a drama about the recent horrific murder of Iryna Zarutska:"
"La triste vicenda di Iryna presto su Netflix *white man about to kill black woman*"

Meme - David Sant...: "Which of these two immigrants got wall-to- wall sympathetic news coverage from the media?"
"Ukrainian refugee escaping war"
"Wife-beating MS-13 gang member"

Meme - "If you stop a violent Black man, you make national news. *Daniel Penny*
If you are a violent Black man, you don't. *Decarlos Brown*"

Meme - "r/TooAfraidToAsk
Why is there no riots in the streets or national outrage over the killing of Iryna Zarutska?
Iryna Zarutska was a Ukrainian refugee who was stabbed in Charlotte. The killer was Black. Liberals seem to care so much about refugees, but I haven't heard anything from them about this incident
You're currently banned from this community and can't comment on posts.
Sorry, this post has been removed by the moderators of r/TooAfraidToAsk"
Turns out you have good reason to be afraid to ask questions that threaten the left wing agenda

Right Angle News Network on X - "BREAKING - The official black lives matter account has posted a video stating that black people “have a right to violence” amid mass outrage over the slaying of Iryna Zarutska at the hands of a black male in Charlotte, North Carolina."

Colin Wright on X - "The left will only report on stories inconvenient to their narrative when the right makes enough noise about an issue that it suddenly becomes useful to report on the right's outrage about it."

Meme - "POV: Just trying to make it home alive on public transit despite the 'socioeconomic factors' behind you *woman in knight armour*"

Meme - 0liver✨⛈️🌴🐊🦈 @0Iiver_Sister: "decarlos brown wasnt crazy, he knew exactly what he was doing and why he was doing it because he rehearsed his magical get out of trouble words as he was exiting the train. this is the lede. dont bury it."
"She called me nigger"

Meme - End Wokeness: "Not a single celebrity or feminist activist has said a word about this"

Meme - Netflix: *white man about to murder scared black woman*

Johan Jelqington on X - "I wonder what percentage of historic "lynchings" were actually in response to black guys doing shit like this."
Thread by @Trust_Lion_ on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Looking back on lynchings being discussed in history class is so funny in retrospect. "Yeah white people used to become very angry and very violent all of a sudden for NO REASON and find a black person and hang them and this happened all the time"
"It happened basically every single day and we're only ever going to discuss one case which we insist was motivated by a false accusation which we'll never acknowledge originated as a claim almost 50 years after the event and was denied by every authority that investigated it"
"So off of this one case which we claim was falsified with no credible reasoning, now believe that there were thousands and thousands of episodes of white people just getting together to harm Minorities™️, again- FOR NO REASON. Do not consider that!!""

Thread by @jessesingal on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "After Jordan Neely randomly punched a 67-year-old woman in the face, which led to one of his three dozen or so arrests, several for assault, he spent 15 months in jail, max. Then The Helpers arrived(!), leading to "a carefully planned strategy between the city and his lawyers to allow him to get treatment and stay out of prison." The traumatized, violent, deeply mentally ill guy got to do basically an honor-code type of deal where he sorta pinky-swore to stay in treatment. But 13 days later he just walked out (because of course he did!).  Then outreach workers saw him on the subway. They approached him and he started pissing in front of them. They called the cops, who didn't bother to check if he had a warrant out -- they just shooed him off the train. Three weeks later he was killed.
The reason I'm reminding people of this story is that I think it's a really really really bad idea to treat "If someone commits multiple public assaults and is not in any control of their own life or actions, it's okay to incarcerate them for awhile" as a MAGA position."

Morgoth on X - "What I find striking about this image is that it mocks the conventional liberalism of the West. The killer has never known hardship or war. He has no recent cultural memory of communism or forced famines and poverty. Unlike her, he isn't a refugee; he's a pampered pet from a demographic that has been indulged to the point of madness."

Meme - ""What terrifies me more than a White girl getting her throat slashed by a subsaharan repeat offender is White people getting mad about it""
Plantation scientist @plantationdrip: "New York Times article on the murder of Iryna Zarutska"
"In North Carolina, as in other Southern states, newspapers in the Jim Crow era often egregiously exaggerated stories about Black criminality. Among other things, such stories served as a precursor to a white supremacist uprising in Wilmington, N.C., in 1898, in which at least 60 Black men were killed."

>Meme<.a> - shoe @shoe0nhead: ">NYT finally covers it
>it’s about the people covering it
however much you hate journalists i promise you it will never be enough"
""New York Times. A Gruesome Murder in North Carolina Ignites a Firestorm on the Right. Security footage capturing the unprovoked stabbing in Charlotte became an accelerant for conservative arguments about the perceived failings of Democratic policies."

i/o on X - "The NYT just can't help itself. Every few months it provides yet another breaking update on the Emmett Till situation, but it has only printed the phrase "black homicide rate" in its pages three times in 52 years. The staggering rates of black homicidal violence embarrass the paper. So rather than report on them, it prefers to deflect, project and obfuscate."

Meme - Aesthetica @Anc_Aesthetics: "This is what black twitter is posting right now just so you understand what time it is"
"Deserved"
"Clean up in aisle 13"
"We even for George now *decarlos brown as Derek Chauvin kneeling on Iryna Zarutska as George Floyd*"

Thread by @webdevMason on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "People talking about "situational awareness" like it's perfectly normal to sit down in a train and spend the entire ride assessing angles of attack rather than reading a book or checking your messages. I don't know why you people want to live in a post-apocalyptic nightmare but I would simply rather not"
When left wingers admit public transit is dangerous

She had already been stabbed at this point and cowers in fear while she bleeds out and these people just sat and watched. While her killer says "I got that white girl". The hate filled rhetoric of democrats is responsible for this kind of violence and apathy. The DNC is a plague on our society. : r/libsofreddit - "What that girl needed was a Daniel Penny."
"And they locked him up immediately and then a PIECE OF SH!T DA tried him for murder."
"Which is why you’ll never see the likes of his actions again from a bystander. The inactions those people is exactly what the right said would happen by charging Daniel Penny for murder."

The brutal murder of Iryna Zarutska exposes the cost of the Left’s ‘compassion’ - "A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words. You could replace this article with the photograph of Iryna Zarutska and her alleged killer: a Ukrainian refugee still in her work uniform reading her phone on the bus, and a hooded man rising from his seat on a train to swing a knife into her neck. You would get the essential dynamics: American cities are unsafe, with a criminal class left to run riot at the expense of the innocent people around them. Then again, much of polite society across the West has dedicated itself to not noticing the patterns that keep unfolding across these horror stories. The “compassionate” thing to do is turn a blind eye, look elsewhere until the news cycle moves on, then continue to make the same mistakes until the next slaughter... While it may not have fed into this decision, Republicans have also seized on the actions of North Carolina’s “Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice” set up in the wake of George Floyd’s death. A report released last year set out progress against a laundry list of aims, many concerned with lowering arrests, incarceration, and the use of cash bail. “Compassion” apparently requires that disparities within the criminal justice system be eliminated regardless of the wider impact.  Even after watching a woman killed on video, with the suspect then walking away in a trail of blood, the values of liberal America were on full display. The mayor of Charlotte, Vi Lyles, called for “compassion” to be shown to the suspected killer on the grounds of mental ill health; Zarutska wasn’t mentioned by name in the statement. Meanwhile, a fundraiser was immediately opened for Brown, who was “failed categorically” by the “judicial system and the mental health services” of the state; another attempted to crowdfund for his legal fees, to “fight against the racism and bias against our people”. If this sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve heard every element of it before. A criminal released after multiple incidents; judges who don’t want to be responsible for putting him or her away; a mental health system that thinks the kindest way to treat those failing to manage is to put them onto the street; the defensiveness of the Left who maintains overrepresentation of particular groups in the criminal justice system is the result of pure racism; a political system which panders to this belief.  Together, these “compassionate” behaviours have wreaked havoc on American communities. Studies around the world have shown that criminal behaviour is hugely concentrated among a small group of hardened offenders. In Sweden, for instance, a group consisting of just 1pc of the total population racked up 63pc of all convictions for violence. The last time I ran the numbers, the rough implication was that fractionally harsher sentencing in a handful of US cities would prevent dozens of murders and thousands of assaults each year.If lawmakers had genuine empathy for society and for those forced to live near dangerous people, they would do the sensible thing: they would remove them from the streets, ending their ability to terrorise new victims. If they were genuinely concerned about people with severe mental health problems, they would institutionalise them rather than leave them homeless. A society where a man can be accused of shooting another person in the head, be found incompetent to stand trial, be released, and then be charged with committing the exact same crime a second time is one which has abandoned all sense of reason. Being unable to understand your actions or restrain them is if anything a reason for a sentencing enhancement rather than release. And if lawmakers are worried about racial disparities, they should look at the victims of crimes as well as the perpetrators. In cases where the race of an offender is known, African Americans made up roughly 58pc of homicide offenders in the last five years, but also around 56pc of victims. Turning a blind eye to these figures, to claim that is racist to arrest dangerous criminals, is an abrogation of duty that leaves communities to rot. There is nothing compassionate about this inaction, or its consequences. Jordan Neely was also homeless with mental health issues, and a long criminal record: he had been arrested 42 times, including three times for unprovoked assaults on women on the New York subway. When he threatened passengers on a journey in 2023, he was restrained by Daniel Penny, a former marine, and died in a chokehold. The same set-up, with a different outcome.  Neither incident should have happened. Neither needed to. Donald Trump is completely correct when he says the people who “refuse to put bad people in jail” have blood on their hands. Until America abandons “compassion” for common sense, however, the death toll will continue to rise."
Left wing "empathy" is highly selective and weaponised

Show compassion for Ukrainian refugee murder suspect, says Democratic mayor - "Ms Lyles said that Charlotte “must do better” for people like Mr Brown, who is homeless, as they “need help and have no place to go”... “I want to be clear that I am not villainising those who struggle with their mental health or those who are unhoused. Mental health disease is just that – a disease like any other that needs to be treated with the same compassion, diligence and commitment as cancer or heart disease.  “Also, those who are unhoused are more frequently the victim of crimes and not the perpetrators. Too many people who are on the street need a safe place to sleep and wrap around services to lift them up.  “We, as a community, must do better for those members of our community who need help and have no place to go.”... a GoFundMe account set up for Mr Brown was pulled soon after it was set up and garnered $5 in donations out of a $35,000 goal.  The fundraiser claimed that the suspect had been “failed categorically by the judicial system and the mental health services of North Carolina, and as such is not entirely to blame for what happened”."

