*Paid subscribers can find the ad-free version of the episode at the bottom of this article.*

Zohran Mamdani has been mayor of New York for seven months and the betting markets already make him the favorite for Time’s Person of the Year. Two years ago he was a state legislator nobody could name but now he is the most successful thing the Democratic Socialists of America have ever produced. The party reports more than 120,000 members with a New York chapter that cleared 15,000 this summer.

Their 2026 national program asks Americans to picture a country with no landlords and no mortgages, where food, energy, medicine and transport stop running as businesses. It calls for public ownership of the largest corporations, universal rent control, publicly owned housing, the abolition of police, prisons and ICE, a gutted military, no Senate, no Electoral College, and a presidency and Supreme Court that answer to Congress. All of it listed on their own website.

Consider the choice of language: Seize, abolish, and redistribute. Marx worked the word abolition into nearly every page of The Communist Manifesto, and the DSA echos it. Neither document spends any time on what happens after abolition. Marx declared the goal was “the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” Take everything, break everything, and make nothing.

Just like Marxists of old, the DSA is organizing its targets. Mamdani published the names and addresses of 950,000 residences that might owe his pied-à-terre tax. Scott Galloway, who supported the tax, called it a wanted poster and asked what the upside was eighteen months after a health insurance executive was shot dead on a Manhattan sidewalk.

Milton Friedman, in 1979, exposed the problem with central planning. Asked whether capitalism runs on greed, he asked back which society doesn’t. Russia? China? Einstein did not work out relativity on instructions from a government office. Then Friedman closed with an important question: where in the world you find “these angels who are going to organize society for us?”

Then we get into the recent controversy, brought forth by a clash between reality and ideology. Enes Kanter Freedom, six foot ten and 250 pounds, read the WNBA eligibility guidelines, declared for the 2027 draft, and said he wants the rules applied to everyone without exception. Royce White followed hours later. The league’s collective bargaining agreement runs 409 pages. Article 13, Section 1A says only players who are women are eligible but don’t offer a definition, hormone standard, or transgender policy.

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Extended Version of Blendr Report EP173: Communism With Better PR: Mamdani for Time Person of the Year

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Many Canadians may be operating under what economists call fiscal illusion—the tendency to underestimate the cost of government when taxes, borrowing and public spending are difficult to connect.

A related idea from behavioural economics is called payment decoupling. It describes what happens when the act of buying something is separated from the moment you actually feel the money leaving your hands.

Researchers call that feeling the “pain of paying.” The less visible and immediate a payment is, the less psychologically noticeable it can become.

Cash is a good example. You take money out of your wallet, count it, hand it to the cashier, and physically see that you have less left. Tapping your phone or credit card makes the transaction faster and less visible. You still pay the same amount, but the loss may not feel as immediate.

Something similar can happen with government spending.

Income and payroll taxes are normally deducted automatically before workers receive their pay. Canadians can see those deductions on their pay stubs, but they may not feel like separate transactions. Sales taxes appear on receipts, but many people focus on the final price rather than how much tax they paid.

This has the effect of separating the taxes people pay from the government programs those taxes fund. We contribute through numerous different taxes and then receive public services without being given an individual bill showing exactly how much we paid for each one.

A recent Fraser Institute study estimated how much Canadian families in different income groups contribute toward public healthcare through the tax system.

Canadians often describe the country as having “free healthcare” because insured hospital and physician services generally have no charge at the point of use, but that does not mean healthcare is free. It means the bill is largely paid collectively through taxation.

According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, total healthcare spending in Canada was projected to reach approximately $399 billion in 2025—about 12.7% of the country’s GDP. Roughly $261 billion of that amount was expected to come from public funding.

Healthcare is therefore not free. It is one of the largest expenses funded by Canadian governments. The real question is whether Canadians understand how much they personally contribute—and whether they believe the services they receive are worth that price.

What we pay

Now that we’ve established that healthcare is definitely not free, we should also establish how much each of us roughly pays per person.

The study estimates that Canadian families, depending on the type, pay between $6,464 and $21,115 annually.

Adults living alone pay about $6,500/year, adults with 1 or 2 children pay around $7,000/year, and households with 2 adults and 0-2 children pay around $20,000/year.

So not only is healthcare not free, but the adults in 2 adult households pay about $10,000 each to healthcare with an income of $166,000-$202,000/year, coming out to about 10% of their income.

It’s also important to note that the cost of healthcare has gone up exponentially compared to other goods.

From 1997 to 2026, the cost of clothing has gone up by 31%, the consumer price index went up by 85%, food increased by 124%, the cost of shelter increased by 180%, and public health care insurance went up by a staggering 279%. Not to mention the average income has only gone up by 160%.

In other words, public healthcare costs have grown 2.3 times faster than food, 1.5 times faster than housing, and 1.7 times faster than the average income.

Unfortunately, the bad news continues. According to Stats Canada, an estimated 24.7% of tax revenues will be spent on healthcare alone. In only the last 10 years the average Canadian family has been paying 47.1% more for healthcare, while incomes have only risen 46.2%.

The Middle Class Trap

As always, it seems being in the middle is the worst place you can be in the economy. Let me explain. When you look at how much families with different income levels contribute to the healthcare system, you see that the people getting the worst deal are the middle class.

The 10% of Canadian families with the lowest incomes will pay an estimated average of just $637 toward public healthcare in 2026. Families in the middle-income group will pay about $8,644, while families in the top 10% will pay around $66,350.

At first, that might seem like exactly how a progressive tax system should work. If you make more, you pay more, but once you do the math, you can see where middle-income families start feeling the squeeze.

The lowest-income families earn an average of $17,654, while the middle-income group earns $88,572—roughly five times as much. However, the middle-income group pays more than 13 times as much toward healthcare.

Now compare the middle with the top. The highest-income families earn an average of $454,221—just over five times the income of the middle group, but they pay about 7.7 times as much toward healthcare.

Put another way, the lowest-income families pay about 3.6% of their income toward public healthcare. Middle-income families pay about 9.8%, while the highest-income families pay 14.6%.

That means the burden jumps by roughly 6.2 percentage points between the lowest and middle-income groups. From the middle to the top, it rises by only another 4.8 points.

The top 10% still pay the largest share of their income overall, so it would not be accurate to say middle-income families pay the most, but these numbers do suggest that middle-income families face the steepest increase in the burden.

That raises a fair question: Are middle-income Canadian families getting squeezed the hardest by the way public healthcare is funded?

What we get

So, now we know how much Canadians pay for healthcare; naturally the next question is, what do we get compared to how much we pay? Well, it doesn’t look good.

According to a report by Second Street, about 3.7 million Canadians are waiting for surgeries, diagnostic scans, or specialist appointments, although incomplete provincial data suggests the true number could be closer to 5.8 million.

According to another study by the Fraser Institute titled “Wait Your Turn: Wait Times for Healthcare in Canada”, Canadians have to wait 28.6 weeks on average to see a specialist. With wait times being the lowest in Ontario at 19.2 weeks and highest in New Brunswick at 60.9 weeks.

