Link here to the op-ed published in the Western Standard.

Link here to the original longer essay published in the C2C Journal.

I hope you enjoy it!

Paulina

buy me a coffee

My abridged and updated op-ed below published in the Western Standard with the original and longer essay published by the C2C Journal.

Grocery shopping on a beautiful Friday night, I couldn’t find celery, but that wasn’t the only thing missing; the produce section’s shelves were largely empty. Asking an employee, I learned that at least 30% of the store’s walk-in clientele was pressuring the grocer to boycott American produce. Here I was, a Canadian, on a limited budget, and fellow Canadians had made it impossible to purchase fresh food that’s affordable.

Food shortages and soaring prices are more than an inconvenience — they’re a warning sign. Not because you can’t find pecorino cheese for Jamie Oliver’s Summertime Tagliarini. But because scarcity has a way of turning consumers into zealots. The moral panic accompanying this year’s “buy Canadian” wave strikes me as not unlike the toilet paper obsession during the “great toilet paper scare of 2020.”

As emotionally satisfying as such gestures might be, self-righteous grocery patrols cannot sanitize Canada from the brash, blunt, and “anti-Canadian” personality of the American President. The conceit is absurd not only because it restricts supply and reduces competition — raising prices for Canadians who already can barely afford to eat. But because it suggests the president of the world’s biggest economy can be wished away with the swap of a sticker. Nevertheless, our Laurentian elites have doubled down, deeming the Americans unworthy of negotiation, at one point declaring the entire relationship over.

Canadian anti-Americanism is not simply disagreement with US policy. Mature disagreement could be useful — it might ask how Canada could become richer, stronger, more productive, better defended, less dependent, and more capable. Instead, the lazy version is an alibi veiled in a cultural sneer, allowing Canada to avoid responsibility for its own stagnation and creeping decline. It lets Canada blame Trump, Republicans, American capitalism, American arrogance, American exceptionalism, and American vulgarity. By implication, Canadians are the opposite: polite, refined, wise, moderate, enlightened, and morally evolved.

The narrative is flattering and anesthetizing. It allows a fraying country to milk the emotional pleasure of superiority without the burden of achievement. Washington is ever the villain while Canada is spared the painful question: why are we so dependent on a country we so enjoy resenting? Meanwhile, the harder domestic problems remain: weak productivity, low business investment, regulatory sludge, strangled markets, botched procurement, unaffordable housing, and a culture that rewards woke “virtue” over merit.

Meanwhile, the Mark Carney and Doug “Rabid Dog” Ford governments have proved unpredictable even in their anti-Americanism. We’ve changed course too many times to fathom. Even summarizing it is bewildering: “Elbows Up” became permission for lazy anti-Americanism, metamorphosing into the self-servingly edited Ronald Reagan anti-tariff TV ad, to the Gordie Howe bridge dispute, then pleas for the Americans to “support our neighbours” as Canadian wildfire smoke crossed the border — after Ottawa eliminated nearly half the relevant emergency operations positions.

As if that weren’t enough, as Trump threatened still more tariffs, a crazed single-day rhetorical swing included “dismantle the US” and “intensifying trade”. Whatever one thinks of Trump, Canada’s antics are not sophisticated diplomacy, let alone serious negotiations with our most important trading partner; nor are they indicative of serious political will. They’re a temper tantrum played out at the expense of terrified Canadians.

A mature Canadian patriotism would manage to restrain itself while looking hard at its own systems, institutions, resources, and finances — and fix them. It would make Canada so productive, so innovative, so free, and so well-governed that it could handle whatever the US could throw at it.

Alas, the country’s decline proceeds apace. While some Canadians keep busy policing grapefruit labels for political impurity, many of the country’s most talented and ambitious head south. According to a 2024 paper by Leader’s Study, a shocking 48% of new businesses founded by Canadians were launched in the US.

Canada can posture against the US culturally, but its most ambitious builders routinely look south for capital, scale, compensation, and company formation. Canada’s problem is not that it still likes America too much. It is that it resents American power and success while exporting the people most capable of building Canadian power and delivering Canadian success. Canadians watch ambition migrate elsewhere and then congratulate themselves for not being American. It is self-sabotage.

Yes, I know: America is chaotic, aggressive, unequal, loud, and exasperating. But it is also dynamic. It rewards ambition. It generates prosperity. Canada, by contrast, specializes in over-governing its over-regulated markets, making ambition so reviled that hating Elon Musk is its latest virtue.

Resurrecting Canadian self-determination would mean building its productivity pipelines, procurement systems, talent pathways, and innovation infrastructure so that staying in Canada became the obvious choice. It would focus on fully exploiting its most competitive assets for revenue generation: oil, natural gas, mines, and critical minerals.

A serious country would want better. It would want less theatre and more capability. Less resentment and more achievement. Less maple-leaf moralism in the grocery aisle, and more of the hard, unglamorous work required to make Canada strong, respected, resilient, free, and wealthy.

Because behind the curtain, a Canadian founder will quietly board a flight to San Francisco because they dared to dream, knowing that even if they fail, they will learn more than they ever would from dutiful compliance. Elsewhere, a Canadian consumer will stare at a pitiful bundle of celery and wonder how a country so abundantly rich became small enough to mistake sourcing a different stalk for national strategy.

P.M. Szpunar writes personal reflections on totalitarianism and political culture through the lens of opera and the operatic canon. Her work can be found at www.peaisgreen.com.

The original, full-length version of this article was recently published in C2C Journal.

buy me a coffee

Part of a series on America’s 250th Anniversary of Independence, and originally published in the C2C Journal: Ideas that Lead, I am thrilled to share my latest article in full for you below.

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

Grocery shopping on a beautiful Friday night not long ago, I couldn’t find celery, so I asked a clerk about it. “Oh, let me bring you some!” he exclaimed, uneasily. He returned visibly embarrassed, because all he had to present was the most pitiful and emaciated stalks I’d ever seen. Celery wasn’t the only thing missing; the produce section’s shelves were largely empty. I couldn’t shake the unsettling sight, so I asked another employee whether Friday was re-stocking night. “Oh no,” she said. “We’re getting a lot of pressure from customers, including emails, to boycott American produce.” “How many customers?” I asked. “Around 30 percent of our regular traffic,” she said. “Apparently at Loblaw’s, it’s even worse.”

For a moment, I had nothing to say. “I’m sorry,” I finally managed. “Some people just want to eat real food.” I left without those $5 miniature celery stocks but with the absurdity sitting like a doughy lump in my stomach. For over a year, I’ve longed for delicious and just-harvested greenhouse-grown veggies from a specialty market, but I just can’t afford that. So here I am, a Canadian, on a limited budget, and fellow Canadians have made it impossible to purchase fresh food that’s affordable.

I’m not the only customer leaving stores empty-handed, because such anti-American behaviour is widespread. A year back, the Angus Reid polling firm found that 85 percent of Canadians had replaced or planned to replace U.S. products in their purchases, and 59 percent said they would boycott American imports outright. Yet long after “Elbows Up” was laid bare as a cynical election ploy, people are still at it. And grocery stores are willing to oblige.

Denying shoppers the best-priced goods for political reasons strikes me as part of a larger racket. Global News reported that Loblaw’s had weighed packaging together with food, thus overcharging customers. Other tricks have included taking formerly loose lemons, onions or avocadoes and selling them in bundles, or obfuscating unit pricing in packages of convenience, otherwise known as “shrinkflation”. A cucumber can be transformed into a “snacking solution,” with the customer paying premium for plastic, slicing and the emotional relief of not having to use a knife. Prices remain emotionally familiar whilst quantities disappear as grocers are forced to play magic tricks in order to stay alive.

Food shortages and zooming prices are more than an inconvenience – they’re a warning sign. Not because you can’t find pecorino cheese for Jamie Oliver’s Summertime Tagliarini. But because scarcity has a way of turning consumers into zealots. The moral panic accompanying “Buy Canadian” is not unlike the obsession with toilet paper during the “Great toilet paper scare of 2020”.

For shoppers who think they’re both signaling and bolstering national loyalty through grocery choices, the problem is that supply chains are as tightly integrated as a car’s engine. Slapping on a maple-leaf sticker won’t unwind such complexity. Irrespective of whether the product is American, imported or “prepared” in Canada, it asks those “Elbows Up” consumers to patrol grocery aisles like hyper-vigilant border agents on the hunt for smuggled goods. The patriotic profiteering they’re attempting to root out even gets its own inflammatory label: “maple washing”.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency last year reported finding 12 cases of maple washing, where food baldly labelled “Canadian” was found to be imported. Shoppers were aghast to find “domestic” asparagus with a small tag from Peru. Worse, the Peruvian asparagus was distributed by a U.S. company! The federal agency proceeded to “take action” by forcing grocers to halt the eating of politically contaminated American food, but graciously declined to levy potential penalties as high as $15,000.

As emotionally satisfying as such gestures might be to a certain type of Canadian, self-righteous grocery patrols cannot decode supply chains or sanitize Canada from the brash, blunt and unpredictable “anti-Canadian” personality of the American president. The conceit is absurd not only because it restricts supply and reduces competition, raising prices for Canadians who already can hardly afford to eat, but because it suggests that the president of the world’s most powerful economy can be wished away with the swapping of a sticker. Nevertheless, the Laurentian elites have doubled down, deeming the Americans unworthy of negotiation, to the point of declaring the entire relationship over.

There is something deeply unserious about a country mistaking resentment for strategy. The Washington Post reported on Canadian cafes renaming their Americano coffees “Canadiano” to reflect the country’s new spirit of “nationalism” in response to President Donald Trump’s tariffs and “51^st state” comments. These are small ideas that, replicated often enough, collapse a nation into parody and humiliation. They create further polarization and division, degrading a healthy and non-ideological “Canada is not for sale” sort of patriotism into a moralistic, preening “Canada is inherently wiser, kinder and more civilized than America” pose.

It is one thing to oppose a government, quite another to treat hundreds of millions of people as a contaminant worthy of disinfection. Such a posture might be emotionally soothing, but strategically it is weak.

Tweet

It should be obvious – though it seems to escape millions of Canadians – that consumer boycotts hurt both sides, including Canadian businesses. Sales of U.S. spirits in Canada fell by 66.3 percent after multiple provinces pulled U.S. products from liquor-store shelves in response to the Trump tariffs, and total sales of spirits in Canada fell by 12.8 percent. Removing U.S. alcohol from Canadian shelves hit companies, distributors, workers and consumers in both countries, none of whom imposed the tariff policy. The CEO of Kentucky-based Brown-Forman Corp., maker of Jack Daniel’s whisky, declared the provinces’ actions more damaging than a tariff.

When every American brand becomes suspect, the posture looks less like strategy than temper-tantrum. And it signals a shift in temperament from an entirely reasonable “We oppose this Administration’s policy” to a corrosive “We are done with America.” In one such signal, Canadians began cancelling trips to the U.S. as well as purchases of U.S. real estate (though there are recent signs of a rebound). It is one thing to oppose a government, quite another to treat hundreds of millions of people as a contaminant worthy of disinfection.

Such a posture might be emotionally soothing, but strategically it is weak. Liquor, produce and travel boycotts hit not only distant California and Kentucky but border states where people tend to love Canadians and oppose Trump’s tariffs – and whose Senators and Congressional representatives can often be counted on to lobby for smooth two-way trade and travel.

And while such posturing and signaling indeed is unserious, it’s hardly funny, because it’s seriously self-destructive. A Canada that cannot prevent tent cities from being normalized in its parks and underpasses should be cautious about congratulating itself on its moral superiority over the economic powerhouse it fundamentally depends on. At its weakest, “Elbows Up” becomes permission for lazy anti-Americanism – a way to feel brave without doing the harder work of rebuilding Canada’s own sources of strength. And it avoids the harder question: how did Canada become so structurally dependent on the U.S. in the first place?

This pattern is not new. Canada has a long history of periodic temper-tantrums aimed at the Americans. Anti-Americanism predates Confederation itself. But that’s no justification for its indestructible recurrence; the opposite, actually. The anxieties of a small, infant country (1867 population: 3.4 million) sitting next to a chaotically evolving, aggressively expansionist behemoth against which it had fought the bitter War of 1812 – still within living memory – are understandable. Behaving the same way 150 years later, when Canada has more people than the entire U.S. did back in the 1880s, plus a $3.2 trillion annual GDP, isn’t understandable; it’s a sign of terminal immaturity, or maybe a collective psychiatric disorder.

How does the “Buy Canadian” movement reflect anti-Americanism and amount to economic self-sabotage?