TheBlaze on X - "Van Jones on CNN discussing the brutal Charlotte stabbing: “We don’t know why that man did what he did. This man was hurting. Hurt people hurt people.” 🤡🤡🤡"
Michael Shermer on X - "“Hurt people hurt people” is not a theory of violence or mental illness. It’s an absurd statement meant to excuse the murderer. Would he say “Derek Chauvin was hurting and hurt people hurt people”? Woke poisons everything it touches. Progressives make Fox News seem rational."

Geoff Russ: North Carolina train killing shows why soft-on-crime urbanism has failed - "The killing of Iryna Zarutska is a tragic example of why people are not convinced by the evangelists of city life. The YIMBY movement , and other urbanist voices, grew much loude r in recent years as the housing crunch took hold across the West. Besides calls for denser housing, they also uphold old, walkable European cities as a template for restructuring car-centric cities. Urbanism sounds great, until mentally-ill people with knives get on the train. People see crimes like what happened to Iryna Zarutska and buy houses in the suburbs or move away to a small town. We are not immune to this in Canada. In 2022, 31-year old Vanessa Kurpiewska was fatally stabbed on Toronto’s subway. It can happen to anyone. Arguments for expanded public transit fall apart when you see drug addicts lighting up glass pipes on the bus , releasing toxic fumes that might contain deadly hits of fentanyl . It is not pleasant standing next to a gaggle of mentally ill addicts milling around City Hall/Bow Valley College station on Calgary’s C-Train line. Such company is tense for an average-sized man, and much worse for women. Just in March at that same station, a woman was attacked by a mugger. Anybody can go for a walk in that part of Calgary, and be treated to sad scenes of homelessness, mental illness, and drug addiction. A city like Calgary can try and pedestrianise itself as much as it likes. It can fill the Beltline’s parking lots with condo towers, open new transit routes, and brag about falling crime rates . Professionals and young families will not sit down for a picnic in Calgary’s downtown Central Memorial Park, the location of the city’s cenotaph, when people are doing drugs in the bushes. They’d rather hop in their car and drive back to the suburbs, leaving most of downtown empty after 6 p.m. Our cities should be vibrant, walkable, and full of life. For that to happen, however, they have to not only be safe on paper, but make people feel safe and at-ease. Some are comparing the killing of Iryna Zarutska to the death of George Floyd in 2020, which resulted in a wave of anti-police rhetoric and soft-on-crime policies that caused havoc in American cities. That year, Canadian politicians eagerly tried to imitate their American counterparts, with then-Vancouver mayor Kennedy Stewart flagellating himself for his “ white privilege ” and dramatically stepping down as spokesperson for the Vancouver Police Board. In the 2022 Vancouver election, amidst heightened fears of public safety, Stewart was thankfully defeated by challenger Ken Sim, who had promised to hire 100 new police officers. Sim kept that promise , and officials announced in June violent crime rates in Vancouver were at its lowest in 20 years. It turns out that the problems of public safety have simple solutions. What happened to Iryna Zarutska should be the death rattle of permissive attitudes towards criminals and urban crime. We need police on transit platforms, prosecutors who keep violent offenders away from them, and transit agencies that help keep cities safe for the taxpayers that fund them. Like it or not, what happens in the U.S. affects the entire English-speaking world, and the story of Iryna Zarutska is now being reported in Britain and Australia , whose cities are also stricken with rising disorder and violence . People deserve to live in safe cities, and should not have to see human degradation on their way to work, or be at risk of random, deadly assaults."

Meme - bla bla bla @nakkaiiii: ""all were black" who cares?"
Renson Seow @lefireRS: "The people like me who have affirmed that avoiding black people on public transport for safety care."
@BSalm25931: "You are racist"
Renson Seow: "She wasn't racist. And now she's dead."

Meme - Democratic Donkey Judge: "EVERYONE DESERVES A 2nd CHANCE!"
DeCarlos Brown Jr.: "or 14th chance..."
Democratic Donkey Judge: "except for THE VICTIM" *DeCarlos Brown Jr. stabs Iryna Zarutska*

🌋🌋 Deep₿lueCrypto 🌋🌋 on X - "The criminal who killed Iryna Zarutska had 14 prior arrests and was released back onto the streets every time and eventually he killed her. Irynas blood is on Democrats hands. Irynas blood is on the Leftist DA’s hands"

If the Choice in 2024 Were So Obvious, the Election Wouldn’t Be So Close

From 2024:

Opinion | If the Choice in 2024 Were So Obvious, the Election Wouldn’t Be So Close - The New York Times

"There are many styles of Harris-Walz signage in my lovely university-town neighborhood, but the one that’s stickiest in my mind comes with a one-word slogan: “Harris-Walz 2024: Obviously.”

It’s sticky because it gets at something fundamental and fundamentally strange about Trump-era America. The divisions in our country are resilient, the reversion to a 50-50 split seemingly inevitable even amid plague and war and protest. Yet in those regions of America that officially have a professional commitment to debate — the realms of academic and journalistic argument — things are still mostly as they were when Donald Trump first emerged: To oppose him is completely obvious, obligatory, a matter of simple common sense.

Except that it can’t be that obvious or we wouldn’t be where we are. So let’s take one last survey of why some waverers might not yet be sold on Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, by returning to where this all began: The world of 2016, when Americans normally disinclined to vote for liberals were first informed that there was no other reasonable choice.

In that world, the Hillary Clinton campaign offered the country an implicit bargain. The promise was not some sort of dramatic bipartisan moderation to meet the Trumpist threat; on policy Clinton’s campaign was somewhat more left-wing than Barack Obama’s White House.

Rather the promise was that even if you disagreed with liberalism’s elites on policy, you could trust them in three crucial ways: They would avoid insanity, they would maintain stability, and they would display far greater intelligence and competence than Trump and his hangers-on.

The promise of sanity was broken first. Under Trumpian and especially Covidian conditions, the culture of elite liberalism lurched toward fanaticism, embracing radical and fanciful ideas to a degree that I had not imagined possible.

At the time some liberals resisted this lurch, but many others fell silent under pressures that felt almost McCarthyite in their threats to livelihoods and reputations.

Today more liberals concede that things got a bit kooky for a while. But the tendency is still to cast the high tide of wokeness as just a silly season whose effects were hardly comparable to right-wing depredations.

To me, though, the farther that we get from that moment, the more the remarkable the damage looks. For instance: After the liberal establishment was radicalized by the killing of George Floyd into a temporary repudiation of normal policing on “antiracist” grounds, America experienced a dramatic wave of homicides, on a scale unique among developed countries in the Covid era, in which thousands and thousands of people died unnecessarily.

Or again, America in that season mainstreamed experimental and unproven chemical and surgical treatments on thousands of gender-dysphoric young people, with the enthusiastic support of the medical establishment and then the Biden administration, because people with a normal degree of skepticism were afraid of being called transphobes.

Even before you get into harder-to-quantify issues of intellectual corruption, damage to schools and social life and mental health, there is a basic physical toll here — on “bodies,” to use the language that some progressives favor — that undermines the liberal claim to represent sanity against populist derangement.

And it undermines those claims even if the craziness has passed for now, because we could see how a figure like Kamala Harris behaved during that period. Is she a true believer in every notion she endorsed in the 2020 campaign? Perhaps not. But neither is there any good reason to think that she would offer principled resistance if liberalism entered a fevered state again.

Then alongside sanity at home, there is the failure of liberalism to deliver stability abroad. When Trump was first elected president I expected a period of testing — cross-border incursions, terrorist violence, a coordination between our adversaries against a wobbling Pax Americana.

All of that happened — but under Joe Biden’s leadership, not Trump’s. The position of the United States is more parlous today than when Trump left office, the risk of a genuine world war has intensified, and the cost of destabilization is already measured in thousands upon thousands of dead.

I don’t think all this reflects terrible case-by-case decision making by the Biden administration. But in the aggregate you can see a severe weakness in liberal internationalism right now — a tendency to extend itself rhetorically without the material investments required to back those promissory notes, a limpness in its relationship to allies who take our patience and protection for granted, a difficulty figuring out how to negotiate with enemies after you’ve spent so much time denouncing them. (We are clearly paying the price for missing a 2023-era window for an armistice in Ukraine.)

One might prefer well-meaning weakness to the Trumpian alternative of an amoral president seeking retrenchment, surrounded by foreign policy hands trying to use his mercurial persona to keep our rivals off balance. But it’s possible the Trumpian formula yielded better results for a reason, and it’s not at all clear that Harris is ready for the tests that Biden’s failing foreign policy will hand on to her.