Compared to Canadians only having to wait 9.3 weeks in 1993 and paying 279% more since 1997, Canadians are not getting a better deal with the added cost.

Many Canadians also struggle to find a family doctor. A national study done in 2022 found that 1 in 5 Canadians, or 6.5 million Canadians, don’t have a family doctor.

Unfortunately, even considering all of the provided information, many Canadians will still resist being skeptical of the situation our country’s healthcare system is in. There is a wide sentiment among Canadians that “free healthcare” is a part of our very identity. It’s become almost sacred and untouchable no matter how objectively bad it gets.

Many will blame the sharp increase in immigration for the increase of the cost of healthcare, but there is little data to support that. Seniors aged 65 plus account for 47% of health care spending, which is a trend that is slowly increasing.

Others will say that being taxed any amount is a small price to pay for the relief of not getting a bill at the end of treatment. Although that never takes into account the risk of never getting care in the first place due to long wait times.

Canadians will have to ask themselves if clinging to the illusion of free health care is worth the cost of a very deadly reality.

Public healthcare, Canada’s most prized achievement, is now openly prioritizing ideological compliance to ‘woke’ orthodoxy over competence.

A post by Caroline Elliott circulated screenshots of a B.C. Provincial Health Services Authority job posting for Director, Business Planning, highlighting the Indigenous-specific “anti-racism” and DEI language in its requirements.

This is not an inconsequential position. The role supports the BC Centre for Disease Control, the Genome Sciences Centre, and PHSA’s research programs. Tasks include budgeting, financial statements, variance analysis, capital planning, and business cases.

It is ridiculous enough to impose an ideological litmus test for taxpayer funded government positions — it is even worse to place more importance on those beliefs than experience for the job itself.

Consider some of the “core competencies”:

“Demonstrated knowledge of the historic and ongoing impacts of settler colonialism on Indigenous Peoples in social and health contexts…. including clear understanding of and commitment to eradicate Indigenous-specific racism and discrimination and embed Indigenous Cultural Safety and Humility.”

“Additionally, it involves embedding Indigenous Cultural Safety and Humility, and an advanced expertise and unwavering dedication to engaging with diversity, centering equity, and advancing inclusion (DEI).”

“Brings an understanding of the Indigenous specific racism and the broader systemic racism that exists in the colonial health care structure.”

“Demonstrates action-oriented practices addressing Indigenous-specific racism and dismantling systems of oppression.”

“Exhibits strong DEI and anti-racism competencies/skills.”

“Demonstrated deep understanding of their personal learning/unlearning journey in relation to Indigenous-specific racism and dismantling systems of oppression.”

“Demonstrated knowledge of the social, economic, political realities of settler-colonialism and impacts on Indigenous peoples.”

The tell is in the difference in language.

The ideological requirements use demonstrated knowledge, clear understanding, commitment to eradicate, unwavering dedication. The financial ones open with wording that consideration will be given to related leadership and managerial experience.

When discussing ideology, beliefs must be demonstrated and unwavering. Meanwhile, competence will be taken into account.

This is not to say the PHSA is looking to hire a completely unqualified activist. One of the qualifications is a real professional standard — accounting designation or MBA plus twelve years of progressively senior management. The point is they will not hire somebody who is not an activist. It’s a barrier to entry — and a big one considering ideological commitments are two out of the three qualifications. They will effectively take a pool of qualified individuals and shrink it to include only those who profess the correct politics.

It would be comforting to believe this is a one off — some HR manager sneaking their own politics into a single job posting. Except the same social justice dictates appear nearly verbatim across other PHSA senior postings — Director, Labour Relations; Manager, Financial Planning and Analysis; Director, Strategy, Planning & Implementation at BC Cancer. This is a bureaucracy-wide template.

There are two primary reasons this is not merely cultural but rather hardwired into the system itself:

1. B.C.’s Office of the Provincial Health Officer runs something called the Unlearning & Undoing White Supremacy Project.

2. British Columbia’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA) requires the provincial government to take measures to ensure provincial laws are consistent with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Let’s go through each one of them.

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There is a growing discontent in the heart of Western Canada. Less than two weeks ago, Elections Alberta verified over two hundred and twenty thousand signatures on the petition for a vote on Alberta independence. This cleared the bar needed to trigger a vote by more than forty thousand names.

On the face of it, you’d think this a win for the separatists. Clearing the legal threshold is a first for an independence movement in Alberta. Except despite all efforts, it may change nothing.

Danielle Smith scheduled a vote for October 19, months before the petition signatures were counted. On this ballot will be ten questions, with the independence question being tenth. According to Bruce Pardy, professor of law at Queen’s University, the entire vote has been assembled to guarantee the answer comes back No.

“It’s designed to fail,” Pardy told me on a recent episode of the Blendr Report.

What They Asked For vs. What They Got

“Do you agree that the province of Alberta should cease to be a part of Canada to become an independent state?”

That was the question more than 279,000 Albertans signed a petition for, hoping to see it on an official ballot. But this is not what they will see.

Question 10 is not a yes or no. It is a choice between two options. Option 1: Alberta should remain a province of Canada. Option 2: “The Government of Alberta should commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada.”

The change in language makes a major difference. This will not be a vote on independence but rather, on whether to begin a process toward a second vote on independence. Even if Albertans pick Option 2, it will not put Alberta on a path out of Confederation. Just on a path to another ballot.

Jeffrey Rath, who has been pushing the Stay Free Alberta petition, is demanding Smith swap the wording. This is unlikely.

The Third Way That Doesn’t Exist

Pardy goes a step further and points to the shaky math behind it.

Let’s say you divide Alberta into rough thirds. One is committed to independence and will vote Yes no matter what the question is. Another third is opposed and will vote No no matter what. This means the decision would be made by the middle third.

While Pardy acknowledges that middle is not happy with Ottawa and would like real change, they are not yet willing to leave the country to get it.

Danielle Smith is letting that middle bloc believe there is a third way. “She has designed a referendum to tell them that,” Pardy said. “There is a third way. That is, we acknowledge that things are not right, but we are determined to change them. Here are some policy questions. And especially, here are some constitutional questions. Here’s a way to change the deal that we have right now in Confederation, because we agree with you it’s not right. So vote for these other questions. Choose the third way. If you choose the third way, we don’t actually have to go and ditch the country. We don’t have to leave the country. We can fix the country.”

Except, according to Pardy, “that third choice does not actually exist. Those constitutional amendments will not happen.”

Also on the ballot will be a Senate question. Albertans will be asked whether they support the Government of Alberta working with other willing provinces to amend the Constitution to abolish the unelected federal Senate. Not that it will be abolished. Only that Alberta should ask. Pardy admits the Senate is a problem, but amending the Constitution of Canada requires broad multi-provincial agreement — and there are provinces, along with a federal government, with no interest whatsoever in granting it.

Ballots like these serve as steam valves and it’s not the first time they’ve been used. In October 2021, Alberta held a referendum asking whether the Constitution should be amended to remove equalization — a federal transfer program that draws on general federal revenues and pays out to provinces with lower fiscal capacity, such as Quebec.