The “Buy Canadian” movement that sprang up in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s musings in 2024-2025 about making Canada the 51^st state, like other forms of consumer boycott, harms Canadian businesses and consumers by restricting supply and reducing competition, reducing choice and raising domestic prices. This worsens Canada’s affordability crisis in a time of rising inflation and stagnant wages. Though presented as a morally praiseworthy form of patriotism, the U.S. boycott is an emotional response rather than a strategic one, diverting Canadians from beginning the harder work of rebuilding Canada’s own sources of strength. “Buy Canadian” is a manifestation of lazy anti-Americanism that mistakes symbolic distance from the U.S. for strategic independence.

But recur these tantrums do. There were spats in every decade following the World War II, sometimes more than one. The softwood lumber war in the early 1980s, then the debate over possible Canada-U.S. free trade in the late 1980s when the left, the media and about half the Laurentian establishment spent five years hollering, “They’re coming for our health care! They’re going to steal our water!!” No such thing happened, of course. But on it goes. As recently as 2018, Canada had another eruption of performative economic independence from the U.S., before quickly returning to its deeply integrated economy.

Canada and the United States will remain siblings by virtue of geography, integrated supply chains and – the unmentionable word – culture, whether they like it or not. Two-way trade last year fell to a “mere” $1 trillion in goods and another $300-$500 billion in services, but is growing again this year. With Mexico pushing hard for renegotiation of the three-nation free trade pact at the sight of patience wearing thin in the Trump Administration, the fracture is now a lot more worrying. Lazy nationalism even creeps into the treaty’s label. Is it USMCA, placing the member countries in descending order of population? No, it’s the CUSMA, because of Canada, beginning with a C!

Tantrums on repeat: Canada’s anti-American outbursts are older than the nation itself, with trade disputes and boycotts recurring virtually every decade. Shown: (top left) activist David Orchard opposing the impending North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), September 1992; (top right) an 1869 cartoon expressing anti-annexation sentiment in Canada, captioned “Uncle Sam Kicked Out!”; (bottom) a protester calling for an American boycott at Lornado, the official residence of the U.S. Ambassador to Canada, Ottawa, 2018. (Sources of photos: (top left) Patrick Pettit/Regina Leader-Post; (bottom) The Canadian Press/Justin Tang)

Canadian anti-Americanism is not simply disagreement with U.S. policy. Mature disagreement could be useful. It might ask how Canada could become richer, stronger, more productive, better defended, less dependent and more capable. Instead, the lazy version is an alibi veiled in a cultural sneer. It allows Canada to avoid responsibility for its own stagnation and creeping decline. It lets Canada blame Trump, Republicans, American capitalism, American arrogance, American exceptionalism and American vulgarity. Canadians by implication are polite, refined, wise, moderate, enlightened and morally evolved.

The story is flattering – but also anaesthetizing. It allows a fraying country to milk the emotional pleasure of superiority without the burden of achievement. Washington is ever the villain while Canada is spared the painful question: why are we so dependent on a country we so enjoy resenting? Meanwhile, the harder domestic problems remain: weak productivity, low business investment, regulatory sludge, strangled markets, interminable and botched procurement, unaffordable housing and a political culture that rewards woke “virtue” over merit while subverting true patriotism.

The hypocrisy is difficult to miss with Canadian fans booing the “Star-Spangled Banner” at NHL and NBA games in Vancouver, Toronto and Winnipeg. Although some of that happened while Trump was behaving at his worst, just last month at the Canadian FIFA World Cup opening ceremonies, a sea of red and white paraded through Toronto’s streets – only for Canadian fans mere hours later to boo the American flag. This takes us multiple removes from policy critique into the realm of international humiliation and personal hostility toward ordinary people. It gets worse. A Quebec mayor found himself forced to beg Canadians not to boo American children at a peewee hockey tournament. If national self-respect requires grown adults to be reprimanded for jeering child athletes because of their passport, the politics curdled a while ago.

Mature Canadian patriotism would not confuse deracination with sophistication. It would not sneer at its own once-cherished traditions, desecrate public monuments or treat patriotism as shameful. It would not boo an anthem, eradicate Christmastime street decorations or forbid “God” from being spoken on Remembrance Day. It would build leverage. It would look at its own systems, institutions, resources and finances – and fix them. It would make Canada so productive, so innovative and so well-governed that talented people would not be forced to leave for anywhere else to flourish.

What would true Canadian self-determination look like, if Canadians were willing to move beyond performative anti-Americanism?

Mature Canadian self-determination involves building Canada’s own productivity pipelines, procurement systems, talent pathways and innovation infrastructure to make staying in Canada the obvious choice for its most talented citizens, innovators and entrepreneurs. It means substantively tackling – rather than just tweeting about – serious domestic problems like weak productivity, low business investment and excessive regulation. Such an approach could enable Canada to truly build leverage and strength, fostering a self-confident patriotism based on mutual respect for Americans, and improving Canada-U.S. relations through trade, interaction and alliance rather than emotional resentment.

None of this requires loving America uncritically or ignoring tariffs, insults or genuine threats to Canadian interests. It does require growing up. It requires distinguishing between the American government and the American people. It requires understanding that sovereignty is not a pose or a feeling, but a state of security and respect achieved through relentless work and competence.

Canada’s anti-Americanism is indestructible because it is emotionally convenient. It endures because it is immature. It is pretending that artificially induced emotional distance from the United States is the same as strategic independence from it.

Self-determination isn’t a grocery tag, slogan or renamed coffee. It’s the ability to build, defend, procure, trade, innovate and retain talent. To move goods within one’s own borders, to reward ambition, to attract capital and to make national independence amount to more than just one’s elbows twitching.

Tweet

But while some Canadians keep busy policing grapefruit and strawberry labels for political impurity, many of the country’s most talented and ambitious continue to leave for the United States. They go to American universities, work for American companies, raise American capital and build American-headquartered firms. According to a study by Leader’s Fund, by 2024 a shocking 48 percent of start-up companies founded by Canadians were launched in the U.S.

The contradiction is devastating. If the United States is as crude and dysfunctional as Canadian anti-Americanism insists, why does it continue to achieve so much? Why does it remain such a powerful magnet for Canadian ambition?

Self-determination isn’t a grocery tag, slogan or renamed coffee. It’s the ability to build, defend, procure, trade, innovate and retain talent. To move goods efficiently – and freely – within one’s own borders, to reward ambition, to attract capital and to make national independence amount to more than just one’s elbows twitching.

Mature sovereignty would mean a Canada that could defend its airspace, procure equipment on time, develop resources responsibly, move goods across and among its own provinces without obstruction, attract and retain founders, apply the rule of law blindly and equally, reward excellence through meritocracy and rebuild institutions that work for and protect its people. It would mean building a Canada secure enough not to sneer at Americans but to respect them instead. To trade with them, interact with them, maintain friendships and marriages with them, and stand shoulder-to-shoulder as allies when needed. Sovereignty wouldn’t be confusing.

Instead, confusion sprawls in all directions, from coffee to defence – a realm where cheap self-indulgent anti-Americanism suddenly becomes expensive and dangerous. Last year, Prime Minister Mark Carney ordered a review of the $19 billion contract for 88 American-made F-35 Lightning II stealth fighter jets, saying in part that Canada relied too much on the U.S. for security. This May, Reuters reported that the review was still incomplete, amid suggestions Canada might split its fighter fleet and buy some second-rate Saab Gripen jets.

There’s a legitimate argument for diversifying procurement and building more domestic defence capability. There’s a difference between strategic diversification and procurement as make-believe therapy, however. If Canada’s interminably delayed fighter-jet decision becomes just another opportunity to performatively distance from the United States, while actually degrading our air force’s capabilities, then anti-Americanism has moved from café menus into national security. Here too, confusion hardens into self-destruction when the establishment fires a respected defence official merely for pointing out the downsides of continuous anti-American rhetoric.

The China file is equally revealing. Diversifying trade is sensible and Canada should not remain helplessly dependent on one market. But a Canada that treats the United States as morally suspect while rushing to warm up relations with the cruel tyranny in Beijing is a flibbertigibbet country. In April 2025 Carney labelled China Canada’s most significant geopolitical threat; Canada’s foreign-interference inquiry had found China the most active foreign entity attempting to interfere in Canadian elections. Yet by January of this year Carney was in Beijing grovelling for stronger ties through closer cooperation. Again, diplomacy is important and some trade-offs are necessary, but the contrast is striking. The United States is treated as a bully to be culturally resisted, China a partner to be pragmatically managed. Selective indignation.

How does Canada’s approach to agreements like the trilateral free trade treaty known as CUSMA or USMCA reflect its immature stance on Canada-U.S. relations?

The common Canadian insistence on calling the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement CUSMA rather than USMCA highlights a shallow form of emotional nationalism that diverts from genuine strategic planning and policy execution. It reflects an immature, resentful anti-Americanism that is poisoning relations, prioritizing symbolic gestures and performative nationalism over genuine efforts to strengthen the economy and address structural dependencies. This posturing allows Canada to avoid responsibility for its own stagnation by blaming America, rather than confronting its genuine problems by working to rebuild true strength.

Our federal government has proved unserious even in its anti-Americanism. The apotheosis of puffed-up posing – as well as a sure vote-getter – was the government’s “Buy Canadian” push. The plain and ordinary meaning of such a slogan is that the Government of Canada would promote, designate and/or purchase things that were actually made, grown or otherwise produced in Canada. Not quite. Months later, bureaucrats questioned by Opposition MPs reluctantly admitted that literally any “presence” in Canada qualified as Canadian content, even a mere warehouse or storefront containing 100 percent foreign-made goods. Then there is the “Canada Strong Pass” ostensibly aimed at making it more affordable for citizens to enjoy our national parks – only to see them more overrun than ever with foreign tourists chasing deals.

Broad anti-Americanism becomes self-defeating when Canada’s economy, talent pipelines, innovation ecosystem, tourism flows, capital markets and startup ambitions remain deeply integrated with the United States. A contradiction that anti-Americanism cannot explain: if America is so stupid, why do so many of our smartest and most driven people go there to flourish?

The answer isn’t that America is perfect. America is chaotic, aggressive, unequal, loud and exasperating. But it is also dynamic. It rewards ambition. It absorbs talent. It builds at scale. It fails spectacularly and renews itself in perpetuity. Canada, by contrast, specializes in over-governing its over-regulated markets, making ambition so reviled that hating Elon Musk is the latest of its virtues. Meanwhile, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan profits to the tune of $11.6 billion from the initial public offering of Musk’s SpaceX. In an ironic twist, Musk, whose mom is Canadian and who spent time living and studying in Canada, went to the U.S. for his project to take the fiction out of science fiction, and now presides over American companies valued at a scale that Canada itself struggles to imagine.

So while some Canadians satisfy their wilted ambitions in declaring Florida orange juice morally off-limits, ever-more of our country’s most ambitious look south. A study of brain-drain by Brock University reported that many science and technology graduates were heading to the U.S. and only two of the top ten employers of Canadian tech-degree graduates who did stay were Canadian.

Canada can posture against the United States culturally, but its most ambitious builders often still look south for capital, scale, compensation and company formation. Tellingly, the wording in that Leader’s Fund study cited above had shifted from “We invest in Canada” in previous editions to “We invest in Canadian founders, wherever they build.” Canadian company founders raised nearly twice as much capital in the U.S. as those based in Canada, while Better Dwelling found that fewer than one-third of Canadian-educated founders launched in Canada.

Canada’s problem is not that it likes America too much. It is that it resents American power while exporting the people most capable of building Canadian power. The damage done by this nation’s self-sabotage is not only that talent leaves, it’s that Canada fails to fully utilize the talent it already has. It watches ambition migrate elsewhere and then congratulates itself for not being American.

Meanwhile, a Canadian founder will quietly board a flight to San Francisco because they dared to dream, knowing that even if they fail they will learn more than they ever would from stay-at-home compliance. And if they succeed, not even the sky will be the limit.

Tweet

Resurrecting Canadian self-determination would mean building its productivity pipelines, procurement systems, talent pathways and innovation infrastructure so that staying in Canada became the obvious choice. It would mean looking honestly at Canada’s problems of crowding-out the private sector, smothering regulations where the only “fix” is more regulation, virtue-signaling industrial policies, abysmal productivity, chronically low investment and flatlining GDP. It would focus on fully exploiting its most competitive assets for revenue-generation: oil, natural gas, mines and other natural resources. Yet the Bank of Canada and much of Bay Street remain in blissful denial of our country’s economic stagnation, reported elsewhere as stupefying, shocking and unsustainable.

A serious country would want better. It would want less theatre and more capability. Less resentment and more achievement. Less maple-leaf moralism in the grocery aisle, and more of the hard, unglamorous work required to make Canada strong, respected, resilient and wealthy, where life is once again affordable. Until then, someone will rename a drink and feel patriotic about it. In some other grocery aisle a shopper will study a package for the coveted maple leaf and mistake the purchase for an act of conscience. Others will boo an anthem at a hockey game and imagine they are defending national sovereignty. Others will stamp their feet in protest and cancel a planned trip to the United States.