Especially since the final promise of 2016-era liberalism — its claim to have a profound advantage in competence and intelligence — is not exactly vindicated by the Harris-Walz ticket.

I understand that we are close enough to the election that this last point will be furiously rejected. But notwithstanding the great rally around her after Biden’s bow-out, the Democratic nominee for president is still the Dan Quayle-like figure that almost everybody saw just a little while ago, still vague on policy and painful in extended interviews, still carrying a record as a vice president that inspires little confidence in her abilities.

By comparison Hillary Clinton was clearly a more serious policymaker, Joe Biden was clearly better at the work of politics, and both were more experienced in ways that matter to a chief executive. And Harris’s selection of running mate was a telling double-down on mediocrity: She picked a partner who would cast no shade on her own capabilities, even when there were clear political incentives to choose otherwise.

Better mediocrity than Trump — except that in 2024, unlike 2016, the Republican ticket has the ballast of a running mate who is capable of going multiple rounds in any format (I may have a personal bias in JD Vance’s favor, but I think his performance in interviews and the V.P. debate have been extremely effective), and the fervent involvement of the man responsible for America’s most successful automotive startup and rockets that are the wonder of the world." 

The prospects for left-wing populism

The prospects for left-wing populism

"Consider for a moment the volume of commentary that has been dedicated to the subject of inequality – the number of articles documenting the growing chasm separating the wealth of the 1% from the rest; the number of academic papers uncovering “disparities” along every conceivable axis of human difference; the number of scholarly books written condemning global inequality, or trends in income inequality. Now compare that to the number of words that have been written on the subject of inflation – the number of academic conferences that have been held denouncing the scourge of price inflation; the number of scholarly books that have documented its impact on the lives of ordinary people; the number of angry tracts demanding an end to fiat currency.

Even contemplating the comparison provides a useful window into the agonies of the modern left. As we all know, the average progressive intellectual cares a great deal about inequality and not at all about inflation. Seeing this makes it easier to understand why the left has been feeling frustrated. Consider the ill-fated Biden administration in the U.S. At least since the heyday of the Occupy Movement in 2011, there has been a concerted effort to get Americans riled up about wealth inequality, with the obvious expectation that some of this anger could be channeled into support for the Democratic Party. The fruits of this effort, at least on the electoral front, have been pretty much non-existent. Americans, we were told, have been tricked into caring only about cultural issues, not economics. And then suddenly, at the tail end of the Biden years, the entire world gets hit with a bout of inflation, and Americans become consumed by incandescent rage over economic issues, which they proceed to channel into support for the Republican party, which then rewards them by passing a gigantic tax cut for the wealthy.

It’s not hard to see why many people find this situation completely mindboggling. How could Americans get so upset about their economic situation, and yet fail to draw the obvious connection to the actual causes of their distress? How could they get so angry at immigrants and not at billionaires? Surely, surely, there must be some way for the left to channel this anger, to achieve some increase in support. In the past, there have been left-wing populists, and populist left-wing movements. Why is it so difficult to get anything going today?

This is the background against which the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City must be understood. While Democratic Socialist luminaries like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are sometimes described as “populist,” their recently-completed “Fighting Oligarchy” tour didn’t really set off any brushfires, much less erode support for Trump... Mamdani, on the other hand, was able to craft a populist message and platform that caught on with voters, catapulting him from a candidate who started with less than 1% in the primary polls to winning more than 50% of the general election. Lots of people would like to know how to bottle that lightning.

The difference between Mamdani’s pitch and the Bernie/AOC line is easy to see, if one has the correct understanding of populism. In fact, the comparison provides a good example of how widespread misunderstanding of populism handicaps left-wing strategy. The crucial thing to understand about populism, and populist anger, is that it is a revolt directed against cognitive elites, not economic elites. Its centerpiece is the affirmation of “common sense” against the sort of “fancy theories” defended by intellectuals and their lackeys. Common sense is the product of intuition, not ratiocination, and so a convenient way to understand populism is to see it as a political strategy that privileges System 1 over System 2 cognition.

While each style of cognition has its particular strengths and weaknesses, an important difference between them is that intuitions are elicited through interaction with the world, and are therefore focused on highly concrete, “primary” representations, whereas the analytical system is capable of performing operations on “decoupled” representations, which permits reasoning about abstract, hypothetical, and even counterfactual states. As Keith Stanovich has argued, this decoupling requires effort, in large part because it requires sustained attention...

An easy way to distinguish a populist appeal from a technocratic one is that the populist message will restrict itself entirely to primary representations. For example, the “cost of living” is not a primary representation, it is an abstract concept. The price of groceries, on the other hand, is a primary representation – everyone can easily summon up an image of the price, on the supermarket shelf, the last time they bought orange juice or bread. This is, of course, something that Trump spent a great deal of time talking about (“groceries, such a simple word”), and that the Brahmin left in America spent a great deal of time making fun of him for (e.g. here). In so doing, they exhibited a sort of higher-order stupidity. As Stanovich observes, the thing about primary representations is that they have a “special salience” that abstract concepts will never possess.

Mamdani was apparently one of the few to draw the more obvious conclusion from Trump’s remarks, which was that instead of making fun of him for talking about groceries (in a tone of often insufferable superiority), maybe the left should also be talking about groceries. So he made it one of the major promises in his campaign – a pledge to lower the price of groceries in New York by creating publicly-owned, city-run grocery stores. Of course, like most educated people, he probably knows that profiteering by grocery stores is not actually the cause of high food prices. It’s not difficult to find data showing that grocery stores in New York operate with pretty slim margins, and that the major costs occur further up the supply chain. The problem is that a “supply chain” is an entirely abstract concept, which means that for most people it might as well not exist. Obviously, if one wanted to develop a plausible plan for lowering the price of food, it would make sense to think about agricultural subsidies, or transportation costs, or retail overhead, but you’re not going to get the average person excited by talking this way. People who are mad about the cost of living are going to focus their ire on the last link of the chain, the consumer-facing organization, and that means the grocery store.

One can see a clear parallel between the Mamdani grocery store proposal and the anger directed against health insurance companies in the U.S. The targeted shooting of a UnitedHealthcare executive in the streets of New York, one may recall, also ignited a populist brushfire, leading to widespread veneration of Luigi Mangione, the man accused of the killing. Again, the wonks came out of the woodwork, pointing out that health insurance companies have relatively slim profit margins, and are not really responsible for much of the excess cost of the U.S. health care system. This analysis, however, relies on a series of abstract concepts (e.g. “moral hazard”) that are simply not available to intuition. Like grocery stores, health insurance companies are the consumer-facing part of the health care supply chain. Furthermore, insurance itself is an esoteric product, which very few people understand (most Americans believe that these companies create no value, but rather make their money by denying claims). And so for people who are angry – which presumably includes the 1/3 of Americans who are currently carrying medical debt – health insurance companies naturally get the blame.

From this analysis, one can see also why the Bernie/AOC “billionaires are bad” pitch is not genuine populism. The problem with criticizing inequality is that inequality is another abstraction, one that only intellectuals care about per se. There’s lots of research showing that most people have no idea what the distribution of income and wealth is in their society, in part because they don’t really care. What they do care about, first and foremost, is their own financial situation. To the extent that they are bothered by what others have, their attitudes are based on comparison to a specific reference group. They pick out an individual or group who is thought to be comparably situated to themselves (e.g. neighbours, high-school classmates, siblings, etc.), who then serve as a source of primary representations. They judge their own level of success and material comfort based on how well their situation compares to that of these people. (Hence the kernel of truth at the heart of H. L. Mencken’s observation that a truly wealthy man is one who earns more than his wife’s sister’s husband.)

The problem with complaining about Jeff Bezos’s yacht, or Elon Musk’s effective tax rate, as a political strategy, is that these people are completely outside the reference class of all but a small handful of Americans. As a result, their financial situation is completely incommensurable with that of the average person. It is very difficult to cultivate resentment, or any other strong feeling, by inviting people to contemplate an abstraction.

In order to do populism effectively, politicians must not only focus on problems that the public cares about, they must also by-and-large accept the public’s framing of those problems. This creates a dilemma for the left, because that framing, in a complex modern society, will usually be incorrect. As a result, it is extremely difficult to find issues on which left-wing politicians can be authentically populist. For example, many of the problems that the left would like to resolve, such as climate change, or mass transit, or even spiraling health care costs, are collective action problems. Collective action problems, unfortunately, are extremely unintuitive. (I can easily spend an hour with a blackboard explaining the basic structure to my students, and still many of them get it wrong.) It’s one thing to focus on grocery stores during a campaign, but if you actually want to succeed in lowering food prices, you’re going to have to do a bit of a bait-and-switch, or order to focus on points in the supply chain where government intervention can make a greater difference.

There are, of course, genuine left-wing populists out there, but they don’t have a very good track record of success when it comes to achieving progressive policy objectives. Many of Canada’s left-wing luminaries, like Naomi Klein and Linda McQuaig, were burned by their support for Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. The problem with Chávez was that he was an authentic populist, in the sense that he wasn’t just playing dumb, he really did reject the fancy theories of intellectuals. His response to inflation in the Venezuelan economy, and in particular to rising food prices, was to impose a set of price controls on basic commodities. In the process, he basically made entire sectors of the economy illegal. In particular, he made it impossible to sell food at anything other than a loss. People reacted by withdrawing their goods from sale, and in particular, many farmers switched to subsistence farming and stopped planting commercial crops. Millions of Venezuelans were pushed to the brink of starvation and the economy collapsed almost entirely. Approximately 25% of the population has since fled the country, making it one of the largest self-inflicted economic catastrophes of the modern era.