Nearly 62 percent of Albertans voted in favour of removing equalization. Hard to blame them, considering it’s been more than sixty years since the province last received a payment from it.

“And what happened?” Pardy asked. “Nothing. Because it’s not in the interests of other provinces to do that.” His indictment is clear. “Danielle is selling a bill of goods. She is acting as though the answers to these other questions matter.”

Some independence supporters propose voting only on the independence question and declining the other nine ballots, hoping to send a message. Pardy highlights the futility of this. If a third of voters do that while the other two-thirds answer everything, and the independence tally comes back negative, then they lose. “That’s a no for independence. And the fact that all the independence people voted just for that question means nothing.”

Clever ballot behaviour has little practical effect other than letting the voter feel righteous.

The Clarity Trap

Even though it’s unlikely, let’s run through the scenario that the petitioners get the question phrased their preferred way, the middle third tilts towards independence, and Option 2 wins out. Pardy argues that this still would not count.

The Supreme Court of Canada decided in 1998 that a province seeking a mandate to negotiate its departure from Confederation must put a clear question to its people and win a clear majority. Parliament then passed the Clarity Act, which created a formal process for deciding whether the question asked was truly clear.

Credit where it’s due here. Each of the ten questions sits on its own numbered, colour-coded ballot, and Question 10 is counted first at every voting station in the province. The question isn’t being buried at the bottom of a long form.

The problem is what the results say when read together. Consider Question 8, which asks whether Albertans support working with other willing provinces to amend the Constitution so that provinces can opt out of federal programs that intrude on provincial jurisdiction, such as health care, without losing any of the associated federal funding. Then there is Question 10.

Vote for both, and you have voted for two incompatible futures. Keeping federal transfers requires being a province. Independence requires not being one.

“Now you have a referendum result that you need to interpret,” Pardy said. “And if your referendum result requires interpretation, the question is not clear.”

This would hand Ottawa the proverbial trump card. Even on a win for Option 2, the federal government can say the overall result is contradictory, and decline to accept it. Even Pardy, who frequently and effectively opposes decisions made in Ottawa, said this would be “a fair argument.”

The Binding Trap

There’s another seemingly insurmountable obstacle written into Alberta statute.

In December 2025, the Alberta legislature passed Bill 14, the Justice Statutes Amendment Act. Some of what it did helped the independence side. It stripped out the provision of the Citizen Initiative Act that a judge had used weeks earlier to rule that a citizen petition could not ask an independence question at all. That ruling would have ended all hopes of separation. Bill 14 came after an earlier UCP amendment that reduced the signature threshold from roughly 350,000 names to 177,732. Without both changes this petition would never have been possible in the first place.

But Bill 14 also amended the Referendum Act, which says a government that holds a binding referendum must take the steps necessary to implement the result. Bill 14 added section 4(3), which states that if implementing a binding result would contravene sections 1 to 35.1 of the Constitution Act, 1982 — namely the Charter and Aboriginal and treaty rights — then the government is not required to implement it.

It doesn’t take a law professor to understand that Alberta independence would unavoidably remove the application of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, as well as the section 35 guarantee of Aboriginal and treaty rights within Alberta.

Pardy argues that “the government has given itself the power to refuse to implement independence even if the vote is yes.”

If that wasn’t enough, the result of Question 10 isn’t even binding. Whatever Albertans choose in October, no government is obliged to act on it.

To recap: The ballot is built to produce a No. If it somehow goes the other way, Ottawa can call the result contradictory. And if for some unforeseeable reason they don’t, Edmonton is under no obligation to do anything about it.

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Once August 19th rolls around, Canada will have an additional 50% tariff applied on roughly $20 billion of Canadian goods, courtesy of Donald Trump. There is a major difference between this round of tariffs and previous. Most importantly, CUSMA-compliant goods will be included, with no expiry date.

The legal mechanism being used by Washington is also new. After the Supreme Court ruled in February that the emergency powers law never allowed tariffs in the first place, Trump needed to find a new way of implementing his. His administration is now applying Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, becoming the first to use it. This allows a president to levy duties of up to 50% on any country deemed to be discriminating against American commerce. Notably, this does not require a trade tribunal or vote in Congress. Trump can sign a proclamation and it becomes law.

Three proclamations were signed: dairy, alcohol, and motor vehicles — which at first glance doesn’t actually contain cars. Rather, it focuses on furniture, lumber, plywood, cement, plastics, clothing, footwear, toys, machinery, cosmetics, and farm goods down to cut flowers and seeds. Jamieson Greer, the US Trade Representative, says these tariffs are in response to provinces pulling American liquor off the shelves and European dairy getting more access to the Canadian market than American. This brings supply management into the crosshairs, which has been an untouchable policy in Canada for more than 50 years.

The second story of this podcast is about Don Drummond, who spent twenty-three years inside the federal finance department, claiming he’s never seen a lack of transparency like Carney’s. He’s been reading these documents since 1977, even helping build the thing he now says he can’t read. Typically, Drummond and his associates at the C.D. Howe Institute try to work out the deficit before the budget gets tabled. Except due to the opaqueness of this cabinet, they can’t. There is no way to tell whether Ottawa’s latest spending announcements are capital purchases, amortization, or liabilities. This includes a Pacific Coast pipeline agreement, a carbon capture package, and up to twelve submarines from a German shipbuilder that hasn’t signed a contract yet. All of this was announced without any fiscal transparency and lands on a backdrop of planned deficits of at least fifty billion a year for the next five years. Don’t worry though, Carney’s finance minister says we hold the strongest fiscal position in the G7. Meanwhile, Reuters reported last week that the loonie is now the most heavily shorted major currency in the world. Which means someone is lying.

We also cover a recent eighteen-month joint operation between Windsor police, the CBSA, and the OPP called Project Bay, which led to one of Ontario’s largest drug busts in history. Nearly 1.7 tonnes of drugs, $139 million worth of product, and seventeen firearms (including an anti-tank rifle). Twenty-one people were charged as a result. The important takeaway is the network beneath it. Sam Cooper of The Bureau reports that Mexican cartels are running a broker model inside Canada’s commercial trucking industry, with drivers knowingly hauling concealed loads. Apparently the Americans asked the RCMP to work this in 2019, except there was “no appetite” to do anything about it.

Then, for paid subscribers, we discuss recent findings by Senator Rand Paul on the link between China’s military labs and vials found at the Detroit Airport. This intersects with the Winnipeg Lab scandal from the year before the pandemic, leading to the question: just how frequently are Western nations sharing deadly pathogens with a hostile adversary?

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Extended and Ad Free Version of Blendr Report EP172: Trump’s New Tariffs, Carney’s Blind Budget, and Cartel Trucking

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When does a word lose its meaning? Many would say when it loses its clear distinction. After all, if something stands for everything, it stands for nothing. Modern culture and post-modern thought have embraced this shift—the steady devaluing of words, the move from shared, objective truth to purely personal, subjective truth. The cost is plain: without a common understanding of reality, we lose the ability to record the present accurately for the future.