Meanwhile, a Canadian founder will quietly board a flight to San Francisco because they dared to dream, knowing that even if they fail they will learn more than they ever would from stay-at-home compliance. And if they succeed, not even the sky will be the limit. I myself am a start-up tech founder – and I am in the process of incorporating my company in the U.S. Somewhere else, a Canadian consumer will stare at a pitiful bundle of celery and wonder how a country so abundantly rich became small enough to mistake sourcing a different stalk for national strategy.

buy me a coffee

I invite you to listen to my essay narration by clicking on the link above.

buy me a coffee

Thank you for your support!

Dear Friends and Readers,

A brief version of the expanded essay below, was published on The Epoch Times in the March 19th print newspaper edition, link here on Reader's Turn.

recently joked that the Liberals are “not hope” asserting that Canadians need hope in order to “afford their lives”. Once upon a time, this is what Canada stood for – hope – why my immigrant parents sacrificed everything to come here, to give us hope for a better life. But what does it mean to have hope? To an immigrant Canadian like myself, this statement rings hollow, as opportunities, earnings, time, and hope, slip from our grasp. Hope, I argue, is rooted in boundaries: where the government gets out of the way whilst protecting the security, peace and liberty of each person, not groups of persons. Hope means that we have a cultural identity stemming from common values – that we identify with something (other than not being American), rather than a vague pursuit of inclusion, that paradoxically results in exclusion. Identity politics has divided us into seeing each other as the enemy, rather than as human. It has made Canada a lonely, insufferable place to live, one impossible to thrive or flourish.

In his recently published book, The Polycentric Republic, defines a good society as “the capacity of individuals to pursue and enjoy personal and communal flourishing in ways that are responsive to their own rationally informed and uncoerced choices and their own sense of meaning and purpose”. Why is it that living in a country as great, beautiful and as resource rich as Canada, is it no longer possible to make out our own happiness and shape our destiny? Canadians resort to their daily grind of struggle with grocery costs, unaffordable housing, lower wages, skyrocketing inflation, dwindling productivity, high unemployment, fight for basic parental rights, eroding rights for bodily autonomy, punishing regulations, disappearing property rights, state suicide veiled as virtue for illnesses that can be treated, going so far as bypassing the family’s consent for euthanizing young people, the horrifying expansion of euthanasia in babies, living funerals, deaths of despair in farmers, the macabre slaughter of 300 healthy, sentient ostriches in a kill pen when the tests were negative, expanding state of digital surveillance with Bill C-22, equity based justice, and so on.

Canada’s history is indelibly rooted in Christian values and it is these values that built our country: our legal and political frameworks emerged from British and French legal traditions, which assumed God’s supremacy and embedded ideals of liberty, moral duty and communal responsibility. However, thanks to liberal progressivism (unlike classical liberalism), our morality, culture, and national character, spun into an endless spiral of revisionism, have now collapsed. We have become a country of merely just surviving, not striving over mastery of our human potential, nor building a prosperous future embedded with pride, guided by common values of a beautiful land whose generations took immigrants like us, in. We have, in gratitude, adopted Canada as our home, by assimilating, contributing and producing for the benefit of our children.

As Professor asserts, the rise of the managerial state now aggressively seeks to criminalize our own thoughts and feelings alongside religious speech with its latest and crushing attempt at criminalizing “hate speech” with Bill C9: the censorship bill with terms of up to life imprisonment. Despite significant resistance raised by Canadians, religious and civil rights groups, by top-down Liberal diktat, our Parliamentary Representatives have been censored from debating the censorship bill inside of Parliament. Bill C9, as it stands, is dangerously close to becoming law. Canadians then, are not even people anymore, they are machines managed by the state. MP Sandra Cobena, in a breathtaking exchange with Marc Miller, Minister of Identity and Culture, about clause 208 of the Budget Bill and Bill C-15, asked why cabinet ministers would have broad discretionary powers, effectively above the law, learned that it would be “helpful to have” and that “Canadians expect us to be judicious in our decision making.” Furthermore, at the last hour on March 17^th, the Liberal government has once again appealed the invocation of the Emergencies Act to the Supreme Court, despite both the Federal Court and Federal Court of Appeals determining that invoking the Act did not meet the threshold. Twice, the same arguments were rejected. As Dr. Bruce Pardy forewarned us that this may happen, the biggest question now is, will Chief Justice Wagner recuse himself, as he rightfully should, having called the peaceful protest a “small beginning of anarchy where some people decided to take other citizens hostage”? It is clear, in my view, that our constitutional right to protest is slowly eroding, as the freezing of bank accounts has infused a sense of fear of professional persecution and economic harms. Suddenly, our willingness to exercise that basic right becomes too much of a risk to bear. Rather than our government getting out of the way then, they are here to decide for us, dismissing our responsibility to think for ourselves, to grow our potential, to define our destiny and to learn from our mistakes. They are here then, to strip us of hope.

This is not the Canada that rang hope from afar for my parents. This is not why they sacrificed so much to raise us here. This is Canada in an unrecognizable and accelerated economic, social and political decline, stripped of her wasted potential in a land inherently wealthy, vast and beautiful. A Canada that has broken millions of hearts. This is not flourishing; it is totalitarianism. It strips every Canadian of their right to agency, to purpose, to the pursuit of meaning through authenticity. If holding views that may be contrarian leaves us worrying who we may offend, and if this national paranoia is a requirement for social and economic survival, then Canada, by her own rulers, has been robbed of her very soul. Canadians don’t want to sing in the choir of life conducted by our rulers – we want to write our own song, not have it written for “our safety”. We can figure out what is hateful all on our own. We can also figure out what we believe to be true or not. As MP eloquently pointed out: “the best remedy, even for offensive speech, is more speech, not enforced silence…censorship is the confession of a society that it no longer trusts truth to win...in the absence of freedom of expression, there are only official lies… there is no citizen so small that their voice must be denied the light.”

Canada’s social structure has devolved into a toxic one, wherein our rulers fail to recognize where boundaries in society lie, as they continue to encroach upon how we navigate our social and economic lives. Canadians have been made to believe that we must obey as if we are children, by complying and being virtuous. In infantilizing our citizenry, purportedly for “our own good”, Canadians, in their vehement acquiescence towards our rulers, have ended up in a toxic relationship with one another. We no longer delineate the insidiousness of abuse but acquiesce towards it. As Thunder eloquently points out, when the state accumulates excessive power over its citizens, it is no longer able to recognize boundaries of autonomy or legitimate concerns raised by intermediaries under its authority. Canada has a case of Stockholm Syndrome: we are in love with our abuser to cope with surviving in our own country which we love. Rather than our rulers serving us, we have let them abuse us. It is time to stop this toxic cycle.

buy me a coffee

By cc: , , ,

Back in 2016, every time I wore C-A-N-A-D-A on my back, I’d start a conversation – it didn’t matter where I was. I had my Canada jacket on and that somehow pulled people towards me: I was a tourist magnet for strangers, and why I always wore it while traveling. People would start conversations out of nowhere: “hey, you’re from Canada, were you on the team?” I’d laugh, flash a big smile “of course!”, I’d say jokingly. Depending on my mood, I’d like to fool the stranger, often an American, who then would ask “which sport did you play?” I’d play along, and say “ah, figure skating, Vancouver 2010!” I’d give them a wink hoping they’d realize the truth, secretly admiring the compliment as I found it so funny. My jacket became a magnet for conversations: with strangers at Starbucks, ticket counters, on trains, in getting my luggage tucked while looking for my seat, with bus drivers, on a walk at a park, eating at restaurants, exploring a museum. I would carefully preserve, one of my two treasured Canada jackets, washing them by hand, ensuring that none of the letters would be stripped by harsh detergent. Everywhere I went, people would say: “hey, you’re from Canada! That’s the best place in the world!

I was a proud Canadian. I was free, thriving and happy. The government didn’t stick a knife to my throat every time I awakened, I had blissfully no idea what went on in Parliament, and I never worried for my future: I had goals, big and small dreams, relationships, sports, a business, and a life to pursue: together with a long bucket list. My late Father did us well – both my brother and I were thriving, successful, peaceful, healthy, and happy. We had friends, goals and a social life. Life was so good. I went back to business school in the UK and enjoyed every thriving second. There, I realized that my Oxford classmates envied my position in life: “ah, but you’re from Canada!”, they’d say. This was a time when the UK was in the turmoil of Brexit and terror attacks dominated the headlines. I was proud and immensely grateful for how lucky I was to be living in a peaceful country, but sad for those who couldn’t enjoy the freedom I had taken so for granted. I was even more proud and grateful to be a lucky Canadian.

At 4:50am, my alarm would go off, and after dragging myself out of bed, I’d either hit the rink, an early morning run, or a cross-fit workout that I’d only appreciate after being beaten by an all-talented Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu trainer. I loved sport and the discipline it required. What motivated me on those groggy mornings, were Olympic athletes – Canadian ice dance duo whom I deeply admired and still do – Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir. I motivated myself with – if Tessa could win the 2010 Olympics with compartment syndrome in both her legs not being able to walk to the fridge in the Athletes Village, then surely, I can drag my butt out of bed for an early workout. And so, I did. I made time for everything: social media didn’t consume my life as the media didn’t routinely lie (and burden me with the time-consuming and exhausting effort of uncovering the truth on my own), Parliamentary Committee meetings weren’t the reality horror show they are today; kids weren’t taught that they can switch genders, the right to property wasn’t a thing of the past, Canadians weren’t taught to hate themselves at every opportunity, the government didn’t profess state suicide as virtue, and I had reason to remember my friends’ birthdays. People mattered to me more than their opinion and I wanted to show them how much I care. In a full and busy schedule, I commuted 4 hours daily to work, and flew across the Atlantic regularly for lectures. I worked out, I socialized, I studied, I multi-tasked, I made time for dance practice, for reading, for work, for studies, for relationships and for fun. Politics were there as a means for honing one’s intellect, fueling curiosity, expanding awareness and learning from others’ perspectives. They didn’t serve as tools for destroying people’s lives and socially assassinating them at the mere inkling of a differing opinion. I’d often wake up to 164 WhatsApp’s to yet another fiery debate from classmates. People from all over the world, were wanting a better world and were unafraid to fight for it. Differences were welcome and encouraged. Mono-maniacal thinking and moralization were unheard of. Life revolved around relationships, work, family, school, friends, goals, sports, studying, ball gowns, travel and fun. It was all so eerily – normal.

Canada’s harsh winters ensure that nearly everyone has access to an ice rink or a ski hill. Ski school is even available in the bigger cities and makeshift hockey rinks are often embedded into one’s backyard. We take our winter sports very seriously here. I grew up on sandy Mediterranean beaches with mazut, but I love the ice, the snow, and the cold just as much as I love the sea. Hockey, our treasured national pastime, in a game against our friendly Americans, was an excuse to celebrate in a sea of red and white with friends, to a lot of cheering, and much too much beer. Hockey was fun because hockey connected us.

The 2010 Olympics were a highlight for Canada: we climbed the pinnacle of the world on its biggest stage : we were first in the world (!) winning 26 medals, 14 of which were gold: coast to coast to coast in an endless sea of red and white, we proudly cheered. Fast forward 8 years, in the 2018 Olympics, we dropped to a respectable third with 29 medals, 11 of which were gold. In another 8 years, in this year’s 2026 Olympics, we didn’t even make the top 10: placing in a pitiful 11th place with 21 medals, only 5 of which were gold in a country where nearly half the year is winter. Who could blame them? They were forced into a hideous uniform that humiliated all of Canada at the outset. In their relentless effort to brainwash us, CBC mainstream media covered this up by blatantly lying that we placed 8th overall gaslighting us to believe that we had in fact “surpassed our goal of 20 medals”.

Why I love sport so much is that it is emblematic of real life: of mindset, of grit, of attitude, of determination, of discipline, of strategy, of setting goals and the will of achieving them. Sport psychology can transfer to any business and any life challenge. If you want to see how quickly an athlete unravels thanks to the cobwebs of one’s mind, watch a struggling figure skating performance: it is all there. Watching Alysa Liu win the gold in women’s event wasn’t only thanks to her effortless skating: it was her mind and spirit that won. We all have cobwebs in our minds, and it’s the pursuit of overcoming them that matters. What this dramatic drop from first to eleventh place demonstrates is not only how far Canada has deteriorated but how unwilling it is to get back up. It is not only a country unwilling to prioritize its elite athletes but it is a country unwilling to prioritize its own Canadians. What’s worse is that the majority thinks this is a good thing.