The problem, it seems to me, is not so much that Chávez was a socialist but that he was a populist. If one restricts oneself to primary representations of the world, what inflation looks like is a general increase in the price of goods. If one is willing to follow a more abstruse line of reasoning, one can see that appearances are misleading in this regard, and that inflation is actually just a decline in the value of money. Those who are willing to follow this abstract line of reasoning can usually be persuaded that the correct policy response lies in the realm of monetary policy (e.g. increasing interest rates, contracting money supply, etc.), in order to halt this decline. This is the exact opposite of the populist response. (Has any populist, anywhere in the world, ever wanted to do anything but lower interest rates?) What Chávez did was what anyone reasoning in a concrete manner would be inclined to do – he ordered the people who had been raising prices to stop doing it. And when he didn’t like how they responded, he sent the National Guard out to seize their goods.

One can see here the problem with the populism-envy that has been consuming the left in recent years. It’s not so difficult to craft effective populist slogans, condemning various aspects of the modern world. (Although it is perhaps worth noting that telling voters to support a particular political party, in order to alleviate some injustice suffered by some other person, or by some group that the voter does not belong to, is not ever a populist appeal.) The problem is that the left has very few policies that actually correspond to these slogans. One could see the awkward position that put people in during the “defund the police” mania of 2020, which was also a populist brushfire, but where no one could agree on what the slogan actually meant or entailed. At one point, it seemed as though the only thing that movement intellectuals could agree on was that it did not mean what the ordinary English-language sense of those terms would imply. (Similarly, many people who bought Alex Vitale’s book, The End of Policing, were presumably disappointed to discover that the title was a play on words, and that he did not actually want to end policing. The book is about the objective of policing.)

Again, this sort of bait-and-switch is practically inevitable in left-wing populism, which is presumably what discourages many people from making that pitch. Mamdani is obviously an incredibly talented campaigner, and even seems to be a successful Trump-whisperer. The question is whether he will be able to implement the technocratic policies that are actually needed to improve life for New Yorkers, without dousing the populist flame that got him into office."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Links - 31st March 2026 (1 - Left Wing Economics: Canada)

Carney may accept the world as it is, but we cannot accept Canada as it is - The Globe and Mail - "The bigger threat to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s mission to double exports to non-U.S. jurisdictions by 2035 is a problem of our making, rather than the tiresome bluster of President Donald Trump. A steady diet of political indifference, bingeing on bureaucracy and peppering the mix with bouts of labour militancy has clogged Canada’s large ports, our critical commercial arteries to global markets.  Transport Canada’s own assessment has shown our ports are “managed primarily in favour of importers and containerized exports are a secondary consideration.” The Montreal Economic Institute reported that Ottawa’s restrictions on automation are restraining port modernization and the efficiency it brings. RBC suggests our ports are “among the least efficient in the industrialized world,” posing one of the top economic risks facing Canada in 2026...  Our ports in British Columbia, key gateways to Asian-Pacific countries, are amongst the worst in the world – not just among industrialized countries – when in comes to productivity... The Port of Vancouver is 389th and Prince Rupert comes in at 362nd. The Port of Montreal, moving about $400-million in goods daily, is little better, ranking 344th. In contrast, Cartagena’s Port in Colombia, a troubled and relatively poor country, ranks 46th.  Large American ports such as Seattle, New York-New Jersey, Boston, Philadelphia and Long Beach, Calif., are all run more efficiently than Canada’s largest ports. The Canadian bright light is the Port of Halifax, in 55th place.  The price of our indifference shouldn’t be dismissed. A case in point is potash, which is mostly mined in Saskatchewan. It is a much sought-after agricultural fertilizer that increases crop yields and wards off crop diseases. Canada generates a third of global potash production volume and is positioned to materially increase that in the coming years. Our primary potash export market is the United States. Yet there is room to expand export markets in China, India, Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia and many more countries – the very goal Mr. Carney has laid out for the country to reduce dependence on the Americans.  But last year one of our country’s most important potash miners, Nutrien, announced a $1-billion investment in the Port of Longview, Wash., deciding not to invest in the ports of Vancouver or Prince Rupert.  The company, having endured years of rail bottlenecks, labour disruptions, higher costs, and aging infrastructure, and little prospect of change, decided to mitigate its Canadian risk.  In this case, that mitigation strategy entails directing a large portion of the potash it mines through the U.S. to tidewater in Washington State. Nutrien’s decision could see half of all the potash it produces shipped through the U.S. by 2031.  If the Port of Vancouver continues to decline, even more potash could transit through Washington State in the years ahead, and with it well-paying union jobs, government revenues and logistics expertise, just as Canada is working to loosen America’s grip on our economy."
Time for the unions to strike again

Tristin Hopper on X - "I once went to the funeral of a guy whose entire professional career was designing things that never got built, or were at most failed boondoggles. I can't emphasize enough how much "not building stuff" has been a defining feature of Canada since the 1970s."
John Carter on X - "The incredible thing is that the national debt during Canada's infrastructure building period, which encompassed both World Wars, was effectively nothing.  The moment we stopped building things, the debt skyrocketed.   This was because the elder Trudeau redirected the government from nation-building to buying votes for the Liberal Party with welfare state patronage schemes, and ran up the national credit card to pay for it.   It was also because he changed the rules such that the government could only take interest-bearing loans from private banks, rather than the previous system of funding infrastructure development via interest-free Bank of Canada loans.   Which was how Trudeau paid off Canada's financial classes to look the other way as he bankrupted the country.  Trudeau was the greatest criminal mastermind in Canadian history."

Canada Post carrier fired for hoarding 6000 pieces of mail reinstated - "An arbitrator has ordered the reinstatement of an Ontario postman fired for hoarding at least 6,000 pieces of mail during the summer of 2022 because Canada Post wasn’t aware of his post-traumatic stress disorder. Hyun Min Jang was terminated from his job as a rural and suburban mail carrier in King City, Ont., “for misdirection and delay of mail, as a result of the discovery of thousands of pieces of undelivered mail in his personal vehicle,” according to a recent decision from Kathleen G. O’Neil, the arbitrator.  “Items retrieved from (Jang’s) vehicle included a great variety of mail, some of significant importance to customers such as wedding invitations, cheques, health cards, tickets, jury summons and immigration documents,” O’Neil said... The Canadian Union of Postal Workers grieved Jang’s termination.  “The union acknowledges the undelivered mail as major misconduct for a mail carrier, but asks that (Jang) be reinstated to his position with appropriate accommodation for a health condition that affected the conduct that led to his discharge,” O’Neil said... Jang, who needed a Korean interpreter for the arbitration hearing, “worked successfully for Canada Post for approximately eight years, starting in 2014,” said O’Neil’s decision dated Dec. 16, 2025."

Losing our public services to privatization is criminal. Guess who's going to fill that void. : r/EhBuddyHoser - "Maybe management should take a pay cut then? Why's that never on the table?"
"The CEO of Canada Post, Doug Ettinger, has a salary within the range of $506,800 to $596,200, with a maximum performance bonus of up to 33%. This places the total potential compensation between approximately $562,200 and $661,400 per year.  Canada Post loses $10 million a day."
Left wingers just hate the private sector on principle

B.C. premier paints rosy picture for economy heading in to 2026 - "B.C.’s premier says companies and investors are gaining confidence in major project proponents in the province, despite some economic uncertainty that remains."
Weak economic growth forecast for B.C. in 2026, says new Deloitte report

Eric Lombardi 🇨🇦🚀🏗️ on X - "My latest for @TheHubCanada CANADIANS MUST OPEN THEIR EYES TO OUR GROWING CULTURE OF CORRUPTION.
“Across all these examples, an unmistakable pattern emerges: the erosion of restraint.   Canada has built a system where every pressure is answered with a new program, a new grant, a new intervention, a new procedure. Complexity accumulates. Discretion expands. Those with influence use it. But the public feels the consequences.   Infrastructure is slowly built that costs far more than it should. Housing approvals take years instead of months. Businesses wait on permits rather than customers. A younger generation feels downwardly mobile. The population has a growing sense that government money is being used to manage political interests rather than create opportunity.  Corruption in Canada is not a handful of scandals. It is now a culture. A system of indulgence and avoidance that rewards extraction because no one is willing to confront the incentives that sustain it.”"
Eric Lombardi 🇨🇦🚀🏗️ on X - "“Consider that the City of Toronto steers about $1.65 billion in construction work each year into “closed tendering” union arrangements, with estimates saying taxpayers are over-paying by roughly $350 million annually as a result.   Or the federal level, where the government has committed $382.9 million over five years to launch the “Workforce Alliances” programme, which “brings together employers, unions, and industry groups to coordinate public-private investments in skills and training”. The same budget also provides $75 million over three years to expand the “Union Training and Innovation Programme.”  Unions are among the biggest non-party political advertisers in federal campaigns, and are influential in procurement, public advisory boards, and sectoral decision-making with little public scrutiny.   Unions make up the bulk of the millions of dollars spent directly on electioneering by third parties.   The list goes on, not because unions are uniquely evil but because we have stopped applying a test of public value to the privileges they receive. Why? Because politicians fear their electoral impact.”"

Kirk Lubimov on X - "You don't realize how alarming Canada's manufacturing collapse is until you look at it in manufacturing GDP per capita. Since 2005, Canada's manufacturing GDP per capita has declined by 30%. 20 years of decline. The average Canadian produces less and less but no surprise as 25% of the workforce works for the government."