This brings us to the case of Cédric Grégoire, now known as Emma Grégoire. Between 2022 and 2023, this transgender woman allegedly approached young mothers in Saint-Paul-d’Abbotsford, near Granby, offering babysitting services. After gaining a mother’s trust, Grégoire was left alone with the children. In the winter of 2022, she allegedly sexually assaulted a four-year-old. A year later, in 2023, she assaulted a six-year-old, with police believing the abuse occurred over several weeks.

One might hope this would end with the suspect caught, evidence gathered, and justice served. In Canada, however, such sensitive cases rarely follow that path.

After these assaults on two young children—one just four years old—the National Post reported that Statistics Canada had recorded the crimes of this biological male, identifying as a woman, under female statistics rather than male ones.

When asked, StatCan told reporter Alexandra that they rely on data submitted by police through the Uniform Crime Reporting Survey (UCR). Under this system, police record the self-identified gender of suspects rather than their biological sex.

Police complete a CSC form (Charged/Suspect-Chargeable) for Statistics Canada. The form offers no separate category for transgender individuals, so those who have transitioned are recorded according to their identified gender.

StatCan further explained that officers must follow this practice to comply with Bill C-16 and provincial human rights codes, which protect gender expression. Failing to respect a criminal’s gender identity could itself breach the law.

The result is that crimes committed by biological males identifying as women since around 2018 are added to female crime statistics. The Canadian government sees no issue with this. Better to avoid offending a child sex offender by inquiring about biological sex than to keep male and female crime data sound. Accuracy in national statistics, it seems, matters less than using the preferred pronoun of a criminal.

Three points from StatCan’s response stand out.

First: “This approach allows police services to better reflect the diversity of the Canadian population and avoids having to ask each person their sex assigned at birth.”

It would, apparently, be too inconvenient to ask one additional clarifying question. Asking only about biological sex and setting aside self-identified gender is, of course, unthinkable—even if separating the categories would actually let us track diversity more precisely.

Second: “Statistics Canada has assessed this change and determined that the impact on analyses should be minimal.”

Inaccuracy is acceptable, it seems, so long as the distortion remains small, particularly if the alternative might hurt a suspect’s feelings.

The third point is most revealing:

“For homicides, the Homicide Survey collects information on the sex at birth and gender identity of alleged perpetrators.”

Only for the most serious crimes does the agency see value in recording biological sex. Less serious offences do not warrant the same care.

It’s important to tackle the statistical irrelevance of accurately documenting male and female biology by highlighting that transgender people make up a small percentage of the country.

Transgender people made up just 0.33% of the population in May 2021 — about 100,815 individuals. Removing non-binary people drops that to roughly 59,460. Males make up 53% of those identifying as transgender, according to census data, so male-to-female transitions outnumber female-to-male ones.

Yet identification is rising sharply across generations. The share of transgender and non-binary people is three to seven times higher among Generation Z than among older groups. For those born in 1945 or earlier, the figure was 0.12%. It rose to 0.15% (1946–1965), 0.19% (1966–1980), 0.51% (1981–1996), and reached 0.79% for Gen Z.

So, for whatever reason, every generation has had more people identifying as transgender, which will increase their percentage of the population over time. What percentage will become high enough for the Canadian government to consider giving them their own category?

In 2018, StatCan found 1 in 400 Canadians aged 15 and older identified as transgender. By 2021, it was 1 in 300 — a 33% increase in just three years. Non-profits such as Rainbow Railroad, which helps resettle LGBTQ refugees, add further to these numbers. The “tiny minority” argument will not hold forever.

The deeper problem lies in patterns of crime. Men commit the overwhelming majority of violent and sexual offences.

For the purposes of the article, I only pulled data from 2005-2018 because in 2018 the government began recording transgender women as female.

From 2005 to 2018—before the policy shift—men accounted for 99% of sexual assaults in StatCan data and women just 1%.

Biological women rarely commit such crimes. Adding even a small number of male offenders to the female column distorts the picture.

Why does this matter? Crime statistics shape public debate and government policy. A manufactured rise in “female” sexual assaults will likely prompt unnecessary programs, wasted tax dollars on studies of a problem that does not exist among biological women, and/or unfair social blame directed at women—much like the inflated “white” crime statistics in the United States have been used to demonize white men.

It was discovered in America that many non-white individuals had been classified as white in police databases around the country. This artificial inflation of white male crime has led to the demonization of white men in America.

Consider Hiten Patel, for example. Despite a dark complexion, a common Gujarati surname, and a given name of Gujarati origin pointing clearly to Indian descent, he was classified as White in criminal records and added to White crime statistics.

These are just a few visible cases. How many more go unnoticed amid the push for ideology over truth?

Police and agencies are not the root problem. They follow the law. The real issue lies in Bill C-16 and provincial human rights codes, passed by politicians responding to public sentiment. What was sold as a harmless protection of personal identity has forced society to bend observable reality to the preferences of a few, which has distorted the reality of the entire nation.

The choice is clear: either we value truth and clear distinctions, or we accept comforting fictions that distort how we understand the world.

Last month, the federal government used your hard-earned tax dollars to produce a report titled “CONFRONTING ANTIFEMINIST IDEOLOGIES IN CANADA.” It's one of the most ridiculous things I've read from this Liberal government, which is no small feat after the last 12 years. It frames virtually any skepticism toward modern feminism, criticism of certain gender policies, or men’s online spaces as “antifeminist ideologies,” an “extremist ideology based on gender” that is supposedly “one of the fastest-growing extremist ideologies in the West,” a backlash harming everyone, fueling violence against women and “gender-diverse people,” and undermining “progress towards gender equality.”

It draws on witness testimony, cherry-picked stats, and loaded framing to justify more government spending, online regulation, “awareness campaigns,” digital literacy programs to spot “mis and disinformation,” DEI pushes, and early “intervention” for young men and boys at risk of “radicalization into ideologically motivated violent extremism—especially extreme antifeminist movements.”

So here are the top-5 reasons why Canada’s ‘Antifeminist Ideologies’ report is pure institutional propaganda, broken down with the actual claims versus reality and a corresponding bullshit meter, because the committee clearly wrote this after eating a box of expired crayons.

1. The Premise: “Antifeminism” as Extremist Ideology

The report defines antifeminist ideologies as regressive efforts to undo women’s rights, promote myths like “gender equality has been achieved,” “advancing equality harms society,” “women deserve violation,” “gender symmetry in violence,” and that “feminism has caused a crisis of masculinity.” It calls them “extremist,” intersecting with other bad stuff normalized online, especially among young men via the “manosphere.”

Bullshit level: Nuclear.
This is textbook motte-and-bailey. Reasonable critiques of specific modern feminist policies or claims (e.g., denial of biological sex differences in interests and behavior, family court biases favoring mothers, due process failures in #MeToo, boys falling behind in education, male suicide rates 3-4x higher, workplace deaths overwhelmingly male, and conscription history) get lumped in with fringe misogyny. “Antifeminism” here just means “anything challenging the narrative that all disparities are oppression and feminism is pure good.” Labeling dissent as extremism is how institutions shut down debate. Many “antifeminist” views are evidence-based pushback against overreach, not hatred.