I am thus, no longer a proud Canadian. I somehow now long for an American jacket – their beautiful white on blue stars. The American anthem rings in my mind, to which I wish I had learned the lyrics. I am ashamed in how many times Canadians had the audacity to boo the American anthem at multiple tournaments, only to have the Americans boo us once in turn. It is embarrassing how we can denigrate the most admired Constitution of the world, showing much disdain to American history, their Founding Fathers and all Americans had fought for. I find being a Canadian humiliating. It is actually quite satisfying that the White House has mocked us with barbs that I think we rightly deserve, and that even God showed us a sense of humor. America is not perfect, surely, but nor are we. But what America has, that we don’t, is an infinite ability to renew herself, of resilience, of dynamism. Americans fall, they falter, they are loud and obnoxious, they are unashamed to be themselves, they make mistakes, they make amends, they strive, they dream, they are bold, and they always push forward – because they always get back up!

The State of the Union last night, filled me with hope. For a moment, I imagined that I didn’t live in totalitarian hell, but in a free country. I was, however briefly, happy for a country that wanted the best for its own people. I was embarrassed for those who wanted the opposite, but I was glad that the division was brilliantly exposed for all to see. For a moment, I played the same scenario in my mind, imagining a single Canadian politician demonstrating to the Canadian people what it means to have $5,000 extra in their account, and actually doing something to multiply it. With food inflation at 7.3%, GDP contracting by $4B in last quarter alone, thanks to 10 years of destructive policies, we are the least productive country in the OECD, so 10 million Canadians are now starving, unemployment is a soul crushing 6.7% for Canada and 7.6% for Ontario, youth can’t find work at a whopping 14%, 2 in 5 Canadians are insolvent, 1 in 5 children under the age of 6 are living in poverty, it takes 14 years to approve a pipeline and 20 years to build a mine. Since all of this “transformational” pain is self-inflicted in a virtuous cycle of lunacy - rather than feeding Canadians with actual revenue, our judicious Liberal technocrats decided to feed the Australians instead - by importing liquid natural gas from 25,000 km rather than the 4,000 km it would take from our own cleaner backyard. Why don’t they ship us kangaroos and koalas along for the ride because we actually don’t have those? Canada is the fourth richest country in the world, yet we are nearly as poor, per capita, as Mississippi. Our country is getting decimated with hoodwinking platitudes that do nothing except tightening the noose around our necks. Yes, the American President can be boastful and arrogant. But would anyone expect the world’s most powerful economy to be insecure, apologetic and professing humility over substance? If you want to be the best, you have to believe that you are the best, and then you actually become the best: it’s the same rule in sport, as it is in life.

I suspect that whenever I’ll travel again, my treasured jacket will remain in my closet. I don’t trust that it will spark the warm conversations and friendships it once did. I am no longer a proud Canadian, because Canada no longer gives me any reason to be. It has financially, socially and economically destroyed my life, alongside countless other Canadians. It has robbed me of hope, of precious time, of my own family, of health, of my friends, of joy and of a future. It has shown me more cruelty and evil than could fill my wildest imagination, and more coldness than my eyelashes and nostrils freezing at -40C. In their valiant and relentless effort to moralize their own population, Canada has become a nation of demoralization and fakery, where people prioritize their performance over their humanity, their calculation over their compassion, their status over their friends, and their wallet over their heart. It has become a society devoid of soul, of heart, and of authenticity. Canada is no longer the place it once was, and I don’t trust that it will be back anytime soon. But, I still have my dreams, and I refuse to let anyone extinguish them: I hope that truth, faith and the pursuit of freedom will be their fuel.

buy me a coffee

There, there you are!
On another spellbound day,
when I slept and woke up,
but my tongue was all twisted,
and piercing my soul.
Life is a thief,
time, the liar.
People are walking,
like nothing is missing.
I always thought,
hey, slow down!
Don't walk so fast,
I need you to get caught up
to examining all my vinyls,
so you can walk me down the aisle,
slowly,
like I always knew.
And I can lie down,
in the middle of a tornado,
to cover you.
Not to spend, 
every waking moment,
wishing you cracked me up.
Our society so deranged,
it's no wonder we are all
merely just
estranged.
Can you hear the deafening stillness,
of everything we've ever known?
I will listen to the same sad song,
over,
and over,
and over again,
until it vibrates in my skull.
But now there is 
just
scar tissue
inside my head.
You are not gone,
just harder to find.
Our ten years,
tied by blood,
were, as you said,
thicker than
anything.
My other heart. 🤟

buymeacoffee

Read more

Where are all the poets? Where are all the songs? Where is the music? Where is your passion, your rage, your tears? Where are the crowds? Where is the patriotism, the red and white? Where is your soul, Canada? Where is your courage, your tenacity, your resolve, your love, your voice? Where is your fight for truth, for justice, for prosperity, for peace? Where are all the men?

Where are all the Canadian Charlies?

Listen to this powerful song and poignant lyrics below, by Diesel.

How dare they? by Diesel

This one hurts.

A young Christian man took a bullet for 
speaking his mind.
Name was Charlie.
Husband, Daddy, voice for the kids.
Lord, why’d it go down like that?

Stage lights cold as a winter rain,
one breath, one prayer, then the world went strange,
crowd froze up when the thunder cracked.
Truth on a mic and a life attacked,
he talked about hope and a storm and lane,
Bible in the heart and a promise in his hands.
But a shadow reached from a coward’s perch,
cut down a sun in the mid…

Read more

Dear friends and readers,

Below is an updated version of my Medea Stumbling on Stones Part II essay, originally published in Canada’s C2C Journal in my first publication. I have re-produced it here with the editor’s permission. Thank you to George Koch, Chief Editor, for taking me on and for a wonderful first-publication learning experience. Thanks also to Paul G. Conlon, author of Citizen One: Case Against Digital ID for providing helpful comments on the original draft.

Here is the: link to the original story.

Although the slide of Canada’s universities into wokism is well-known, few who don’t spend their days on-campus probably grasp just how far it has gone. Administrators chase academic respectability through “performative inclusivity” – at the expense of educational standards and even students’ health. One Toronto resident watched her beloved institution devolve deep into ideological rebranding with an expensive “campus greening”, a contrived “Indigenous landscape” and donor-bait memorials that cheaply evoke a Holocaust memorial while eerily conflating living adults with dead grandchildren. In this intense first-person telling, P.M. Szpunar recounts her horrifying discovery of the U of T’s strange new proclivities and seeks to unravel how they came about.

I always associated universities – especially their libraries – with freedom. They instilled a belief that I could discover anything. Sometimes I simply long to sit in the quiet surrounded by the vast intellectual legacy, marvelling at the scent of aged books. It fosters a deep contemplation where time disappears. I like the soft rustle of pages in reading rooms, the thinking minds around me working through their last, agonizing term paper, the soft clatter of laptops, the whispers of students, and yes, that cute guy across the room…reading. It always seemed the more I studied, the less I knew, faced with endless tentacles to unravel. The library’s ambience of a sanctuary became a conduit to doing my best work, in making sense of the curious thoughts swirling in my confused mind.

One gorgeous autumn day at the University of Toronto, I decide to study at the Bora Laskin Law Library, the only remaining place on campus at the time with publicly accessible wi-fi. On my way, I meet a delightful young woman, clearly a European, a tourist. “Do you know which way is the subway?” she asks. Eager to help, I smile and, since we’re headed in the same direction, lead the way. Strolling down the beautiful Philosopher’s Walk towards the library, we instantly connect, her warm smile engaging, her blonde hair shining brightly in the afternoon sun. Her name is Agrita and she’s visiting from Latvia, here to explore studies in architecture.

We head down towards Hart House Circle as I am eager to show her the beautiful places around campus. “I just wanted to check the place out, I thought it would be interesting, and I wanted to see the dome,” Agrita says. “The dome? That one?” I reply, pointing to Convocation Hall. “No, not that dome,” she assures me. “It’s a different dome.” We search around and soon spot the smaller, less-impressive dome of the Louis B. Stewart Observatory. “Oh, that’s it?” we say, laughing.

Our chat slides towards politics. “It’s very strange here, this place has become so weird, this city,” I obliquely probe, trying to detect her political leanings. “Ugh!” she agrees with an acknowledging look. “Yeah, it’s pretty extreme, the ideology in society,” I push further, as I feel a connection to her. “Can I show you something?” Agrita readily agrees, although time is short as she wants to see the CN Tower and I want to show her Massey College and other noteworthy feats of architecture. Eager for her reaction to what is in store, but feeling a bit selfish in doing so, I lead her down Hart House Circle towards Knox College, pointing out places along the way.

We arrive to find the scene depicted in the accompanying photos. “Ugh, it’s like a graveyard!” Agrita exclaims, visibly shocked. “I know,” I say, unsure how to respond. “What has become of our world?” I ask rhetorically. “You must know what ‘Stumbling Stones’ are?” I inquire, referring to the dispersed Holocaust Memorial of Stolpersteine – stone cubes faced with brass plaques, more than 100,000 in total, placed at more than 1,000 sites throughout Europe to commemorate the innocents abducted by the Nazis and sent to the death camp at Auschwitz. “Of course,” Agrita says solemnly. But this, she continues, is “really, really weird.”

We stand in silence, upset and confused, unsure what to make of these stones. We look for signs of an explanation. “Oh, look!” Agrita exclaims, “Some are in memory of…” On closer inspection, some of the names refer to deceased persons, others seek to celebrate people who seem very much alive, but mingled in plaques on the ground amongst the dead.

My mind floods with confusion. ‘Has anyone made the connection between these pavers and the Holocaust?’ It still wasn’t entirely clear whether these particular children were being commemorated or were alive and being recognized for some unexplained reason.

Tweet

It’s nearly dusk and Agrita wants to catch a glimpse of the CN Tower. We pause for a moment longer in silence, unsure how to process the scene. “If you want to study architecture, maybe try Chicago,” I finally blurt out, wanting to protect her from unhappiness, but trying to safeguard her freedom of self-discovery. “Its skyline is beautiful and the architecture is super-impressive.” We stand in silence a while longer. “Don’t come here,” I say at last. “This is not the place.” “Thanks!” Agrita exclaims, looking relieved. I can tell my new friend is really looking forward to her next destination, the CN Tower. We connect on social and hug goodbye.

On my way back to Hart House I stumble upon another, similar scene: the “Grandchildren’s Garden”, a grassy patch scattered with what look like gravestones masked as pavers inscribed with names of children on campus. Walking around I find more pavers: Ethan Peterson, Woods Peterson, Drake Peterson, Willow Peterson, Odin Peterson, Luke Dirksen, Henry Dirksen. Clearly two families, I reason. But why here? I grow agitated. Why are dead children commemorated at a university? How is this normal? It takes me some effort to research and conclude that they could actually be living grandchildren, some of them ambitious PhD students and apparently off studying at Harvard, commemorated into pavers as one big happy family. Are we really inscribing children into pavers whilst they are still alive? And if so, I wonder, What will distinguish them once they are dead? It seemed downright deranged.

Does fundraising have to get this weird? The “Grandchildren’s Garden” is another graveyard-looking area on the U of T campus, this time with the names of living children inscribed on commemorative stones. Disturbed by this discovery, the author researched the question of what drove the university to do this. (Source of photos: P.M. Szpunar)

My mind floods with confusion. Has anyone made the connection between these pavers and the Holocaust? It still wasn’t entirely clear whether these particular children were being commemorated or were alive and being recognized for some unexplained reason. The “In Memory Of” pavers Agrita and I noticed didn’t carry death dates, yet In Memoriam and its equivalents mean dead. How do students wrestle with their chemistry labs or mathematics assignments, sitting on top of either dead or living children, even if only symbolically, as they nibble on grapes and a salami sandwich? The failure to distinguish between – and separate – the dead from the living was inescapably creepy and chilling. Would happy pictures of talented students placed on a college wall not suffice in imbuing them into the university’s proud history? Did it have to get this weird?

Curious, I delve deeper, as I have a tendency to do. My research disturbs me. It turns out that since before the Covid era, Canada’s most prominent university has been busy transforming some of its most visible and visited spaces into something like a green cemetery. The starting place, I learn, is the Landmark Project, which began prior to 2014 as an effort to remove surface parking, enhance green spaces, make campus more inclusive and make the U of T’s most historic grounds more walkable.

By 2019, Landmark had led to a “decolonization” effort involving creation of an “Indigenous Landscape” at St. George’s College, possibly inspired by U.S. colleges paying homage to their submerged histories. In the spirit of acknowledging Taddle Creek, a built-over stream that was once a gathering place for the Huron, Seneca and Mississauga peoples, Landmark now aimed to revive Indigenous knowledge, culture and history buried through urbanization. As the university approaches its 200^th anniversary in 2027, a new Indigenous landscape is meant to unearth the one below it.