David Knight Legg on X - "Pax Silica is a new US and UK and Australia led tech and critical minerals security coalition.    Where is Canada?  We have US-adjacent supply chains and vast critical mineral deposits.  Why are we missing - as we also are in AUKUS - again?
- Pax Silica is a security coalition between US, UK, Australia - and tech/sovereign wealth leaders Japan, UAE, Singapore, South Korea, Netherlands and Israel.
- Canada is also missing from the advanced submarine warfare coalition between Australia, UK and US (AUKUS) in spite of the largest coastline and adjacency to Russia.    Why isn’t Canada a part of key emerging security coalitions with our allies?"
Jean Philippe Fournier on X - "This is a very serious issue and it leads to uncomfortable questions.  Canada seems to be increasingly left out of important multilateral agreements despite being a member of the G7 and having a top 10 economy.   Part of the reason is Canada has been a worse military freeloader than Europe.  Another is that the Canadian economy has underperformed and is taken hostage by competing regional and other stakeholders.  If serious action isn’t taken (and that would mean putting aside the Canadian need for consensus decision making), Canadians could wake up to being totally locked out of the forums that shape the world and that’s not something the country is used to."
🅰️sh Dash on X - "Canadians want to be left out - they experience suicidal empathy at the resource level - could extract it all to prosper, but most Canadians want to keep it in the ground. Doesn't matter if they go extinct, the success that comes with being resource rich is too much to bear."
When you can't develop due to indigenous sovereignty, environmental concerns and regulation and on top of it hate the US

Meme - Kirk Lubimov @KirkLubimov: "It may be a tough pill to swallow for many Canadians but Canada has a lost decade and it has nothing to do with Donald Trump. Donald Trump just exposed it even more. It has everything to do with the people you voted for. No lies or excuses can make up for it."
"Real per capita GDP growth among G7 countries: Last 10 years *Worst compared to, in descending order, USA, Italy, Japan, Great Britain, France, Germany*"

Tech founders leaving Canada at accelerating rate, survey finds - The Globe and Mail - "Toronto venture-capital firm Leaders Fund found that just 32.4 per cent of Canadian-led “high-potential” startups launched in 2024 were headquartered in Canada. (The study defined these startups as having raised US$1-million, with most of their senior leaders educated in Canada. The survey tracked 2,932 such companies over a decade.) From 2015 to 2019, that figure exceeded 67 per cent. Much of the decline has occurred since the COVID-19 pandemic began. As a result, Canada is producing relatively fewer of the world’s high-potential startups, the study finds... The Leaders Fund study and other industry players have identified many issues that are hurting Canada’s competitiveness. Managing partner Gideon Hayden said deal flow at the Leaders Fund used to come mostly from Canada, but investments in the U.S. and Israel now account for 70 per cent of its financings. That shift prompted the firm to seek out whether that indicated a wider trend, using data from market-research firm Specter. “What is indisputable is that after 2020, virtually every single one of these metrics,” he said, “start to deteriorate in Canada, while in other ecosystems, that is not necessarily the case.”... Many believe the lengthy pandemic lockdowns in Canada compared with the U.S. held back a recovery, as the tech hubs of San Francisco and New York were quicker to restart networking events such as hackathons and founder meet-ups... there is a broad consensus among sector leaders that much needs to be done to make Canada a more competitive place to build a tech business. The U.S. offers many advantages for founders over Canada: Capital is abundant, the climate is more business- and founder-friendly, and the breadth of thriving tech companies in the Bay Area and New York is an irresistible draw. There is less red tape and fewer regulatory roadblocks. Governments and businesses are more willing to buy from startups.  Meanwhile, Canadian tech entrepreneurs felt betrayed last year when the federal government proposed to increase taxation on capital gains after years of mounting deficits and spending increases. The U.S. government, in contrast, raised the tax exemption on capital gains by founders this year to US$15-million. While Prime Minister Mark Carney cancelled the Canadian tax change, its proposal by predecessor Justin Trudeau “was a low-water mark for startup entrepreneurs’ confidence in the federal government,” said Benjamin Bergen, president of the Council of Canadian Innovators. “My takeaway is founders aren’t fleeing Canada, they are fleeing the friction that Canada has created,” said Lucy Hargreaves, CEO of Build Canada, a fledgling organization that has posted a series of memos from accomplished founders outlining how governments could improve Canada’s competitiveness. “If we keep pushing our builders away, we’re exporting our future prosperity.”  One such company is Aalo Atomics, founded in 2023 by Toronto’s Matt Loszak to rapidly assemble nuclear plants to electrify data centres. He first pitched the idea at home but got a cold reception from investors and utility Ontario Power Generation. He moved his company to Texas, raised US$136-million and got approval from the U.S. Department of Energy to build a power plant. “We wouldn’t have been able to raise $136-million so quickly in Canada,” Mr. Loszak said. “That would have slowed us down.”... “Every founder who leaves Canada is one less person creating jobs, paying taxes and building prosperity here,” Ms. Hargreaves said. “We should be treating startups the way we treat our natural resources. They are a strategic asset that underpins our future economy.” "
Time for more regulation and to "tax the 'rich'" more

Canada’s national unity faces a major test in 2026 | Toronto Sun - "If legitimate concerns and grievances for both provinces are not dealt with by Ottawa, support for the separatist movement will only grow.  That would include the Carney government dealing with one of the biggest threats to national unity in Western Canada, the continued refusal of British Columbia Premier David Eby to be cooperative in any way shape or form with Alberta on the issue of a pipeline to the Pacific.  The fact that Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is talking about the need for a pipeline route to the Pacific that goes through the United States instead of B.C. should be of concern to all. It would show that Alberta’s prosperity would be better served working with the Americans than with other Canadian provinces.  Sadly, for those in the Ottawa bubble or captured by it, the likelihood of them being as concerned about separatism or national unity in Western Canada as they are about the possibility of Quebec separatism is slim to none. If the parochial attitude of the Laurentian elite, who continue to run this country, prevails then we will see scorn for the West and overtures to Quebec. And against this backdrop is the fact that unlike in 1995 when Bill Clinton was in the White House and spoke in favour of a united Canada, we can’t rely on that same sentiment coming from the White House now."

No 'business case' for pipelines because Liberals want it that way - "There is something perverse about a government that once claimed there is “no business case” to sell natural gas to Europe so our allies don’t have to rely on Russia, but whose prime minister is happily going to China to talk energy exports. That energy, by the way, could very well end up powering a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The Liberal party’s disreputable habit of siding with authoritarian enemies of the West aside, the government’s position on whether there is a “business case” for an energy project has nothing to do with the market, and everything to do with politics.  When, on Thursday, Liberal MP Nate Erskine-Smith mocked those who want pipelines built “with no business case or analysis,” he wasn’t entirely wrong. Of course there is no business case for a pipeline, because the Liberals have engineered it that way. They’ve strangled the energy industry with regulation to such an extent that few businesses would ever risk hundreds of millions, if not billions, in investing capital, on their own. So, yes, there are no business cases for pipelines in Canada, only political ones. After the Americans deposed Venezuela’s murderous dictator Nicolás Maduro last weekend, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith argued that it had become even more necessary to approve and build pipelines in order to compete with Venezuelan oil. Yes, it could take about a decade for the Latin American country’s oil industry to rebuild once U.S. sanctions are lifted and investment resumes, assuming everything goes perfectly, which it likely won’t. But it could take at least that long to bring a new pipeline to the West Coast online... By no means is acknowledging the challenges ahead for the Venezuelan oil sector a vindication of the anti-oil agenda of the Liberal party, but those sympathetic to that agenda are trying to spin it that way. Globe writer Doug Saunders hilariously wrote on X that if anything, in light of Maduro’s removal, Canada needs to stop developing carbon-based energy altogether and immediately: “In fact, Venezuela amplifies the case that we urgently need to cancel any planned pipelines and pour investment into post-petroleum diversification.” This is silly. The people who never wanted energy infrastructure in the first place and have worked tirelessly to prevent it from ever getting built aren’t suddenly listening to business experts. They are cherry-picking what analysts say. As my Post colleague Jesse Kline pointed out, predictions in the past of peak oil turned out to be entirely bunk, so the left is now saying we must abandon oil because it is too plentiful.  About a decade ago, when the Liberals first came to power, there were multiple pipelines and other energy infrastructure projects being advanced by private companies with actual business cases and everything. The Trudeau government then proceeded to systematically squash the industry. They cancelled the Northern Gateway pipeline. Energy East was killed because of political opposition and the uncertainty created by the government’s regulatory agenda. The same was true of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline, while the Trans-Mountain pipeline expansion was also nearly cancelled, and only survived because Ottawa purchased it.  In all, by 2020, some $150 billion in energy infrastructure projects were cancelled largely due to politics and regulation. That only accounts for projects that were formally put forward, never mind the projects that were never, and will never be, proposed because of the Liberals’ antagonism to anything that would bring wealth to this country. The combination of the Impact Assessment Act, the tanker ban and the promise of an emissions cap, not to mention the government’s ability to just cancel projects, have all conspired to ensure energy companies avoid investing in Canada.  Mark Carney’s memorandum of understanding with Alberta superficially promises to approve a pipeline, but puts so many environmental restrictions on any such project, and defers far too much to anti-energy B.C., that it is just another case of the Liberals replacing the judgment of private business with their own. So, when they say there is no business for a pipeline, believe them — because that has always been the plan."