2. “Fastest-Growing Extremist Ideology” + Links to Violence

It claims these ideologies are gaining momentum, becoming normalized, and link to violent extremism and gender-based violence (citing things like the Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Commission). Young people (15-24) are most exposed to “online content inciting hate or violence” (71% per some StatCan data vs. 49% national average). A 2025 UNESCO Chair survey allegedly shows 30% of francophone 18-34-year-olds see feminism as a “strategy to control society,” with 40% of anglophone men saying equality is achieved, so feminism is unnecessary.

Bullshit level: High.
There is no rigorous, non-circular evidence that “antifeminism” is a distinct, fast-growing extremist ideology driving violence. Real extremism data (CSIS, etc.) focuses on Islamist terrorism, far-right, far-left, etc., not broad skepticism about feminism. The Nova Scotia shooter had severe mental health issues, a domestic abuse history, and other factors; tying it primarily to “antifeminist ideology” is post-hoc narrative fitting.

Most men exposed to men’s online spaces don’t commit violence. Higher male suicide, substance abuse, and incarceration are real, but attributing them mainly to “toxic masculinity” or patriarchy ignores biology (testosterone, risk-taking, lower agreeableness on average), economic pressures, and other cultural factors. The survey numbers actually show widespread reasonable skepticism, not extremism. The report treats pushback against radical claims—such as “all men are oppressors” or denying biological sex in sports, prisons, and schools—as a societal threat. That’s pure projection.

3. “Toxic Masculinity,” Types of Masculinities, and Gender Symmetry in Violence

The report calls traditional masculinity ideals (strength, stoicism, and emotional restraint) “toxic masculinity” that harms men by discouraging help-seeking and links them to misogyny and violence. It says men benefit from “patriarchy” in earnings/representation but suffer elsewhere. It explicitly calls “gender symmetry in violence” a myth pushed by antifeminists.

Bullshit level: Maximum.
“Toxic masculinity” is gender-studies jargon, not science. It pathologizes normal male traits evolved for protection, provision, and competition. Stoicism has upsides, like resilience, and emotional suppression isn’t uniquely “toxic,” it’s context-dependent. While men are overrepresented in overall violent crime, female perpetration in intimate partner violence is substantial and often bidirectional (meta-analyses like Archer 2000 and Canadian and U.S. data from NISVS / StatCan show women initiate or are violent in many non-lethal cases). Severe injury/homicide asymmetry exists, but “symmetry” isn’t a myth—it’s documented. Dismissing this as a “myth” lets the report ignore mutual violence dynamics and female perpetration.

Men do have real disadvantages (suicide, homelessness, education gaps where girls outperform boys, and workplace fatalities). Framing everything as patriarchy harming men “too” while demanding more pro-feminist interventions is incoherent.

4. The “Manosphere,” Influencers, and Online Harms

It singles out the manosphere and antifeminist influencers as key vectors spreading this, shaping discourse harmfully, especially for young Canadians.

Bullshit level: Very high.
Broad-brush smear. The “manosphere” is a loose category including everything from legitimate discussions of male issues (suicide, false accusations, education, custody) to toxic fringes. Influencers vary wildly. Some promote responsibility and self-improvement; others are grifters. Blaming online spaces for societal issues while ignoring real data on boys’ declining outcomes (education, mental health) and family policy failures is just lazy. “Harmful content” is subjective; regulating platforms for it (see Recommendation 3 below) risks censoring dissent under vague “safety” pretexts. Young people seeing “hate” content often means encountering views that contradict progressive orthodoxy.

5. The Recommendations (The Real Agenda)

And now we get to the real reason this report exists—government recommendations to fix this crisis:

1. Government awareness campaigns to “counteract antifeminist rhetoric” targeting parents/youth/young men, i.e., more government propaganda.

2. More funding for Canadian media. Lmfao…

3. Legislation regulating online platforms (moderation of “harmful content,” transparency, protecting children), aka censorship.

4. Digital literacy programs to recognize “mis and disinformation,” or a Ministry of Truth.

5. Support women in politics + measures against “gender-based political violence.”

6. More financial support for DEI programs for women and 2SLGBTQIA+…because you can never have enough.

7. Engage men/boys to advance gender equality, promote “healthy masculinities (which apparently don’t exist),” combat antifeminism, and intervene early against radicalization into “extreme antifeminist movements.” This literally sounds like brainwashing.

8. More research on antifeminist ideologies and their intersections with gender-based violence and coercive control. In other words, more research funding to produce more biased reports reinforcing this narrative.

Bullshit level: Off the charts.
This is state-sponsored ideological enforcement.

Bottom Line

This report isn’t neutral analysis, it’s a committee document pushing a specific worldview: modern feminism (broadly defined) is unassailable progress, and any pushback is dangerous extremism requiring government countermeasures. It ignores or downplays biological sex differences (well-established in psychology, endocrinology, evolutionary biology), outcome gaps driven by preferences or choices, and legitimate policy critiques. It weaponizes “violence” and “extremism” to pathologize normal discontent, especially among young men facing real headwinds.

The “insane” part is the total lack of self-awareness: a government committee on the “Status of Women” treating broad skepticism about its own ideological framework as a national security-adjacent threat while demanding more power to suppress it. Classic institutional overreach.

This thing is a textbook example of why trust in these institutions has completely eroded.

*Paid subscribers can find the ad-free version of the episode at the bottom of this article.*

The first-ever chief operating officer of the Prime Minister's Office is an American. Maia Johnson worked Democratic strategy on Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, orbited Michael Bloomberg's now-dead firm Hawkfish, and came up from New York to volunteer on Mark Carney's leadership run before joining the PMO this year. This month Carney invented a C-suite title that had never existed and handed her the day-to-day machinery. That office touches intelligence, national security, and the Canada-US file. Nobody in Canada voted for her, and by design nobody could.

A government that won power promising to stand elbows-up against America turned around and installed an American operative in its engine room. The quiet message is that citizenship is now optional at the most sensitive desk in the country, provided you belong to the right network.

None of it lands the same way without understanding what the PMO became. Before Mulroney it was secretaries and paperwork, people who pushed files for the prime minister. Now it runs to dozens of unelected staffers who push policy and push elected officials around. Remember Jody Wilson-Raybould, leaned on by Trudeau’s office to bury a prosecution while Gerald Butts took the fall. That is the caliber of power we are now handing to people who never stood for anything on a ballot.

Carney also scrapped the nonpartisan senate selection process his predecessor spent a decade pretending to honour, appointed his own principal secretary Tom Pitfield, and poached conservative MP Richard Martell with a seat that pays until he turns 75. Martell held his riding with 34 percent last year, so the Liberals get a loyal senator and a by-election they could flip.

Meanwhile, in June a House committee tabled a report deciding the country’s real danger is men who question feminism. Five months of work, fourteen recommendations, and the spine of it is public awareness campaigns aimed at boys, new powers to police the internet, and more money to study the problem they have already decided exists. They spent a decade calling masculinity toxic, watched young men grow frustrated, and concluded the fix is to muzzle them and lecture them harder. Meanwhile the data on who is actually radicalizing points the other way, toward young women moving sharply left, but that finding does not fit the report so it does not appear.