As part of its “decolonization” drive, the U of T’s Landmark Project included an “Indigenous Landscape” at St. George’s College with the open-air pavilion at its centre (shown). To the author, the ideological Indigenization of the entire university goes against the panoramic pursuit of knowledge that should be its true goal. (Source of photo: Azure)

After extensive “public” but apparently exclusive consultations with Indigenous leaders, elders and students, the U of T’s Governing Council decided – unilaterally, it appears – that “our university needs to do more to be deserving of Indigenous students.” While I see nothing wrong (though some might) with having a dedicated space for Indigenous students, plus a separate “reconciliation grove”, the Indigenization of an entire institution seems to defeat its very purpose. Aren’t U of T’s 120,000-plus students, faculty and staff positioned to aspire to ideals wider than, or even different from, solely Indigenous ideals?

As important as its Indigenous component is, Landmark’s true core mission appears (perhaps not surprisingly) to be making the university “climate positive” by 2050. That is to say, the U of T’s emissions are to be driven down so far that the institution not only emits zero net greenhouse gases (GHG), it generates enough “clean” energy to result in “net negative emissions.” To that end, not only would vehicles be banished from inner areas, but King’s College Circle itself was to be excavated for a massive geothermal energy field, storing excess heat from above and leveraging the temperature of the ground below to help the university drive its GHG emissions down 37 percent from 1990 levels by 2030.

The largest such facility in Canada, this geo-exchange system would comprise 370 (later 420) boreholes drilled into the bedrock of limestone and shale, some 250 metres deep – nearly half the height of the CN Tower – to “sustainably” heat and cool an integrated campus, reducing GHG emissions by the equivalent of 3,000 cars. Embedded underneath the green field is an underground parking lot accommodating a meagre 236 vehicles (though 48 include EV charging stations!). The cost of this massive transformation was initially reported at $20 million but, given the long time-frame and sprawling scope, one I find hard to believe.

The Landmark Project also aims to serve as a learning tool and be a “ceremonial landscape that predates the automobile.” Capital funding for its key components was approved in September 2019 by the Governing Council’s Planning and Budget Committee acting in camera, i.e., behind closed doors.

The idea for the strange stones seems to have started around the same time as Landmark – it remains unclear who first thought of them, when, or for what original purpose – and I couldn’t find more on them until 2019. Though the process was said to include “public consultations”, there is no evidence other institutional bodies were consulted, no public debate I could find reference to, certainly no university-wide referendum. It all appeared driven by the U of T President’s office and Governing Council pursuing “institutional priorities”, with the Indigenous groups as the (key) stakeholders. This article, written years after the fact by a donor, is one of the few explicit references to the pavers I could find. The stones are also (very) obliquely referenced in one other document I found as being aspects of Landmark that relate to “the importance we place on time as a marker.”

In presuming to commemorate both the living and the dead within an architecture shared with “the generations of alumni that have built UofT into one of the world’s top universities,” as Landmark Project Co-Chair Professor Donald Ainslie put it, the university sought to distinguish itself by imbuing its campus with emotional sustainability through the “temporal effect of memorialization”. Neither the project’s managers nor the institution’s leadership appear, however, to have consulted with external institutions on the advisability of memorializing living alumni and students amongst the dead, nor in examining ethical precedents from broader contexts or research in reactions to them. Instead, they focused their efforts on shaping the space. Landmark’s vision of integrating memory, space and ecological renewal apparently aimed to affirm the university’s commitments to intergenerational continuity, global belonging, collective identity and institutional prestige.

The pavers themselves, though, appear to be fundamentally a fundraising scheme, though one suffused with 21^st-century sensibilities. How else to explain – alongside the distinctly old school donor-funded benches and the more contemporary donor-funded mini-gardens – the innovative but haunting and outright bizarre idea of placing in green spaces and on walkways thousands of stones – 3,478 of them, as it turned out – inscribed with the names of both living and deceased members of the community? According to a paper on Landmark published by the U of T’s Ethnography Lab, the university was seeking to integrate public memory and personal reflection within the daily encounters of student life or, as the jargon-riddled piece puts it, to “mobilize the temporalities of History, Future and Timelessness to construct an identity.” And not least, to make the dreary act of donation seem 21^st-century virtuous.

All you needed was $2,000 at a Landmark fundraiser to embed yourself (or your child or grandchild) into the university’s “living legacy”. Nothing else mattered: marks, merit or Nobel prizes. The university wanted to “include everybody,” diluting the whole point of achievement, ingenuity, competition and, above all, merit. It appears to have worked, with Landmark drawing some 4,500 donors – many later embedded into pavers – plus a $250,000 gift from the Students’ Union, $1 million from the university’s alumni matched to $2 million from the much larger, $2-billion-plus Boundless campaign, and a $100,000 grant from Toronto’s Parks and Trees Foundation. Everything was blurred, commodified, diluted in the university’s “reshaping of collective memory.” Its stated intent was to “imbue [the] school with a sense of prestige” in order to “maintain relevance and appear ‘sensitive’ to the current social moment.” And attract donors. But shouldn’t high-quality academic output be able to do all that on its own?

Now, standing in the Grandchildren’s Garden, tears stream down my face at the thought of the searing pain from the death of one’s child or sibling. I feel like I’ll vomit, but instead start coughing, overwhelmed by my own lingering grief, carried since childhood, from tragedies that would define my existence.

Tweet

Still I wonder, why would permanent engravings typically reserved for memorializing the deceased be blurred and extended to living donors (and their relatives)? How does Indigenization of an institution represent the diverse lived experiences of all its students, faculty and staff? Rather than fostering genuine university values through its physical infrastructure, the U of T appears bent on shaping public feelings about its institutional identity. Rather than neutrally recording its history, it has commodified memory by privileging those who can financially contribute. Its drive for ideologically acceptable prestige dilutes meritocracy, pursuit of excellence and aspirational values, while inadvertently excluding impoverished or marginalized members. Perhaps one might call it “performative inclusivity”.

Actual cemeteries – placed apart, in their own separate spaces – offer solitude, sombre remembrance and even healing to the still-living. They are not, however, an environment where a student would crack open their assignment in quantum mechanics. And neither are universities suitable settings for burials. Now, standing in the Grandchildren’s Garden, tears stream down my face at the thought of the searing pain from the death of one’s child or sibling. I feel like I’ll vomit, but instead start coughing, overwhelmed by my own lingering grief, carried since childhood, from tragedies that would define my existence. I look up at all the wandering students around me, unassuming, unbothered and preoccupied over their paper, exam or night out. How utterly sad.

In contrast to cemeteries, memorials carry different messages and play different roles. Depending on what they commemorate and how they go about doing so, they can arouse a range of emotions. I have no quarrel with statuary or other recognition of long-dead historical figures – in a university’s case, typically commemorating a towering intellect or transformative president – placed there mainly to celebrate the life lived and its achievements, with death incidental. (These, however, the university like other Canadian institutions is proving eager to “derecognize”.) I’m talking about installations in which death – recent death, tragic death, unprocessed death – is central and in your face. It is widely acknowledged that people in a closed system like a university need to be given a choice whether to be exposed to physical reminders of such difficult past events, because they can be re-traumatizing. The associated emotional arousal can reduce cognitive functioning, including the ability to focus on, retain, recall and process information.

On-campus memorials of the recently dead, placed in ways making them unavoidable, therefore pose a risk. In the U of T’s case, students shuttling between classes or on their morning run are now subtly brainwashed with 3,478 death-inspired, cloaked-in-greenery reminders of undefined, unspecified sorrows. Contrast this with the Stolpersteine. Though evoking perhaps the greatest horror in humanity’s blood-soaked journey, they are at least specific. Each one is placed at the individual victim’s last freely chosen residence and provides the person’s name, date of “deportation” and date of death. The Stumbling Stones thus commemorate something real and particular: an unspeakable crime by the one (unmentioned) party and an infinite injustice for the other.

Installed all over Europe, the Stolpersteine, or Stumbling Stones, commemorate the (mostly Jewish) victims of the Nazi regime who were murdered, deported, exiled or driven to suicide. Each plaque is specific, containing the victim’s name, last residence, date of “deportation” and date of death. Shown at top left, the first Stolpersteine, set on December 16, 1992 in front of Cologne City Hall, Germany, displaying Heinrich Himmler’s order to begin deportations. At top right, Stolpersteine honoring Simon and Frieda Herschberg, in Bochum, Germany; at bottom left, Stolpersteine for three members of the Kochen family including Ester Bajla Kochen and her husband Szyja Kochen (bottom right), from Racibórz, Poland. (Sources of photos: (top left) Willy Horsch, licensed under CC BY 3.0; (top right) Syracuse University; (bottom left and right) bruckfamilyblog.com)

This is all rendered even more eerie in that even as Landmark was moving through its planning phases, a horrifying string of suicides ensued on campus correlated to stressful exams: three students died jumping from the same ledge in the now-infamous Bahen engineering building. Yet only after the third death did the university install a barrier, shifting blame to the government for ostensible lack of funding in providing needed health resources for students – whilst heaping praise on its ongoing Indigenization efforts. (A long article in The Otter delves into the suicides and the U of T’s response.) There have been 16 further suicide attempts reported by campus security since 2019. When 13 percent of Canada’s post-secondary students report they are seriously contemplating suicide, we have a national mental health crisis. I went to the Bahen centre to see where the students jumped from, looking up at the barrier placed four storeys above me, but I couldn’t bring myself to go up. I noticed there was no memorial plaque.

In response to one too many of these tragedies, the U of T implemented a mandatory leave of absence policy (UMLAP) authorizing it to place students on indefinite leave if their mental health was deemed to pose a risk. To banish them from the classroom, in other words. The policy drew criticism from the Ontario Human Rights Commission and was heavily protested by student groups in 2018. Students pleaded for help, disrupting public meetings in 2019, warning not to give this institution money until it was made easier to get help, only to be met with gaslighting. In 2023 UMLAP was amended and renamed Supportive Leaves Policy (SLP), enhanced with a new Navi app. It remains unclear to what degree SLP is aimed at improving mental health support for students and how much of it is gaslighting and absolving the administration of responsibility for its students’ wellbeing.

Reading the students’ accounts, it is clear they are stressed, anxious and miserable; some are near a breaking point, and a few tragically have gone past it. They’re struggling in an institution that tells them the burden is on them to develop resilience in a world doing everything to impede it, a place they also struggle in trusting to help them flourish. In their own words, “this university is not the haven it strives to be.” The safest course has become to say nothing at all. So much for freeing the mind in a place where all ideas are considered. Isn’t much of the point of a university to nurture creativity through intellectual rigour, rather than stifling it with compliance through fear? And don’t the constant reminders of death, as the U of T has built into those Landmark Project donor-funded pavers, automatically fill us with fear?

This isn’t, mind you, the productive fear that accompanies intellectual rigour. The fear of facing your professor during office hours knowing that, if unprepared, you’ll walk out with the stark realization you’re not yet the intellect you thought you were. The best professors were always the ones who believed in you, who pushed you to reach a higher standard, the ones you somewhat feared but who never demoralized you, the ones you felt energized by after each conversation, knowing you were supported. The ones who taught you the art of good questioning, of self-belief, of limitlessness, of creativity.

In my case, the ones who encouraged me to believe enough in myself to make complex analysis proofs in Riemann integration actually possible, pushing me through the pain of understanding the Cauchy theorem, and the abstract confusion of bounded and unbounded numbers – but only after I’d spent 20 agonizing hours staring at a barely-filled page written in Greek. This is the satisfying struggle and glory of learning, self-discovery, growth – in which a particular kind of productive fear plays a useful role – yielding the sudden joyful realization that the long sleep-deprived nights fuelled by sugary hot chocolate, cereal and cold pizza were worth it.

But this environment, the one of climate-suicidal nudges, is not that. This is the dull, painful and exhausting fear that dissent, uncomfortable questions and contrarian viewpoints have consequences. It is first and foremost isolating, because the reminder of the inevitability of death almost inevitably evokes and perpetuates fear and loneliness. It is an art, perfected by the university, of silent control through insidious, gentle nudging, signalling to students that the stench of death masked into greenery-shrouded donor-funded pavers conflating the living with the dead and marketed in the spirit of inclusion is not only normal but inspiring and, implicitly, an option appearing on their course-load menu.

The author believes the U of T’s donor-funded pavers have crossed an ethical line, and notes that no other world-class university has followed suit to her knowledge. These include (clockwise starting top-left): Oxford University, shown is the dining hall at Christ Church; Stanford University, shown is the Green Library; Dublin University’s Trinity College, shown is the Long Room of the Old Library; and Harvard University, shown is Memorial Hall. (Sources of photos: (top left) Chensiyuan, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0; (bottom right) Diliff, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

The University of Toronto relies heavily on donations as they enable its stature through progress, so of course it ought to show its appreciation. But embedding living donors alongside the dead all over campus in the pursuit of an ideological identity is an ethical line crossed, in my opinion. None of the other greats have dared to go this far – not Oxford, not Stanford, not Harvard, not Dublin, not Melbourne.