'No one is going to build a pipeline without certainty,' Keyera CEO says - "The head of one of Canada’s largest midstream oil and gas operators says attracting private capital for another pipeline will require permitting reform and clearer assurances from Ottawa.  Pipeline operator Keyera Corp. is set to become a national-scale natural gas liquids (NGL) company when its $5.15-billion acquisition of Houston-based Plains All American Pipeline LP’s Canadian NGL business closes early next year...
 For us to attract more investment in Canada, we have to really reform our policies and our regulations. Investors see it as risky if they don’t have clarity on where carbon taxes are going: clean electricity regulations, emissions caps, tanker bans and things like that. There has to be 100 per cent clarity on what those policies are. No one is going to build a pipeline without that certainty. It’s just not going to happen.   Part of that is regulatory and permitting reform, too. We always think it’s a lot of money to build a pipeline like Trans Mountain or Coastal GasLink. Those pipelines would cost a lot less if we had the right regulatory and permitting processes. Trans Mountain should cost less than half of what it cost. But we have too many headwinds that we create for ourselves in Canada. If we can get that policy reform, it would lower the hurdle rates for someone to make an investment to build another pipe."
'No one is going to build a pipeline without certainty,' Keyera CEO says : r/ilovebc - "No one is going to build anything of consequence without certainty."
Left wingers throw up endless obstacles to a pipeline (on top of their general anti-economic growth agenda), then claim there's no point trying to build one because no one wants to
One left winger called me ungrateful when I pointed out that the government making pipelines impossible to build, then coming in at a later stage and reversing the self-inflicted damage to some extent was not a "subsidy"

Gunter: Canada full of internal obstacles to 'nation-building' projects - "Want to know why nothing of significance ever gets built in this country? Consider the allegations levelled by NDP leadership contender Avi Lewis against pipelines, mines and other “nation-building projects” proposed by Prime Minister Mark Carney and others such as Alberta Premier Danielle Smith. At his party’s French-language leadership debate last week, Lewis insisted the effect of megaprojects on women and girls, especially Indigenous women and girls, “are intense, are horrifying.” “Big, manly things with huge work camps entailed in remote areas,” Lewis charged, lead to widespread murder and sexual assault. This echoes the controversial Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) inquiry whose 2019 final report stated, without much evidence, that Canada’s resource industry brings “extractive violence” and drug trafficking to Indigenous communities. The MMIWG report also blamed “man camps” for increased “sexual harassment and stalking,” “increased domestic violence” and increased risk of Indigenous women “going missing or being killed.” Environmental groups have also used alleged violence in surrounding communities from “man camps” in seeking court injunctions against megaprojects. With segments of elite opinion so tainted against pipelines, hydro dams and mines — and for imaginary reasons — it’s no wonder investors stay away from Canada. Then there is the fact that Carney has given both the B.C. government and coastal First Nations de facto vetoes over an oil pipeline to the West Coast. And both groups have declared they aren’t afraid to exercise those vetoes. That will certainly raise the anxiety of potential investors who might spend billions getting federal approval only to lose it all because a First Nation or the very anti-development B.C. government figuratively lays itself across a pipeline right-of-way. On Monday, B.C. NDP Premier David Eby said he might be open to pipeline from Alberta to the coast if such a line did not require the lifting of the federal tanker ban off B.C.’s northern coast. If the pipeline could be brought to Vancouver (which already has a tanker port), Eby and his government might be prepared to consider it. But Eby’s not stupid. He knows such a route change could add 40 per cent to the final cost of an already expensive project. Indeed, Eby may be counting on the added expense to deliberately drive investors away and kill the pipeline that way. Then Tuesday, the other group to whom Carney granted a virtual veto — First Nations — voted unanimously for Ottawa to maintain its tanker ban and for Ottawa and the Alberta government to “withdraw” their memorandum of understanding on pipeline construction. Like it never even happened. And Tuesday’s vote wasn’t just among West Coast First Nations. It came unanimously from chiefs all across the country. As a country, we never have a shortage of people eager to kill economy-enhancing projects. The mindsets of our politicians, journalists, artists, interest groups and First Nations — even our “experts” — is to kill projects before they begin. Finally, Alberta, alone among provinces, is in the second quartile of the most-free economies in North America. All other Canadian provinces are in the third quartile. Those provinces’ taxes, regulations and red tape are only slightly more attractive than the most-restrictive Mexican states, which the Fraser Institute ranks as the least-free in North America. We know we need to expand our economy. We know we need to improve our productivity before our standard of living drops further. In the last decade, since the Liberals have been in power, Canadians have watched their incomes stagnate at the same time as prices have risen, substantially. That’s not a good combination. It explains the affordability crisis for items such as groceries, cars and housing. This, though, is a country that likes its “free” government benefits, particularly health care and education. And if we don’t get over our negative mentalities towards private-sector projects, soon enough our economy will shrink and our governments will run out of revenues to cover those expenditures."

You said it: Nation-building projects done - "Hooray! We have yet another spineless PM in Mark Carney who has, in essence, given de facto pipeline vetoes to B.C. and the First Nations. In other words, we will never again complete any badly needed “nation-building project” in Canada. Lorne Gunter writes, ”As a country, we never have a shortage of people eager to kill all economy-enhancing projects” before they even begin. These radical elements of our society will be the ones to scream the loudest when, as Lorne writes, our governments run out of revenues to cover “free” government benefits like health care and education."

Letters: Why does 'Buy Canadian' exclude 'Buy Alberta (oil)'? - "Why does Prime Minister Mark Carney’s “Buy Canadian” policy exclude Albertan oil? How can Canada become a self-sufficient energy superpower while importing crude oil into Ontario, Quebec and the Atlantic provinces? Canada spends approximately $20 billion annually importing oil into eastern Canadian provinces. Every year eastern Canadians convert $20 billion Canadian dollars into USD to pay for the imported oil they consume. Essentially $20 billion Canadian dollars are exported from Canada’s economy annually. National income increases as money circulates through the economy. Basic economics calls this circulation of money the multiplier effect. Using a reasonable Marginal Propensity to Consume of 60 per cent, providing Albertan oil to eastern Canadian consumers would add $50 billion to Canada’s economy annually. Building the Energy East pipeline and securing energy self-sufficiency in a troubled world should be the No. 1 nation-building project. Shipping processed petroleum products will minimize the pipeline’s footprint. Pipeline construction will keep Canada’s steel and manufacturing industries busy. Using Canadian know-how with Canadian engineering and trades will lower unemployment rates. Carney tried to appeased U.S. President Donald Trump with a proposed revised Keystone XL oil pipeline shipping Alberta crude to Nebraska. Instead of “Buy Canadian Oil,” the PM’s solution is to increase dependency on our American trading partner. Given Carney’s ‘values’ it is easy to understand why he has a blind spot for Canadian oil."

Links - 30th March 2026 (2 - Migrants: Canada [including Extortion Crisis])

Indian gangs are terrorising Canada - "South Asian communities across Canada are being terrorised by gangs – and city officials in Surrey, BC are calling on the federal government to declare a national state of emergency.  The crimes follow a distinctive pattern. South Asian gangs demand money from members of their own communities. Intimidation, threats and even shootings follow. Gang members drive to someone’s home or business, and video themselves shooting at buildings and vehicles. They then post the recording online or send it to the target, with threats of worse to come if payment is not made. The city of Surrey has seen a drastic uptick in these crimes, with police reporting 35 extortion attempts since the beginning of January. But the problem is perhaps even more severe in Brampton, Ontario with regional police reporting nearly 500 extortion cases each year since 2023. Edmonton, and more recently Calgary, have had their share as well. Dharmjit Mand in Ontario says he was contacted in the autumn of 2025 via WhatsApp and told he had been chosen to ‘donate’ $2 million to the Lawrence Bishnoi gang, a transnational criminal organisation that is based in India but has reportedly put down deep roots in Canada. Mand blocked the number and told the police. But in late November, he got a call from another number with a threat: ‘We’re going to show you what we can do.’  The next night, a car drove by Mand’s farmhouse and seven shots were fired out the window. A video of the shooting was posted online with threats against Mand, accusing him of being a drug dealer. Police told Mand to move, so he went to live with his brother – only to have his brother’s house shot at a couple of weeks later. Mand said he now intends to move his family to the US... Critics of current bail legislation point out that police are effectively forced to carry out a catch and release programme, arresting violent offenders only to see them back on the streets 24 hours later, pending an often distant court date. And when that day comes, the Canadian judiciary’s focus on reintegration into the community, combined with ‘identity-based justice,’ mean that sentences are often light and parole easily earned.   Gangs are also expert at exploiting the weaknesses in Canadian immigration policy. Many of their members are present in Canada illegally, often on expired student visas. Some were already known criminals in their home countries, who somehow escaped proper vetting on entry.    Last December, at least 14 suspects avoided deportation by claiming refugee status, buying themselves years of time in Canada, along with subsidised health care and social programmes, according to Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland. They now cannot be deported until the Refugee Protection Division rules on the merit of their claims – with a multi-year backlog of refugee cases to be processed ahead of them.   Back in Surrey, authorities worry that people aren’t reporting incidents of extortion out of fear. Some are perhaps even paying the money demanded. Locals say there is a strong sense that police are unable to protect the public effectively. Some are calling for stronger ‘castle’ laws in Canada so they can arm themselves in self-defence.  Police have called for Surrey residents to abide by the law, concerned that the situation may descend into vigilantism. One extortion victim was reportedly investigated after allegedly responding to a drive-by shooting by firing back."
Time for even more restrictions on legal gun owners!