An unelected foreigner in the engine room, a Senate stacked with loyalists, and a committee redefining dissent as extremism.

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Extended and Ad Free Version of Blendr Report EP171: Carney’s American COO, Partisan Senate, and “Antifeminist Extremism”

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Let the roots of a tree wither and it still looks like a tree for a while. The leaves stay green while the fruit hangs on. Then one season it doesn't, and everyone acts surprised.

That’s the image Chad O. Jackson and I kept circling in this conversation. The West was built on three pillars: Greek philosophy, which taught us how to reason; Roman law, which taught us what a citizen and a court are; and Christian theology, which told us right from wrong and why any of it matters. The Enlightenment thinkers pulled a clever trick. They wanted to keep the fruit — human dignity, individual worth, equality before the law — while throwing out the doctrine that grew it. Chad calls that wanting God’s stuff without wanting God.

The people running the West today aren’t really secular. Watch how they behave and you find a whole religion underneath. Sacred texts you can’t question. A priest class of experts who alone may interpret them. Sin, heresy, apostasy, and a cancel-culture machine built to hunt all three. The climate movement carries the old anticipation of apocalypse. Gender identity carries the old search for a soul that lives outside the body. We didn’t leave religion behind. We swapped a coherent one for a shabby one and told ourselves we’d grown up.

The Roman pillar is cracking in plain sight. Trudeau, asked what a Canadian is, answered that a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian. That circle is the whole ideology in one breath: citizenship is nothing but paperwork, and paperwork is whatever the state decides. Chad pushed back hard on that. A citizen is someone domiciled in a nation, owing it allegiance and receiving its protection in return. Break that reciprocity and you get people who want the protection with none of the loyalty, and a governing class happy to oblige. He walked through the Supreme Court’s birthright ruling, where Clarence Thomas wrote a lawful, cited dissent and Ketanji Brown Jackson answered with the language of a hashtag. When the high court appeals to vibes instead of law, the pillar isn’t cracked but crumbling.

Underneath the migration numbers sits a colder logic. The elite and the Marxist agitator share one enemy: the middle class. The elite fear it because merit lets outsiders break into old money. The Marxist needs it gone because a comfortable middle has no appetite for revolution. Universal suffrage, mass migration, birthright citizenship — read them as tools for diluting the one class with a stake in preserving the country, and the pieces click together.

We closed on governance itself. Aristotle’s rule by the one, the few, and the many. R.C. Sproul’s claim that a monarchy runs on honor, a dictatorship on fear, and a republic on virtue — and that a republic that loses its virtue doesn’t drift back to monarchy, it falls into strongman rule. That’s the road Chad sees us on. Neither of us thinks politics is the cure. Politics is downstream. The pillars are the thing, and the answer isn’t to argue for them. It’s to embody them.

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The story of Spider-Man will forever be remembered for a single line, delivered to Peter as the dying words of Uncle Ben: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

He did not say that only because the statement is true. He said it because, by our very nature, power corrupts us.

That is why, in our Westminster system, we divide power in many ways. We separate the courts from the legislature, then split those powers even further between judges, ministers, and Parliament itself. We cannot allow power to be concentrated in one place. That road leads, almost without fail, to corruption.

The current Liberal government does not seem to be heeding Uncle Ben’s warning.

In the spring sitting of 2025, the government passed a total of five bills. This spring sitting, it passed 24. Of those, 21 were introduced by the ruling party–and 19 were passed into law.

As a matter of fact, all of these bills were passed after the government already had a majority. The spring sitting began on February 2, and by April 13, the government had formed its majority through multiple floor crossings. Since then, it has forced through several laws, many of them controversial.

In this case, many of the bills were contested by other parties because they bordered on authoritarianism: laws that could erode Canadians’ privacy, security, and basic rights. It is important to note these laws and assess how they could change Canada.

These are the bills I believe will shape Canada the most:

Bill C-9, for the first time in Canadian law, defines “hatred” and makes it a criminal offense to willfully promote hate through the use of symbols, including those tied to terrorist entities. That means the list of symbols deemed unacceptable will almost certainly grow.

This bill received serious scrutiny when the Bloc agreed to support it only if the Liberals removed the religious exemption. The law also makes it illegal to block access to places of worship, which has led many to ask whether protesting near places of worship could be treated as unlawful.

Josh Dehaas, a Toronto lawyer, recently joined David Leis on Leaders on the Frontier and criticized bill C-9 saying, “we already have intimidation laws on the books” and “these laws are not being enforced.”

The government seems to be unnecessarily expanding powers and pushing for laws using lack of enforcement as an excuse.

Bill C-22, the “lawful access” bill, has already drawn warnings from VPN services, including NordVPN and Windscribe VPN, which have said they may leave Canada if the bill becomes law.

This is one of the biggest expansions of government surveillance power Canada has seen in years. It would allow police and other public officers to demand subscriber information and request data from telecommunications and online service providers, including some based outside Canada that serve Canadians. It would also allow secrecy requirements in some cases. Meaning people will have no idea if the government is looking through their personal data.

Critics warn it could sharply weaken digital privacy, expand government access to personal data, and push privacy-focused companies out of Canada.

Supporters argue that giving law enforcement this power creates less friction when they are investigating serious and time-sensitive crimes. That may be true–but giving the state this kind of power will also erode privacy for Canadians.

So the question is simple: is mass surveillance a decent trade-off for online safety?

Bill C-20, the Build Canada Homes Act, would turn the federal affordable housing agency into a Crown corporation.

The bill gives the agency the power to own, develop, transfer, and finance property for development. On its face, that may not sound very controversial. However, in practice, the government has already used this kind of thinking to justify buying condos from Canadian developers who are unable to sell them.

Many are calling out the move, arguing that it is little more than a bailout for developers who should be left to take the loss in the free market.

The bigger question is whether the Liberals can use this as a long-term strategy to stop Canadians from taking a loss on inflated property values. If so, taxpayers could be forced to cover the difference when property owners cannot sell at the prices they expected.

In 2024, Canada was ranked second highest in the world for house-price-to-income ratios. Nine in ten Canadians say they are concerned about the current state of housing. Three in five Canadians are worried about their ability to pay rent or their mortgage, and three in five are worried about losing their home or rental unit.

With Canada’s housing situation getting worse, Canadians may be tempted to support more government housing, but they will also be forced to pay the bill for it.

Bill C-16, the Protecting Victims Act, makes broad changes to Canada’s criminal justice system. It creates new offences for coercive control in intimate relationships, strengthens laws against child sexual exploitation and online abuse, expands protections for victims, and changes sentencing rules.

Supporters say it modernizes the Criminal Code and better protects victims. Critics argue that parts of the bill could weaken sentencing by giving judges more discretion instead of keeping mandatory minimum penalties for certain offences.

There is also concern that some reforms could end up putting the rights of offenders ahead of deterrence and public safety. Lately, judges have already been leaning toward lighter sentences and bail decisions. In too many cases, that has ended tragically. We see it written into law for some minority groups as well, like Gladue Reports for Indigenous people, for example. They can receive lighter sentences simply for their background. Equal under the law no longer seems to be a tenant in the Canadian courtrooms.