As a concerned Canadian and a lover of learning, I hope no other institution treads along these particular paving stones. It is students who need to be prioritized and returned to the forefront. The Hart House Reading Room wall with the tall, arched windows doesn’t even have wall outlets to plug in one’s laptop. The Map Room is outfitted with wobbly wooden tables and Grandma’s stiff folding lawn chairs. As in so many other Canadian contexts – remember Calgary’s exploding water mains? – ideology has been prioritized at the expense of basic necessities, and of the people whom the institution was set up to serve.

P.M. Szpunar writes personal reflections about totalitarianism through the lens of opera and the operatic canon. Her work can be found here.

buymeacoffee

Surprised by my own strength, I marvel how unlike Medea, I managed not to come undone in what I don’t feel is an exaggeration a prolonged shredding of my soul, a test unlike any I could have imagined. I am infinitely grateful for the new friends I have made from abroad and reconnected with locally, led to in meeting as if by divine intelligence. As we emerge from one form of tyranny and are submerged by another form of digital totalitarianism, I am struck by how our societal and economic fabric remains fractured beyond recognition. Just like the bravest of actuaries, scientists, medical anthropologists, economists, and Nobel Laureates correctly predicted the harms the draconian lockdown policies would impose on society early on, it is the harm of social and economic polarization that keeps us harmed. A reality I grapple in accepting, find difficult in resisting, embedded in a struggle of striving to cultivate meaning and purpose for my life in an overwhelming and uncertain world.

I vacillate between clinging to my old beautiful, bountiful, full of promise, prosperity, and freedom Canada of 2015, and the Canada I know is nothing but an illusion in 2025. A painful reality gripping us, a truth and pain so menacing, that I fear where our justified and collective rage may lead. I long for my old life, in a country I so deeply love, for a future that is meaningful, purposeful, structured, connected, embedded in a society free to flourish, prosper and self-determine that has sadly and steadily, slipped from our collective grasp. I have foolishly thought that what is enshrined in the American constitution – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is also by extension, in ours. I felt uneasy to learn that in section 91 of the Canadian Constitution Act of 1867, our founders have enshrined – peace, order and good government. Alas, we do define ourselves by not being American! Canada is defined by its docility and is built on its deference to authority. It is at last clear to me, why the signs are everywhere, their harms even more insidious, and denial of this truth outright dangerous. Is the pursuit of happiness that elusive that we must resort to being governed instead? But what exactly is happiness and why is freedom so synonymous with it, what our ancestors have valiantly fought and died for, and why is it all slipping from our collective grasp?

In his Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt famously argued that happiness occurs in between, and that all we need, is to get the conditions right, as acquiring happiness directly is impossible. Some conditions lie within us, others require us to have the right relationships between us, the right work to fuel us, and all it needs is to be bound together by a connection to something larger beyond us. In the preamble to Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, it states: “Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law.” Our own Constitution then implicitly acknowledges the historical fact that societies informed by certain religious traditions have been sustained by liberty and freedom. But what political voices best fertilize freedom?

We surely need classical liberals in society, as they think about issues of victimization, equality, autonomy, and the rights of minorities. We also need conservatives, as they push us to think about loyalty, respect for authority, tradition, and an innate sense that respect for God is all important in society. But as Haidt warns, a society without conservatives would lose many of the social structures and constraints that need it to function, and a society without liberals, would be harsh and oppressive to many. We need both to preserve our social stability and to do so, we might even find wisdom in the minds of our opponents, to derive meaning for ourselves. But we are stuck in a society where we cannot even speak freely or vote for the betterment of our children. Why did freedom become such a dirty word? And what does freedom mean, exactly?

In Isaiah Berlin’s seminal 1958 Oxford essay Two Concepts of Liberty, negative liberty refers to an absence of obstacles that prevent us from acting as we choose. It means freedom from interference, coercion, or domination by others. Negative liberty is our ability to operate within a sphere with no external influence. It gives us the freedom to move, freedom to choose our profession, freedom to speak without interference, fear, or coercion. It provides a sphere of personal autonomy where we are free to make our own choices without being forced or manipulated. However, negative liberty also poses limits as we cannot attain our goals without adequate resources.

By contrast, positive liberty refers to the ability to control our lives with our self-determination. It means freedom to realize our goals and actualize our potential. Positive liberty empowers us to take control of our lives by pursuing our personal values and being masters of our destiny. Positive liberty gives us the ability to achieve our goals, regardless of who may be interfering or not. It entitles us to education, healthcare, employment, food, and the opportunity to participate in political life.

Berlin argued that there is a tension between the two liberties: promoting positive liberty through state intervention, could lead to a reduction in negative liberty by infringing on our individual freedoms. He warned us that unchecked positive liberty could be used as a justification for totalitarian regimes, with the state acting in the best interests of the collective, when in fact it infringes on its freedoms, like it did during the Covid era. In his famous essay, John Stuart Mill argued that liberty lay in the struggle between liberty and authority, in that we owe nothing to society as long as we don’t harm society. However, in order to implement positive liberty, we need to redistribute wealth and resources, by taking property from one person to provide for the needs of another. Modern libertarians such as Ron Paul, do not believe in the concept of positive liberty at all, because they think that two people cannot be free if one person has to take from another in order to be free. However, without any redistribution, the portion of the population without wealth, education or employment, is not free. We thus need a family unit to function as a society, because family is what society is built upon. In his foundational work The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote “Man was born free and he is everywhere in chains”. Indeed, liberty is complicated.

So, what does freedom mean, to me? To me freedom resides in the mind. As long as I can think freely and reflect on my own observations, learnings and inputs without coercion, I feel free. But the minute I am told what to think, how to think, need an expert to think, or be presumed that I can’t think for myself altogether, I feel imprisoned. I will listen to the expert or even a faucet of experts, but I’ll decide for myself what I think or whether I believe them: thought to me is the freedom from which my individual sovereignty is built. I get self-protective, delving fervently into research to figure out for myself, what I think. The best place for me to do this, is inside a university or a beautiful library.

I always associated universities and libraries with freedom. Their liberating and inspiring campuses instilled a belief in me that I can discover anything. Sometimes, I simply long to sit in the quiet surrounded by the intellectual legacy around me, marveling at the scent of aged books. It fosters deep contemplation, where the disappearance of time is amplified by the collective focus of students around me, studying. I like the soft rustle of pages in reading rooms, the thinking minds around me, the clutter of laptops, the whispers of students, the stacks of books around students working through their last, agonizing papers, and yes, that cute guy across the room…reading. I like the collective focus that I feel inside a library and am immediately motivated by it to do my own work. Indeed, the sanctuary, solitude, and refuge that libraries bring me always make it conducive to do my best work, to make sense of the curious thoughts swirling in my confused mind. It always seemed that the more I studied, the less I knew, and ironically, the more I studied, the more I’d be filled with doubt, understanding even less, faced with endless tentacles to unravel. Oftentimes simply leaving the library would put them to rest.

One gorgeous autumn day, I decided to study at the Bora Laskin Law library, one of the few university spaces left allowing public access to wi-fi. Excited by the beautiful heritage Flavelle House with its ornate fireplace lounge I discovered upon entering, once inside the library, I was quickly disappointed by the poor lighting in the adjoining Jackman’s Building’s reading room and modernist architecture.

Next to me on an adjacent wall, I noticed poorly curated class diploma pictures of freshly minted and aspiring lawyers. Streams of beaming faces ready and excited to take on the world in their respective legal specialties, hung unevenly, clustered towards the edge of the wall, making it obvious that the curators ran out of room and a ruler. Irritated, I got up, and measured the spacings with my finger. A one inch difference is irrelevant, as it looks perfectly alright, but what was not alright, at least in my obsessive mind, was the mediocrity it was rooted in, rather than excellence - hanging pictures of soon-to-be prominent lawyers on a wall that celebrates them, was frankly, insulting. I found it quite ironic that this dull and unimpressive building was awarded the Canadian Architect Award in Excellence in 2013 for the added benefit that it replaced libraries with modern spaces so you could no longer hear a pin drop but be cued instead, to facilitate discussion and interaction. Another nudge embedded into our environment for how we are to behave, slowly erasing history. The reason I love libraries so much is precisely because I can hear a pin drop! There is a comradery in the feeling that you are not alone in the silence, and yet silence is what you crave. It didn’t change my wish that there be a reading room matching the prestige of Toronto’s Law School with the arduous selection process of being admitted, a sanctuary housing thousands of volumes of legal scholarship. A cathedral-like reading room bathed in natural light with large panoramic windows, high vaulted ceilings, stained-glass windows, intricate carved moldings, an atmosphere commanding respect and reverence for the law and a tradition of learning. University of Toronto is a beautiful campus nevertheless, a crown jewel in the city, with its neo-Gothic and Romanesque architecture, sprinkled with heritage buildings such as Hart House, and interspersed with Modernist architecture throughout. Massey College mimics Old Souls College at Oxford in its impressive Ondaatje Dining Hall hosting High Table dinners enshrined in medieval origins of formal traditions such as prayers said in Latin, and students dressed in sub fusc academic dress or black tie. It hosts the Oxford Cambridge society’s Kenneth McCarter Memorial Dinners resembling the formal candlelit affairs steeped in ritual, tradition and history from Oxford. Rich with intellectual and social stimulation, they are special to behold, a lot of fun, and bring back many fond memories from Oxford that continue to warm my heart.

In order to study and log onto the guest wi-fi network however, I was forced to enter a daily code on my mobile, for my laptop to magically know to let me in. Multi-factor authentication is a mechanism for data collection, of monitoring, and yes, of surveillance. How odd, that a university law library would insist on surveilling me around on my mobile when I go to the bathroom or on my route home? Disturbed by this, I questioned the library clerk, “Why can’t I simply use a guest password?” She gave me a look as if the answer was in plain sight, “It is to ensure you aren’t doing anything bad on the internet,” she quipped. “And whose purview defines ensure and bad?” I wondered. Annoyed by the insidious coercion, I immediately knew that if I wanted to experience the simple joy of sitting in a university library which inherently requires access to a laptop and wi-fi, I now needed to comply.

On my way, I meet a delightful blond girl, clearly a European, a tourist asking for directions, “Do you know which way is the subway?” she asked. Eager to help, I smiled and led the way as we headed in the same direction. Leading her down the beautiful Philosopher’s Walk to the library, we instantly connected, her warm smile engaging, her blond hair shining brightly in the afternoon sun. Her name was Agrita, she was visiting from Latvia, here to explore studies in architecture. We headed down Hart House Circle as I wanted to show her the beautiful places around campus. “I just wanted to check the place out, I thought it would be interesting, and I wanted to see the dome,” she said. “The dome? That one?” I replied, pointing to the convocation hall. “No, not that dome,” she assured me, “It’s a different dome.” We searched around looking for a dome, when she quickly spotted the Louis B. Stewart Observatory, the smaller and much less impressive dome. Embarrassed that I had missed the dome’s existence all these years, “Oh, that’s it?” we said, laughing. Quickly our chat delved into politics. “It’s very strange here, this place has become so weird, this city,” I said trying to detect her political leanings. “Ughh,” she gave me an acknowledging look. “Yeah, it’s pretty extreme, the ideology in society,” I responded, feeling a familiar connection to her already. “Can I show you something?” I asked. “Of course,” she said. We didn’t have lots of time as she wanted to see the CN Tower and I wanted to show her Massey College, and other architectural buildings such as the historic Hart House. “Come, follow me,” I said, feeling selfish for wanting her reaction to what I was about to show her. I led her down Hart House Circle to Knox College pointing to places around the university along the way. We arrived to find this:

“Ugh, it’s like a graveyard!” she exclaimed, visibly shocked. “I know,” I said, unsure how to respond. “What has become of our world?” I asked rhetorically. “You must know what stumbling stones are?” I inquired, referring to the dispersed Holocaust memorial of tiles cemented into the front of homes all over Europe of people abducted and sent to Auschwitz. “Of course,” she said solemnly. “Really, really weird,” she said. We stood in silence, upset and confused, unsure what to make of these stones. We looked for signs of an explanation, what is this and why is this here? “Oh, look she said, some are in memory of,” clearly, some are dead, others are celebrated, possibly even alive, but mingled in plaques on the ground, amongst the dead. It was nearly dusk and Agrita needed to catch a glimpse of the CN Tower. We stood for a moment longer in a silent pause, unsure how to process the scene: “If you want to study architecture, maybe try Chicago. Their skyline is beautiful and architecture is super impressive,” I said finally, wanting to protect her from unhappiness, but trying to safeguard her freedom of self-discovery. We stood in another silence a while longer. “Don’t come here,” I said at last. “This is not the place,” I stated protectively, yet decisively. “Thanks!” Agrita exclaimed, looking relieved, her smile beaming. I could tell my new friend was really looking forward to her next destination, the CN tower. We hugged goodbye, connected on social, and I headed back to the library.