RCMP head of B.C. Extortion Task Force sorry for challenging term ‘crisis’ - "Despite dozens of new extortion threats and eight extortion-related shootings this year, the B.C. RCMP says progress is being made to curb extortion violence and to hold those responsible accountable... Brewer said that the extortion-related cases, most of them in Surrey, are not a crisis. “There’s not a crisis,” he said. “What’s happening out there with drug overdoses — that’s a crisis, people are dying. This [threat of extortion] is a threat to public safety, absolutely, and I take it very seriously.” On Wednesday, Brewer doubled down on that message.  “When I say, yes, is it important to people? Yes. Do people feel scared? Do individuals believe it’s a crisis? Absolutely. Are we taking it extremely seriously? Yes.  “Are we putting all the resources we can towards it? Absolutely are. But my point being, if we just call everything a crisis, right, I have to focus on those that are important. Extortions are a primary focus for us in policing right now, particularly in the Lower Mainland, but across the country.”  Surrey journalist Gurpreet Singh Sahota said that at first, he thought Brewer was going to say something else.  “If it’s not a crisis then what is the crisis?” he said. “People are getting shot in the shoulder, people get shot in the jaw and we don’t know even if the killings are related to these extortion-related things. Then what the crisis is? What we call the crisis if it’s not the crisis.” Sahota said he thought Brewer’s comments showed the mindset of the B.C. RCMP — that they don’t think this is a crisis situation.  “Honestly, we are here, Punjabis here from the last 125 years. And Canada is here for 159 years. We as a community build Canada and somehow, we feel today that we are not part of it, that we’re not part of mainstream,” he added. “Still, we’re immigrants.”  “And if the same thing happens to a non-Punjabi, maybe then it will be a crisis.” B.C. Premier David Eby said on Wednesday that if Brewer did not think the situation was a “crisis,” then he needed to step aside.  However, on Wednesday afternoon, Brewer issued a statement saying he wanted to apologize for challenging the term “crisis” as it has now become the focus of the issue and has called into question the RCMP’s commitment to addressing extortions in the province... Surrey radio host and former MLA Jinny Sims called the task force update on Tuesday “superficial.”  She said that what she sees in Surrey does not feel like Canada anymore."
Whatever you say will be racist and xenophobic. You can't win

Canada is losing control of a major city to gangsters - "In September, the federal government declared that the Lawrence Bishnoi gang — an organized crime group from India that has been linked to many of the alleged extortions — would henceforth be a designated terror entity. Last week, Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree said he had deputized two RCMP helicopters to help stem the crisis.  And in late January, Surrey City Council called for their community to be placed under a state of emergency.  But the extortion crisis is underlain by two problems that are worsening crime almost everywhere else in Canada.  First, foreign criminals have been able to exploit a porous and overwhelmed Canadian immigration system. Second, a justice system is proving chronically unable to send these foreign criminals home or even keep them in jail.  The result is that Surrey, B.C. is now plagued by threats, shootings and arsons by criminals predominantly targeting the South Asian community... starting just after New Years, the attacks massively accelerated. Almost every day this year has seen Surrey Police announce some new shooting, threat or arson attack believed to be perpetrated by extortionists... In January alone, Surrey Police tracked 36 separate extortion attacks.  And those are just the ones being reported to the police. In January, a police investigator told independent journalist Sam Cooper that extortion targets, many of whom are often repeat victims, were losing faith in Canadian law enforcement.  “I’m hearing of people living in hotels and they’re footing the bill for themselves, or they’ve left the country,” he said.  Or, in some cases, they’re reportedly shooting back. Last month, Surrey Police announced that homeowners believed to have fired at alleged extortionists were under investigation for “vigilantism.”  The dual problems of lax immigration and a toothless criminal justice system were probably best highlighted in December, when Surrey Police arrested 15 Indian nationals suspected of extortion-related crimes, only for all 15 to immediately claim status as refugees.  Such an obvious exploitation of Canada’s asylum system drew public condemnation from all three levels of government, with Eby calling the whole thing “ludicrous.”  But it worked; even as Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada vowed in a recent media statement that asylum claims would not shield criminals from punishment, the claims did indeed throw a wrench into Canada’s normal removal procedures for accused criminals.  Reversing such “misuse of the system,” said IRCC, would require an Act of Parliament.  Prior extortion arrests have revealed suspects who entered the country on student visas, capitalizing on an unprecedented surge of temporary migration into Canada that often left immigration officials unable to perform even basic screening.  Vikram Sharma, an Indian national accused of two Bishnoi Gang extortion attacks, was one of hundreds of thousands to enter Canada on a student visa in 2022. That was the same year that the number of study permit holders in Canada would soar to a record-breaking 807,000.  Meanwhile, last month, Crown prosecutors revealed the details of an accused double murderer alleged to have killed a Guelph, Ont., couple in a robbery “less than a month” after arriving in Canada as a student.  Two of the alleged hitmen accused of carrying out the 2023 assassination of Sikh nationalist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey, B.C. had similarly entered Canada on student visas that the suspects themselves would boast had been “obtained in a few days.”  All the while, in a law enforcement pattern that is now routine in every corner of Canada, arrested suspects are usually given bail. That was the general theme of a small anti-extortion protest in Surrey this week, with protest organizer Rasinder Kaur telling the CBC “the fear in our community is because (perpetrators) are not getting punished.”"

Harman Bhangu on X - "The irony is hard to miss. While Mark Carney praises Canada’s international student program last week, Lovebir Singh was here on a student visa  According to federal records, Lovebir Singh who held that visa is believed to have fired shots into a Surrey home after a $500,000 extortion threat. Canadians are supposed to believe this is just an isolated failure of the system. People in British Columbia are not buying that anymore  Let’s start with the obvious: we are glad he is gone. The Canada Border Services Agency removed him from the country and deported him. Let me be clear, that is exactly what should happen to criminals that are not of this country tied to violent criminal activity  Now investigators need to go much further. Every associate, accomplice, sponsor, recruiter, and anyone connected to the school program that brought him here should be investigated. These operations do not appear out of nowhere. Someone sponsored him, someone enrolled him, someone helped him get settled, and someone connected him to the people behind this extortion network  And there is a bigger question Ottawa needs to answer: are criminal networks exploiting the international student visa system as a doorway into Canada? Because if someone can arrive on a study permit and end up allegedly participating in an extortion shooting months later, something in the system is clearly being abused @MichelleRempel"

Editorial: Stop crying 'racism' to kill refugee reforms - "Canada’s immigration, refugee and asylum system has long been broken, and to claim any questioning of it is based on racism, as Prime Minister Mark Carney’s cabinet ministers often do when they are challenged by the Conservatives, is absurd.
Among the failings:
The federal government has lost track of 30,000 individuals scheduled for deportation, some convicted of serious offences.
Almost nine in 10 rejected asylum seekers in Canada since 2020 are still in Canada — 55,320 out of 63,436, or 87%. Of the smaller group of rejected asylum seekers who have already gone through the refugee appeal process since 2020, more than eight in 10 are still in Canada — 26,153 out of 31,631 or 83%. The current backlog of refugee claims is nearly 300,000. Because of that, tens of thousands of refugee applications have been approved solely on the basis of paperwork, without an oral hearing. Since it typically takes two years or longer to decide a claim, claimants need to be provided with the necessities of life...
Even the Liberals admit the system needs fixing and have introduced various half-measures to do so, making their accusations against the Conservatives even more bizarre. In fact, many of these problems originated with a 1985 decision by the Supreme Court of Canada extending Charter protection to non-citizens — basically, to almost everyone who arrives here, regardless of how they got here — which Canadian governments of all stripes have failed to address."

AITAH for explaining the consequences of his actions to my son? : r/AITAH - "My family lives in Canada. This is important.  My kid was being bullied at school. He is a big kid and I have always told him to resolve his problems with words. I've told him to report bullying to teachers, and if they don't listen to tell the principal. Also to tell me and his mom so we can follow up. My son's after school program is a taekwondo class. Also important. He's been in taekwondo since he was in kindergarten. He also plays hockey.  There are a group of kids at his school that have been assholes to my kid and his friends. My kid did the right thing and told the teacher monitoring recess. She told him that the kids were new to Canada and that they didn't know how to fit in yet.  He went to the principal and got told pretty much the same thing. So he told his mom. She wanted to go confront the parents and she likely would have ended up in custody. She's Irish. Like real Irish from Ireland not Marky Mark Irish.  I told her I would take care of it.  I made an appointment to talk to the principal and teacher along with my son. I went into the meeting with a simple goal. To stop the bullying. The principal and teacher both tried the same excuse on me. That these kids were newcomers and they weren't fully aware of how Canada was different from their home country and what they saw on American TV.  I asked what was being done to stop it. They said they had talked to the boys. I asked if the parents had been brought in and talked to. He said no. Okay. So I turned to my kid and I explained that in Canada kids under twelve years old CANNOT be charged with a crime. In fact they can't even be arrested. Worst case scenario if anything happened he might have to do some community service.  The principal and teacher went crazy telling me that I can't tell him that. I asked them if I was lying? They both shut up. I pointed to them and told my kid to remember that they didn't say I was wrong. I told him to tell me in a week if he was still being bullied.  My understanding is that all the bullies parents were called in and told to control their children. The bullies were also given library detention instead of recess for a month.  I'm satisfied with the result but the teacher and principal seemed upset.  My wife thinks I should have given him the information privately."