The Liberals no longer have anyone who can truly hold them accountable, thanks to their majority. The Senate is filled with senators recommended by Justin Trudeau. The circumstances now allow the government to move quickly and carry out its agenda with little meaningful resistance.

Hate has now been defined by law, turning a subjective feeling into something that can be weighed through circumstantial evidence and left largely to the judgment of a court. Churches are worried about how Bill C-9 could affect religious speech and their ability to preach Scripture in public.

With that in mind, the government will also have the ability to seek personal data from users on social media. An investigation into a hate crime would almost certainly be enough for an officer to justify such a request.

We also have bills coming that would force Canadians to use ID verification to access social media, framed as laws meant to protect children. In practice, that will likely mean some form of biometric scan or digital identity check just to use major online platforms.

Power is being gathered. Speech is being defined. Privacy is being weakened. Housing is being pulled deeper into the hands of the state. Criminal law is being reshaped.

And all of it is happening under a government that gained the power to move quickly, then wasted no time using it.

That is exactly why power must be divided, checked, and watched closely.

Uncle Ben was right.

The Trust Collapse

The crisis in the West is not that people stopped trusting institutions. It’s that the institutions continually give us reasons to stop.

According to a recent access to information memo, the federal government of Canada is now contemplating “legal action” against users on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media sites suspected of spreading “false and misleading information.” The censored 35-page document said, “This strategy seeks to uphold the integrity of—and public trust in—government information.”

So let’s be clear: a federal department was discreetly exploring legal action against Canadian citizens over online speech THEY deem false or misleading (making them the arbiters of truth) while hiding the details behind redactions and pretending this was about protecting public trust.

Across much of the democratic world, governments have spent years misleading the public, managing narratives, and burying mistakes. Then, when people speak up, they call it “misinformation,” like the public suddenly became irrational. And before anyone tries to tell you this is just partisan rhetoric, just look at the numbers, recent events, and the laws they passed because people stopped believing them.

Edelman’s Trust Barometer found that 69% of people globally worry that government officials, businesses, and journalists deliberately mislead them. Reuters found global trust in news at all time low of just 37%. With Canada sitting directly on this mark. Furthermore, Freedom House says global internet freedom declined for the 15th straight year in 2025.

Clearly, the public did not become irrational, it became experienced. People watched the same pattern repeat across COVID, inflation, housing, immigration, foreign interference, media subsidies, online speech laws, emergency powers, and economic decline.

The Control Response

So what did governments do in response? They reached for more control.

Canada is policing speech through several policy channels, but the Online Harms Act really takes the cake. It proposed new online-harm bureaucracies, financially motivated human-rights complaints, and criminal-law changes that attach life-imprisonment maximums to certain hate-related offences.

The U.K.’s Online Safety Act gives Ofcom power over social platforms and search engines, backed by fines up to £18 million or 10% of global revenue.

The EU’s Digital Services Act gives regulators power over the largest platforms, algorithms, content systems, advertising transparency, and “systemic risks,” with fines that reach into the billions.

Germany forces large platforms to remove content within 24 hours or face fines up to €50 million.

Ireland’s online-safety regime gives its media regulator power over online content, binding safety codes, investigations, and fines that can reach €20 million or 10% of turnover.

Australia banned social media for kids under 16, then moved to double fines for platforms that fail to enforce it to nearly $100 million.

The vocabulary is always soft: safety, trust, integrity, harm reduction, democracy, public health, child protection. But the machinery is hard: fines, investigations, takedown rules, platform pressure, speech codes, age checks, regulatory discretion, and state-approved categories of truth and harm.

Some of the goals may be legitimate. But the direction is unmistakable. The public is losing trust in the institutions that claim to protect truth, while those same institutions demand more power to control what people can say.

Now why would they do that? Well, here are a few reasons…

The Failures They Don’t Want to Own

They misplayed COVID worse than Bill Buckner in ’86.

For years, people who questioned the official COVID narrative were mocked, censored, deplatformed, smeared, suspended, or treated like threats to public safety. The lab-leak theory was treated like fringe nonsense until major U.S. agencies later assessed it as plausible. Social media companies restricted discussion of claims that later became legitimate debate. Mark Zuckerberg has since said the Biden White House pressured Facebook to censor COVID content, including humour and satire, and that he regrets how Meta handled that pressure.

Now Tulsi Gabbard has released declassified intelligence material accusing Fauci of helping fund dangerous gain-of-function research tied to Wuhan—the exact line of inquiry institutions spent years trying to bury.

The point is not that every COVID skeptic was right. The point is that the institutions were wrong enough, often enough, while acting far too certain.

They overstated. They reversed. They smeared. They suppressed. Then they walked away from the wreckage and expected the public to forget.

They also normalized emergency power.

In Canada, the federal government invoked the Emergencies Act against the Freedom Convoy for the first time in the law’s history. Bank accounts were frozen. Financial information was shared. Protest activity was treated not simply as a public-order problem, but as a national emergency.

Years later, the Federal Court of Appeal confirmed the invocation was unreasonable, beyond the government’s authority, and infringed Charter protections for expression and against unreasonable search.

Let’s think about that… The government used extraordinary powers against citizens protesting government policy. The courts later said it exceeded its authority. And yet the lesson the political class appears to have learned is not restraint. It is better control.

They downplayed the failing economy.

Canada entered a recession after two consecutive quarters of contraction. The Bank of Canada cautioned people not to put too much weight on the GDP data. The political response was not humility. It was reframing.

At the same time, the USMCA—the foundation of Canada’s trade relationship with the United States and Mexico—has been pushed into uncertainty after the U.S. declined to extend the agreement in its current form.

So Canadians are watching the economy weaken, trade stability deteriorate, investment nosedive, and the cost of life explode, while officials tell them not to overreact to the numbers.

That is not leadership. That is narrative management.

The Policy Failures They Moralized

They ignored housing pressure.

For years, governments treated housing like a talking point instead of a system under strain. They pumped population growth, failed to build at the required pace, tolerated speculation, added costs, delayed approvals, and then acted shocked when homes became unreachable for ordinary families.

Then came the proposed $1.45-billion B.C. condo plan.

The idea was to convert unsold condo units into rent-to-own housing, with public money involved in a market where developers built too much of the wrong product at prices people could not afford.

Carney defended it as affordability, not a bailout. But ordinary people can see exactly what is happening. When families are drowning, they are told to show discipline. When developers are sitting on unsold inventory, the government shows up with financing, subsidies, and a softer name for a bailout.

That is not a free market. It’s simply protection for the connected.

They denied election interference.

Canada spent years downplaying concerns about foreign interference until leaks, pressure, and public outrage forced the issue into the open. CSIS concluded China interfered in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections. The Hogue inquiry later found the interference did not change who formed government, but it also found Canada responded slowly and should have communicated more clearly with the public.

They moralized immigration concerns.

To be clear, immigration is not always bad. Just like rain is not always bad. But when too much rain falls too fast, cities flood.