On my way back through Hart House I stumbled upon the Grandchildren’s Garden. Upset, I discovered what looked like gravestones masked as pavers clearly of children on campus. Walking around I found more pavers: Ethan Peterson, Woods Peterson, Drake Peterson, Willow Peterson, Odin Peterson, Luke Dirksen, Henry Dirksen. Clearly two families, I thought. Why here? And how is this normal? Why are dead children symbolized in a university? I pondered, agitated, as it seemed that at first, they must be dead grandchildren. It took me effort to research the names to guess that they could in fact be living grandchildren, some ambitious PhD students, ostensibly studying at Harvard, all commemorated into stone pavers as one big happy family. “What will distinguish them once they are dead?” I wondered. “Are we really inscribing our children into pavers whilst they are still alive?” This was so deranged to me that it defied any social norm, convention, or humanity.

It turns out that since the Covid era, the most prestigious university in Canada had been busy transforming itself into a cemetery. A quick google search pointed me to the Landmark Project, one that: “…was created during a time of lockdowns and isolation, but now stands as a place of connection, interaction and beauty.” Its goal was to create a more sustainable and pedestrian-friendly campus thanks to donors from 35 countries inscribed into 3,478 pavers to pay tribute celebrating their connections to the university. Has anyone bothered to make the connection between these pavers and the Holocaust Memorial? Or were they thinking that the association would automatically be to Hollywood Stars? Were the students, parents and alumni consulted through a vote? The Grandchildren’s Garden, meant to make the area greener and more pedestrian-friendly, was ostensibly a revitalized space for reflection and commemoration. Pavers meant to make it more pedestrian-friendly? According to President Meric Gertler, it is “more than just a physical transformation — it’s a reimagining of what our campus can be…a shift from a car-dominated environment to a green oasis reflecting our commitment to sustainability and inclusivity… and fostering community connections.” How are granite pavers of children masquerading as utopian green spaces fostering inclusivity and community connections? How do students grapple with their chemistry labs or mathematics assignments, sitting on top of either dead or alive children, even if only in symbolism, as they nibble on grapes and a salami sandwich? It was immediately unclear whether these children, were being commemorated or in fact alive. The In Memoriam pavers, didn’t have death dates but In Memoriam means dead. The distinction between the dead and the living was inescapably creepy and chilling. Would happy pictures of talented students on a college wall simply not suffice in imbuing them into the proud history of the university? Did it have to get this weird?

There is nothing inclusive, inspiring, green or collaborative about this. Why would stones of the dead be without death dates, interspersed with others who are living? Why would anyone choose to conflate death with life? Mattias Desmet argues that we have become suicidal society, but I think we are far worse: we are now a death cult, so lost in our shared vision of inclusivity, that we rally around the dead confounding them with the living, desecrating both in the process of forgetting what and who we are rallying around. We have decided to normalize suicidal nudging to legitimize the symbol of death as an option for these precious students, our future of society, exactly where it is most effective: in a university. This is not out of place either. In fact, it is eerily aligned. With the expansion of Medical Assistance In Dying (MAID) to competent mature minors, we now tragically advocate for the capable participation of young people in the extension of MAID.

This to me this is the death of the university, signifying that the safest thing to do is to say nothing at all. So much for freeing the mind where all ideas in a university are valid. After all, isn’t the whole point of going to university to be as intellectually uncomfortable as possible? Isn’t the only way to grow, by challenging ideas, even unpopular ideas, realizing that ideas will evolve only if we cultivate a strict discipline to question, challenge, shape, defend and evolve them? Isn’t the whole point to nurture creativity through intellectual rigour, rather than stifling it with suppression and compliance through fear? Doesn’t death automatically fill us with fear?

No, this is not the productive fear that accompanies intellectual rigour. The fear of facing your professor during office hours, knowing that if unprepared, you will walk out with a stark realization that you are ten times more stupid than you thought walking in. The best professors were always the ones who believed in you, who pushed you to reach a higher standard, the ones you somewhat feared but who never demoralized you, the ones you felt energized by after each conversation knowing you were supported, no matter how bleary eyed or exhausted. The ones who taught you the beauty of questioning, of self-belief, of limitlessness, of creativity, of the art of asking good questions. The ones who made you realize that counter-factual thinking really matters. The ones who left you feeling inspired to randomly assign yourself a mountain of work when you thought you were all done. The ones who encouraged you to believe enough in yourself to make complex analysis proofs in Riemann integration actually possible, pushing you through the pain of understanding the Cauchy theorem, the abstract confusion of bounded and unbounded numbers, but only after you spent 20 agonizing hours staring at a barely filled page written in Greek. The ones I loved most where those I feared: in one of my favourite undergraduate classes, organic chemistry, the fear I felt in burning myself handling acetone or methanol, with the coolness of discovery of synthesizing organic compounds made in lab. I would then spend hours explaining my spectroscopy results figuring out what I actually did, but best of all, I could then imagine and see molecules moving so that I could then flip them and they would react all in my mind! The ones who pushed you through enough struggle, flipping through enough pages, re-writing and memorizing formulas (although that never worked unless you understood the formulas), knowing that the solution to your great academic effort would eventually appear in your mind, oftentimes at 4am. This is the satisfying struggle and glory of learning, of self-discovery, of growth, and the sudden joyful realization that all the long sleep deprived nights fueled by sugary hot chocolate, cereal and cold pizza, were worth it.

This environment, of suicidal nudging, is not that. This is the dull, painful, and exhausting fear that dissenting, uncomfortable questions, and contrarian viewpoints, have consequences. It is an art, perfected by the university, of silent control, through insidious, yet gentle, nudging, signaling to students that the stench of death masked into pavers in the spirit of inclusion conflating the living with the dead, is not only normal but inspiring, and implicitly, an option appearing on their course load menu. It is first and foremost isolating, because the inevitability of death serves a subconscious reminder of fear and loneliness. But in the words of Laura Aboli, “loneliness isn’t the absence of others, it is the presence of many who leave you feeling unseen.” You will most certainly feel unseen with suicidal nudges around you, and you will most certainly not be feeling connected. The whole point is to confuse, isolate and distort. These cognitive distortions have a way of making us lose trust in ourselves, with our judgement stripping us of our independence, so that we become dependent on the university for direction and validation. In the midst of questioning our sanity, we lose our self-esteem, thinking that we are inherently flawed if we don’t comply, doubting our feelings, perceptions, and observations, rather than simply evolving, questioning, and building on them. The longer we are surrounded by this environment, the more we internalize our distorted views, and the harder it becomes to break free.

Cemeteries bring solitude and somber remembrance, surely, and can be very healing – but it is not an environment where one would crack open their assignment in quantum mechanics. And neither are universities environments for burials, unless there is a special historical significance for them, such as a memorial of a statue of an intellectual or a transformative president. Ironically, statues of leading historical figures including Sir John A. MacDonald, Queen Elizabeth II, Winston Churchill, Egerton Ryerson, have been vandalized or torn down across this country in response to our leaders telling us, repeatedly, that we are genocidal and systemically racist, all the while failing to communicate the basics of a shared vision. How daft is it then, to embed and desecrate a campus with 3,478 donor pavers of dead and alive community members? The result that Cultural Marxism has brought across Canadian society are division, demoralization, and resentment. The contradictions are glaring. Death and burials are now mocked, whether they are memorial pavers in a university masked in celebration of inclusion and green spaces, or the demonic idea of putting your loved one’s ashes into an hourglass as an invitation of participating in family game night. What is next? Chocolate sprinkles or organic ashes of your grandson with your latte, ma’am?

Standing in the grandchildren’s garden, tears streamed down my face at the thought of the scorching and searing pain at the death of one’s child or sibling, when I thought I would vomit. Instead, I started coughing, overwhelmed by my own grief, carried since childhood, having now lost all of my immediate family members, tragedies and grief that defined the sensitive yet strong woman I’m becoming. I thought about my Polish ancestors who perished in the Holocaust. I looked up at all the wandering students around me, unassuming, unbothered and preoccupied over their paper, exam or night out. How utterly sad, I thought. My mind went to the horror of the democide we just lived through in the tyrannical Covid era, which by the mainstream at least, has been forgotten and replaced, or worse, gaslighted, in what Teal Swan aptly described as Society's Great Gaslight. Nothing is back to normal despite everyone pretending like it is. Even bringing it up in friendship circles, by mere desire for discussion, is met with derision, brushed aside as if nothing had happened. Popping into my mind were the creepy Stalinist dance videos that masked my inner chaos with carefully crafted musical sedation, leaving me wondering whether they had a Machiavellian effect on our collective psyche contributing to the mass formation that had befallen us, as described by Mattias Desmet.

The root cause of this societal decline stems from the Cultural Marxism that accuses their opponents of being oppressors and exploiting their common decency by making them feel ashamed, resulting in self-censoring. For anyone wishing to protect, defend and be proud of our history, traditions, and heritage, we must anticipate being called a racist, sexist, homophobic, a conspiracy theorist, a terrorist and other condescending and judgmental labels. Such fear paralyzes people and leads to social degeneration. In order to dissipate it, we must identify what we are for, through a common vision and values we can proudly identify with, rather than simply identifying what we are against. In the Marxist view, all human interaction is a struggle between people who are oppressors, who are irredeemably in the wrong, and those who are oppressed, and always in the right. But as Haidt asserts, we need both: life consists of voluntary co-operation for mutual benefit, by people with differing goals, each with their own agency and values, each carrying a moral sense of responsibility for the outcome. The cure that Marxists have proposed has turned out far worse than the disease, with Communism killing nearly 100 million people worldwide. It is simply untrue that human interaction amounts to exploitation and power struggles and that our economic reality stems from ethnic “privilege” to the exclusion of our choices, talents, will, perseverance, and tenacity. Racism does exist amongst all classes, but the only way to co-exist is to stop identifying with one: do we really need to talk about it? How about we stop talking about it, or at least try? People are just people. Why not show what we can do instead, focusing on cultivating our merit, showing our most authentic self, reaching to others from our heart rather than judging by their exterior? Most people don’t care about whether we are black, brown or white, they care about who we are, what we bring to the table, how we behave in a relationship, and how we make others feel.

Instead of uniting, the Trudeau government instilled in us not only a sense of shame of our past, but imprinted a collective guilt that we are systematically genocidal and racist and that we must atone for our sins by fundamentally changing our way of life. We are made to believe that the “oppressed” are now the victims, and since most of us are raised with prosocial values, we naturally feel obliged to show sympathy to victims of genuine oppression. Ensuring that cultural assimilation is successful, however, requires a careful assessment of the cultural milieu from which the potential immigrants arrive from. Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies warned us that unlimited tolerance will lead to the disappearance of tolerance, as if a society tolerates all viewpoints, including those that are intolerant, it risks enabling those intolerant viewpoints as suppressing tolerance itself. A truly tolerant society must therefore have the right to deny tolerance to those who promote intolerance, Popper said, as the pervasive expression of intolerant ideologies can erode tolerance through authoritarianism. In the words of legal scholar Bruce Pardy, “equity, diversity and inclusion are code words for reverse discrimination.” Questioning it is disallowed, dissent or constructive discussion silenced, where we are not even allowed to debate whether it is doing more harm to society than good. Furthermore, Pardy elucidates that white people cannot even claim discrimination because the Charter has an equity exception, requiring “not equal treatment between individuals but equal or comparable outcomes between identity groups.” The labels are indeed harmful and have irreversibly harmed many relationships, including family relations. George Orwell in his satirical fable Animal Farm forewarned that: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” The same can be said today about feminists, women want to be equal and special with the same privileges as men, but with additional privileges available only to women, exclusive of all the tough jobs men do. With the historical majority becoming the minority and us claiming no specific Canadian culture other than not being American, are we really surprised that many are claiming Canada is broken? Have we paused to ask ourselves whether changing Canada in such a way might make everyone worse off, socially, politically, and economically, including our alleged victims? The reality is that the constitutional order of good governance, order and peace established in Canada at Confederation in 1867 has given rise to one of the most admired and prosperous democracies in the world, yet has dramatically dropped to being nearly dead last in economic growth amongst OECD countries. Yet, rather than fighting with fiery and determination to solve it, we sit in complacency thinking the government will solve it for us. Perhaps it is time then, to think about demanding that our government work for us to re-open and re-write the Canadian constitution? To take the best of the Constitutional Republic from the US and the best of the Westminster Parliamentary system from the UK, and fit it into today’s modern era?