Canadians now spending $1 billion per year to cover health-care costs of refugee claimants - "Paying the health-care premiums of refugee claimants will cost Canadians a record $1 billion this year, with some of the beneficiaries continuing to receive free health care despite their claims having already been rejected.  That’s according to a new analysis by the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer, and it’s just one of several ballooning costs wrought by the unprecedented number of foreign nationals currently living in Canada by virtue of a claim of refugee status.  The Interim Federal Health Program, which offers premium health benefits to asylum claimants, is soon set to hit $1 billion in annual costs for the first time... This is a five-fold increase from just six years ago, when the program was costing $211 million per year. The analysis also projects that costs are expected to surge for the foreseeable future, with the annual budget likely to hit $1.5 billion as early as 2029. All told, between now and 2030, Canadians are on track to spend $6.2 billion on health care for refugees or refugee claimants... the Interim Federal Health Program can be accessed even by asylum claimants who have had their case rejected.  It also offers a higher level of care than that enjoyed by the average Canadian citizen. In addition to hospital care and surgical care, the IFHP also covers dental care, vision care, pharmacare and other services not typically covered by public health plans... As of the most recent count by the Immigration and Refugee Board, there were 299,614 foreign nationals in Canada waiting for their refugee claim to be reviewed. This is larger than the entire population of either Saskatoon, Sask., or Windsor, Ont.  It’s also a more than an 1,800 per cent increase from the 16,058 who were in the country when the Trudeau Liberals first took power in 2015. The figure includes tens of thousands of illegal border-crossers who entered the United States on tourist visas before entering Canada illegally to make a refugee claim. It also includes a recent spike in foreign nationals who entered Canada on student visas, but claimed refugee status as soon as their visas expired.  As asylum claimants are often allowed immediate access to government benefits, the spike has incurred several uncontrolled surges in federal spending.  Another example is the Interim Housing Assistance Program, which pays the shelter costs and even food bills of asylum claimants. In 2024, Conservative MP Lianne Rood published disclosures from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada finding that some asylum claimants were receiving room and board benefits in excess of $200 per day. While the benefits were not universal among asylum claimants, those accepted to receive food and shelter supports were getting the equivalent of $84 per day for meals and $140 per day for hotel rooms.  And this was in addition to a whole latticework of additional federal payouts to asylum seekers, including one that gave $3,000 cash payouts to Gazans entering Canada... The Carney government recently announced reforms to the Interim Federal Health Program intended to curb its ballooning cost — although, the coverage still remains far more generous than that enjoyed by the average Canadian.  Starting May 1, asylum claimants will have to pay $4 per prescription instead of nothing, and if they access “supplemental health products” such as counselling or dental care, they will have to cover 30 per cent of the bill themselves."
Damn Conservative governments trying to destroy Canadian Healthcare!

Canada has a hidden asylum-policy problem - The Globe and Mail
Howard Anglin on X - "This report into the breakdown of the Canadian refugee system by the former director of policy at IRCC and a former member of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada should be a major scandal. In a sane country, heads would roll, starting with the ministers who oversaw this catastrophe.  Key takeaways: as the Liberal's lax border and asylum policy led to a flood of claims, the agency that hears the claims adopted a short-cut to deal with the volume: it effectively rubber stamped tens of thousands of applications without a hearing to assess their credibility.  As the author notes, global asylum flows are sensitive to approval rates in different countries, and the incredibly high approval rate in Canada (80% compared to European countries with approval rates half that), means we have become a magnet for bogus asylum claims -- which are then waived in without a hearing, leading to more claims. Rinse and repeat.  It's a disaster will ripple through our country for generations, as the bogus claimants from this cohort are almost certainly here to stay. They and their families have defrauded their way into a permanent home here. The government let them do it, and is still doing nothing to stop it.  A start would be to do retrospective quality checks to see how many claims were wrongly approved under this rubber-stamp policy, and if enough are identified to indicate a problem, to re-do them and remove protection for cases of fraud. But that would be an admission of failure by the government, and no government wants to admit it willfully turned a blind eye to mass fraud."
Adam Zivo on X - "When I got my Master of Public Policy at the Munk School (2018-2020), it was taboo to acknowledge that immigration fraud is a significant problem. I remember during one major lecture, I raised my hand and suggested that, if certain countries are associated with asylum fraud, then their applications should be subjected to additional scrutiny. The guest lecturer basically called this idea racist, and my conservative classmate (who was quieter about her beliefs) later remarked that this seemed to be the point where I had been “cancelled” by my classmates.  I bring this up because I want people to understand the ideological culture that allowed our immigration system to crumble."
Elbows up!
Clearly, a former director of policy at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada doesn't know anything and is just a xenophobic far right extremist who has no "empathy"

The judge determined to dismantle Canada's immigration safeguards - "In 2013, Toronto lawyer Avvy Yao-Yao Go described herself as a “loudmouth activist for politicians to contend with.” She was an advocate of chain migration, a former member of the Ontario law society’s equity committee, a vocal critic of journalists and politicians, and once, she even tried to force the government to pay reparations to descendants of Chinese-Canadians impacted by the head tax (after losing one appeal in this process, her organization accused an appeal judge of racism; the complaint was tossed out).  Ideally, she wouldn’t be in charge of waving migrants into the country from a judicial seat. Nevertheless, Go was made a Federal Court judge in 2021 and much of her job is playing immigration gatekeeper. The results are what you’d expect, and they’re not favourable to Canadians. Most recently, Go halted citizenship revocation proceedings against a pharmacist whose immigration application appeared to fail Canada’s residency requirement, and whose husband had ties to immigration fraud that involved faking Canadian residency. It was unfair to go after the pharmacist, Go wrote, because the immigration application was made and approved in the early 2000s, the investigation into its shadowy nature was made in 2014, and it was only in 2024 that the federal government officially decided to revoke citizenship.  Indeed, that wasn’t the only time in recent history that Go has rewarded rule-breaking. In September, she paused the deportation order of a Mexican man who came to Canada in 2022 and didn’t report to Canadian border officers one day afterward, as was required. Despite this, he was still in the country three years later, fighting deportation and alleging cartel persecution.  Notably, Go paused the deportation proceedings of an Indian man on the basis that his removal from Canada would prevent him from helping his Canadian wife (whom he married only weeks after meeting) cope with her ADHD.  In December, Go paused the deportation proceedings of twoNigerians who each claimed asylum on the basis of bisexuality after their Canadian study permits expired. Asylum officials were skeptical; Go, less so.  Even better was her decision in May to halt the deportation of a Nigerian who claimed asylum in Canada in November 2023, returned home the next month, and came back to Canada in September 2024 to make yet another claim on the basis of sexuality (he had a wife, but he claimed to have had a same-sex relationship two decades ago). His evidence was weak, his story had holes, and it was clear by his return that Nigeria wasn’t all that dangerous, hence his rejection by immigration officials. Go put a stop to that on the basis that officers didn’t properly explain why his claims weren’t credible.  In May, Go also permitted a Nigerian family to remain in Canada as they continued their long fight against deportation. They came to Canada in 2018, claimed asylum, and were rejected; afterward, they failed their pre-removal risk assessment. They challenged that determination and lost, and then tried to stay by applying for permanent residency on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. They failed on that ground, too. Go set aside the immigration officials’ decision to reject the family’s permanent residency application on the ground that the officer didn’t properly consider the best interests of the family’s two children — aged 18 and 16 — to remain in Canada. In this case, they weren’t even anchor babies; the fact the kids had been here for several years was enough in Go’s mind to greenlight the family’s abuse of the asylum system.  She also paused the deportation proceedings of Hedjer Etti Becher of Chad, who claimed asylum on the basis of political persecution. That man claimed to be a political organizer of a persecuted group but later changed his story and said he was merely a member; he also failed to present any documentary evidence to support his claim, and, despite stating that he was forced into hiding with 17 of his “comrades,” he couldn’t name a single one. Immigration officials wanted to deport him accordingly, but Go got in the way. Interestingly, a man with a similar name appears to be interested in Canadian politics, as his Facebook cover photo depicts him beside Alberta Premier Danielle Smith.  Similarly, Go intervened in the favour of two Sri Lankan men — one in 2022, another in 2024 — who tried to claim asylum in Canada and initially failed. Both fled to the United States initially and then crossed the northern border, an indication of country shopping, and told immigration officials that they were in danger due to being perceived as members of the Tamil Tigers. Immigration officials didn’t buy it, but Go seemed to. The first man appears to have succeeded: his name is listed as the director of P.K.Kobi Inc., a Canadian corporation based in Oshawa, Ont.  And in March, Go extended the stay of a Somali asylum seeker who had lived in Sweden since 2007 under false pretenses. Nearly a decade later, she entered Canada using fraudulent means with her four kids. Immigration adjudicators eventually rejected her claim, but Go granted the woman’s application to have that rejection reviewed by a different decision-maker.  Finally, in December, Go cancelled an immigration official’s denial of permanent residency to a 71-year-old grandmother from India on compassionate grounds, who had only come to Canada in 2019. While integration is unlikely and the cost to taxpayers and health-care capacity is certain, what mattered to Go was the woman’s ability to pass her culture on to her children. The matter has been returned to immigration officials."

Michelle Rempel Garner on X - "Here's where I moved the exact change that Premier Eby was asking for - preventing non-citizens convicted of serious crimes from making bogus asylum claims. The Liberals didn't support it."

Meme - "r/CanadaMassImmigration
Happened at my work
I live in a pretty "white" town and work at Canadian Tire. Our new store manager is an Indian woman. I didn't think anything of it until a bunch of new workers started showing up. They're all Indian and half are related to her. They have no clue what they are doing and walk around the store all day doing nothing. Honestly saw this subreddit posted to X and thought I'd share. It's out of control."
"CANADAMASSIMMIGRATION: BANNED. This community has been banned. This community was banned for violating Reddit's rule against promoting hate."