I worry whether we have not crossed the threshold in Bruce Pardy’s brilliant depiction of state singularity, where state and society become indistinguishable. If we cannot decipher the difference between pavers masked as grave stones of the dead mingled in with the living, and we wrap such depressing messaging in a blanket of inclusivity at a prominent university, we have become a warped and degenerate society. At state singularity, Bruce Pardy asserts, the “state becomes society and society is a product of the state, where legal norms and social expectations become irrelevant. In this view, the state’s managerial mandate is to do as it judges best, because everything becomes an expression of its vision.” The rule of law is thus rejected. We are living in an era where the rule of law, applied blindly to all people is replaced with rule by law, applied selectively at whim by unelected bureaucrats. In contrast to fascist and communist regimes resulting from deliberate political revolt, at the singularity, Pardy argues, all solutions to all problems lie with the government. Like black holes, state singularities absorb and crush everything. Corporations serve state interests and participate in managing the economy with a large majority of employment opportunities being concentrated inside the state, not the private sector. Singularities thus destroy voluntary efforts by investors and entrepreneurs by impeding them with obstacles. With everyone on the political left and right seeking to leverage state power to craft society in their image, singularities crush our soul because they prevent us from meaningful and fruitful employment and a thriving existence. According to Bruce Pardy:

“In a singularity, one cannot propose to eliminate government, as doing so would be contrary to the ideology, rejected not only by the bureaucrats, but by the citizenry who, dissatisfied with the services they receive, demand even more from their government. State singularity therefore, is found not only in the structure of a ballooning government, but in the minds of the people.”

Our modern technocratic state has all the technological surveillance advances of monitoring spaces, collecting unnecessary private details, supervising activities, freezing bank accounts, all in the name of requiring our compliance and controlling every aspect and nuance of our private lives, in the name of protecting us. Is this a life we want? What will it take then, to liberate us from this digital concentration camp and defeat this insidious totalitarianism, that once in place, we can never truly escape from? To let us think for ourselves and defend our liberty? To protect our freedom, to fight for our sovereignty, to preserve our right to self-determination, and pursue our innate desire for happiness? To strive for human flourishing in how we desire and raise our precious children in how we choose?

buymeacoffee

Dear friends and readers,

If you lost a relationship or like me, a friendship, or two, or three…to propaganda, this song is for you.

Read more

Medea is a story of a sorceress from Ancient Greece who is scorned by her lover, isolated by her loved ones, abandoned in a foreign country, and in seething resentment and cold-blooded revenge, she murders her own children. Yet, behind her filicidal rage lies one of the most complex and fascinating characters ever conceived. Médée Premiered in 1797 at the Théâtre Feydeau in Paris, during a period of social upheaval in a population reeling from the French Revolution, when theatre became a refuge for counter-revolutionary activity, paralleled in Medea's story of betrayal and revenge.

By contrast, theatres today are often places of indoctrination, rather than of refuge, where freedom, justice, solace, beauty and inspiration could flourish. However, this Canadian Opera Company’s 2024 production of Luigi Cherubini’s score of Medea in a role resurrected from the canon by opera’s legendary Diva Maria Callas, under director Sir David McVicar, is a rarely performed, visually vivid masterpiece. …

Read more

Alas, that quintessential question us women can all relate to. A few weeks ago, I was so excited to snatch a ticket, a sold-out performance to one of Puccini’s most beloved operas, Madama Butterfly, a masterpiece.

A regular subscriber to the Canadian Opera Company, seated not in my usual seat but in front of a standing-room-only crowd, preferring the classics over any “progressive” works, I noticed that the operatic canon this year ventured strongly towards the latter, much to my disappointment. At the beginning of the performance, an announcement informed us that Eri Nakamura was ill, and an understudy would be performing, to a noticeable gasp of disappointment in the audience. Customary in opera houses in this situation, the director typically appears on stage, to reassure the audience and introduce the understudy. We waited patiently in anticipation, but sickness sometimes afflicts the best of us including the greatest of opera singers, which is perfectly understandable. What bothered me was the laziness with which it was conveyed – it was easier to hide behind an obscured microphone, rather than make the effort to come on stage into the spotlight and address the audience directly. For an opera aficionado like me – introduced to it at age 6, music always bringing Dad into my living room, his heart, love, and voice reverberating within mine, reminding me that I am never quite alone without him. One day, I joke, I will simply travel the world dolled up in ball gowns and petticoats visiting opera houses. I’ve learned as I did from Dad, that in opera, projection and technique really matters but what always matters more is the conductor – drowning the singers with vigorous conducting, takes away from the performance and relegates one’s attention into the wonders of one’s mind rather than the opera, as yawns crawl up one’s throat and posture slumps in one’s seat.

Butterfly is a relatable story of broken dreams. A story of anticipation, of expectation, of hope, of love, of anguish and despair. It was my little modicum of joy, a night to immerse myself with the dramatic and evocative range of a memorable soprano role like Cio-Cio San and lose myself in her heartbreak. A naïve young girl desperately and loyally in love, only to find her partner nonchalantly cheating and betraying her behind her back, as she waits and anticipates his return from overseas, she matures in the process. Like many operas, it all ends in tragedy. But so much more went missing for me. Where were all the stage embellishments, the iconic Butterfly Kimono images, the ancient artifacts of Japanese oriental culture, the beautiful ornaments, the stunning set pieces? Where were all the Geishas peppering the stage in Hikizuri kimonos adorned in traditional Oshiroi Japanese makeup? What happened to the tender expression of passion between the two lovers, during happier times such as their wedding? Did I even sense her innocence and her growth as she realizes her heartbreak and the inevitability of her dreams being broken? Exasperated, I questioned - why does everything need to be re-made into an orderly formation instructing us, like children, into what we are to believe? Why can we simply not be left to indulge, without interference, in the purity and relatability of a broken heart? Angered, I genuinely pondered, was it part of a weird androgynous scheme, a cultural scolding of us into psychological de-souling?

A subpar performance in my view, fitting in well with the mediocrity in Canada taking foothold as the “new normal.” Why expect excellence when excellence is the exception? Why expect a functioning meritocracy when ironically, in the spirit of diversity, fairness of opportunity is exclusive? What happened to our western values, our culture, our confidence, our self-determination? How can we expect to innovate in an environment of mono-maniacal thinking, where our creative instincts are naturally stifled? Creativity is about experimentation, it is inherently about freedom, freedom to think, freedom to create, freedom to dislike, freedom to fail, freedom to disagree, freedom to take risks. Creativity is about dynamism. Where was all the dynamism in this performance? I wondered whether I genuinely miss reveling in Butterfly’s naivete and her sexiness, her femininity and her womanhood, her teasing and her playfulness? That iconic Butterfly image, typically an unforgettable fixture in this performance, was decidedly hard to spot. It must be me, I thought. Or was it? Why could I not sense her hopeless longing and devotion to him, her angst, her expectations, and her sorrow - that he may have in fact forgotten her? This was in fact the entire point of this opera! Her anguished wait and anticipation played out instead, in a long, drawn out, dreadfully boring scene of suspended nothing, with Butterfly and Suzuki (her maid and confidante) and Sorrow (a real-life child, her son) – sitting patiently waiting and waiting and…waiting. Revolving at an agonizingly slow speed with nothing going on onstage seemingly for hours, without any clear signal the audience was left on its own to imagine a ship carrying Lieutenant Pinkerton arriving away from a distance. I thought, surely, this must be dreadfully boring for these singers, as it was for me. The underlying parallel was palpable: the emptiness and stillness permeating the performance was meant to thrust us back to the trauma imposed by the tyrannical Covid era. How odd I thought – and why? I learned that it was intended as the depiction of the Japanese concept of ma, the space between all things. During One Fine Day, in an immediately recognizable vocal libretto, as Butterfly convinces herself with calm certainty and fleeting confidence that Pinkerton will return, her voice mounting to a hysterical frenzy, I thought, surely, this Aria will make me forget it all. But it didn’t.

A pure and relatable story of love, faith, and sorrow metamorphosed into undertones of entitlement, power, unchecked privilege of the American male bravado, the impact of colonialism, gendered violence, ethnical stereotyping and cultural appropriation. Implied against the backdrop of the American elections, I thought, surely, have we not had enough? Can we simply not respect the American people for the choice that their majority had made and a clear mandate that they issued? Why can we not strive for a balance to dutifully respect and protect minorities whilst granting the majority their ruling power? Even at the opera, for these few moments, could we simply not be left alone to relate to the human emotion of love, of longing, of devotion, of hope, of magic, of anticipation, of passion, of heartbreak and despair? Why politicize such universal human emotions into something so un-human? Why rob our human experience of their authenticity for the simple reason of needing to be virtuous, at nearly every turn? In one particularly poignant scene, Butterfly, Suzuki, and Sorrow are waiting for her lover to return, when Suzuki informs her that they will not have any money left if they wait much longer, as they are poor. As she waits for the normal to return, to have agency and control over her life again, as most of us have since the pandemic, we are left wondering - if things do not go her way, our way, what will be? The normal to return? Things going our way? I sat puzzled in amazement. The normal – is not returning. Things – are not going our way. Not in Canada, and not for Butterfly. The Laurentians are dictating, and we are here to follow. This is not a republic, Canada is not a country governed in the interests of the people, and for the people. In the wise words of :

“Canada is a country in retreat, more interested in redistributing wealth than in producing it, more resolved to administer than to build, and more prone to languish than to strive. Its people traded freedom for the appearance of safety, and competition for the solidarity of victimhood. Its culture punishes risk and rewards conformity. Its elites collaborate with foreign powers and global institutions. They sacrifice the interests of the people to plunder the country of what remains of its prosperity.”

I sat bewildered and in anguish, wondering about our government’s insistence on a tit-for-tat tariff war. I thought about the inevitable destructive impacts on my immensely rich, beautiful, and vast Canada. Baffled, I wondered why in diplomacy, it has suddenly become so hard to think logically, why for instance we fail to strive to understand our opponent to negotiate with them productively, resorting instead to antagonism when that is obviously so ineffective? Angry by the equalization programs dividing our union, a confederation of provinces, with the government trampling over our provincial jurisdictions, and misguided taxes not only harming but intending to decimate entire industries. The growing divide between our provinces with Eastern Canada nonchalantly violating the rights of the West, bringing the West to the breaking point of their patience. Trapped by a welfare-fixed mindset infusing our collective, thanks to insidious equalization programs and inter-provincial trade barriers, robbing our industries of so much unrealized potential, and yet leaving us astonished why Canada is on a steep and downward decline in wellbeing and productivity metrics. I thought about our growing social upheaval, our deafening polarization, and the harrowing reality of poverty troubling so many, where a nutritious meal and a warm place sheltering us from the cold, harsh Canadian winters become a luxury. I thought about the friends I lost whom I can no longer find common ground with, and the colleagues who quietly ostracized me for being truthfully outspoken. I thought about the blatant and cruel anti-white racism tarnishing employment opportunities and our right to work, as if being white was not a race nor immutable yet deemed unworthy of legal protections. I wondered whether we will forever stand true, north, strong, and free and if so, for how long? I reminisced about my Dad suddenly left without Mom all those years ago in my childhood only for me to be left to figure it out, all over again. How parallel, the two worlds. Bored and disappointed, I thought about the book I was reading: “Citizen One: The Case Against Digital ID” by Paul G. Conlon, with one prominent phrase reverberating in my mind: “Tyranny is a patient foe. When it resurfaces, its oxygen is charitable-sounding legislation, and its food is propaganda. It will patiently wait decades to creep up on you in the shadows while you sleep.” I again thought about my Dad, and the tyranny he spent his life fleeing simply to give my brother and me a better life, only to find myself right back living in one, full circle. How deeply I miss my one, beloved brother, tragically killed by the pandemic. I was half-sleeping at this opera, wondering when it would all end, despite being all gowned and gloved up. I felt the anguish of tyranny and a Laurentian dictatorship creeping ever so persistently into my soul and wreaking havoc in my heart and my prolonged yet broken dreams, wondering how I’d grapple or endure it. I thought about how we have seen it all before, wrapped in virtue, pushing us as good, judicious all-knowing Canadians marching in the spirit of “Anti-Americanism” carefully rebranded as “Team Canada”, the moralizing great north. But this is not the Olympics, this is a democracy. We are here not to win nor moralize; we are here to assess and to vote. I vowed that I would never be an Anti-American. I apologize to my American friends and colleagues for our collective self-importance. I vowed that I would keep thinking and speaking for myself no matter what it cost me, and that I would fight and persist, as my Dad did, through all our years of hardship. I vowed to stay married to my ethical code.

Do the Laurentians ever wake up? I wish for a regression to the mean and a course correction. I felt the joy disappearing, as surely and as quickly as it did during this, typically magnificent, opera. Even the set design, always meant to be in a Japanese house, set in a Japanese garden, on a Japanese hill overlooking Nagasaki – was merely decorated by cherry blossoms. But cherry blossoms only bloom in season. As with Butterfly’s ultimate suicide with her son seated blindfolded nearby, the fight for freedom is a perilous one: time to look out as it is a slippery and slimy slope.

buymeacoffee