Across the West, governments pushed migration beyond what housing, health care, schools, wages, infrastructure, and social trust could absorb. Then, when people objected, they were called racist, xenophobic, cruel, or extreme. But now those same governments are reversing course.

Canada is trying to reduce temporary residents to less than 5% of the population. The EU has moved toward tougher asylum rules and faster returns. The U.K. says foreign national offenders make up roughly 12% of the prison population in England and Wales and has moved to tighten deportation rules. However, for many of these countries, I feel the correction may already be a day late and a dollar short.

So the public was not crazy, the public was correct, and that is what the institutional class hates most.

The Narrative Machine

They protected legacy media.

Canada continues to pour public money into the media ecosystem while acting shocked that Canadians question whether the press is independent. CBC receives $1.4 billion in annual federal funding. The Canadian journalism labour tax credit was increased from 25% to 35%. Ottawa is now consulting on extending that credit to audio and audiovisual news production.

All in, the federal government spends more than $2 billion a year in taxpayer money propping up its legacy media machine, then acts shocked when people question whether the press is independent.

Of course people question it…

The industry depends on government funding, government tax credits, government-approved eligibility, regulatory protection, and government policy to survive. So effectively, the government funds the media, the media defends the narrative, the narrative protects the government, and anyone who notices is accused of spreading misinformation.

The trust collapse is not caused by bad information. It is caused by an abuse of authority.

People watched officials overstate certainty, bury mistakes, reverse positions, protect their own, and use emergency language or measures to justify overreaching power.

And the pattern is always the same.

The institution fails. It denies the failure. It attacks the people who notice. Then it passes punitive policy to control the backlash, giving more authority to the very institutions people no longer trust.

But you cannot censor your way back to legitimacy, you cannot punish people into believing you, and you cannot fix this problem by giving more power to the people who created it.

You can only fix it by taking power away from them.

When WPATH set out to write Standards of Care 8, the document that governs pediatric gender medicine across the Western world, it commissioned independent systematic reviews from Johns Hopkins. The reviews came back showing no sound evidence that these treatments help young people. So WPATH buried them, forbade Johns Hopkins from publishing, and wrote into the final guidelines that a systematic review was not possible at this time. They had the reviews in hand. Canada follows those guidelines coast to coast.

That is the heart of my conversation with Mia Hughes, author of the WPATH Files, the report built from leaked internal communications of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Hughes did not come to this work as an activist. She was a left-leaning stay-at-home mother of three who, by her own telling, went along with everything her friends believed. Then JK Rowling tweeted in December 2019, Hughes read the replies, and the worldview started to fall apart. Within days she found the teenage girls on TikTok showing off mastectomy scars, and the fixation that became her career took hold.

What she found inside the leaked files is worse than what Hannah Barnes documented at the Tavistock. The example that sticks is Dr. Daniel Metzger, the pediatric endocrinologist at BC Children’s Hospital who brought puberty blockers to British Columbia. In a recorded WPATH panel, Metzger admits that explaining fertility loss to a 13-year-old is like talking to a blank wall. The kids say babies are gross, they will adopt, they will be happy with a dog. In nearly the same breath he cites the Dutch data showing significant regret over lost fertility and says it matches what he sees in his own patients, young adults who come back in their twenties wanting children they can no longer have. He sees what we see. Yet, the treatment pathway rolls on.

Hughes frames this as the oldest pattern in medical scandal: red flags ignored at every step because the doctors are swept up in the thrill of the experiment. Endocrinology carries a long record here, from hormone treatments to correct the height of healthy children to growth hormone harvested from cadaver pituitary glands that seeded a fatal brain disease. The gender clinics knew most of their young patients were same-sex attracted. The Tavistock staff joked that soon there would be no gay people left. The literature flagged the autism rates from the start. None of it slowed anything down.

The unraveling has begun. When activist groups sued to overturn Alabama’s ban, the Attorney General demanded discovery on how Standards of Care 8 was made. WPATH surrendered millions of emails. The fraud is now court record, the FTC and four states are suing, and Hughes is on record saying the crime deserves a Nuremberg. Whether that reckoning arrives or not, one country stands apart for refusing to look. Other nations are changing course. Canada answered by handing its Pediatric Society to one of the most committed ideologues in the field.

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On the morning of June 22nd, a man in military camouflage set a rifle on a tripod in a room at the Hilton Garden Inn and aimed it across the street at the sixth floor — the headquarters of the company that owns Pornhub. By the time the shelter-in-place order lifted, three people were dead: a civilian, the shooter, and a Montreal police officer, the first killed in the line of duty in over twenty years. The gunman left behind 104 pages explaining himself.

The press did what the press does. Left-leaning outlets fixed on the incel language and the biological determinism. Right-leaning ones pointed at the Marxism. Pro-Israel outlets seized on the anti-Zionism. Each one found the piece that served its movement and held it up to the camera. The strange part is that all of them were right. This man checked every box. He tried on incel theory, Marxist class analysis, and the rest, and he decided that all of it fit.

That is the thing the coverage keeps missing. Ideology is rarely the cause but the justification. Nietzsche had a word for what came first: ressentiment. Once a person accepts that he is powerless, that he is a permanent victim with no hand in his own life, that spirit of helplessness goes looking for a philosophy to justify itself. Corrupted people seek out ideas that excuse the emotion they already carry. The violence is the end, while the ideology is only the means. So you don’t beat this by arguing one creed. You’re up against the spirit that spawns them all.

Carl Jung believed that even in good times only about forty percent of people are genuinely well-integrated and sound. For every visibly unstable person on the street, he figured, ten more carry a latent version, wearing every appearance of normality until one bad day tips them. We’ve spent a decade moving the line for what counts as normal — first refusing to name unstable behaviour as a problem, then insisting we celebrate it. So we lost the instrument that used to flag the warning.

So what do you actually do? Not much at the level of policy, at least not fast. The economy, the loneliness, the purpose crisis, the universities nursing victimhood instead of curing it — none of that turns on a dime, and the people most hurt by the fixes are the first to fight them. The honest answer points downward and backward, to how we raise children. Stop shielding them from every hardship. Stop repressing a boy’s aggression instead of teaching him to carry it. Adversity is what builds a person, and we keep trying to engineer it out. You don’t repair this in HR but in kindergarten, at the source, and then you wait the twenty or thirty years it takes to undo twenty or thirty years of damage. The saying, often attributed to Mother Teresa rings true: if you want to change the world, go home and love your family.

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The most credentialed Americans are now about twice as likely to support political violence as the least credentialed. We've been told higher education makes people wiser and more intelligent. The university was supposed to push the boundaries of human thought and understanding. Except now it's doing the opposite, and it's doing it on purpose.

Just look at the staffing. Between 1975 and 2005, administrators grew by 240 percent while faculty grew by roughly 50. There are now significantly more managers than teachers. However, those teacher positions are becoming increasingly ideological. A survey of five thousand professors found communications and anthropology faculty sitting at 100 percent Democrat. Religion at 98.8, which is its own joke, atheists running the religion department. Even engineering, the most “balanced” field, was 61 percent left leaning.

The problem isn’t that students hear left-wing ideas. They always have, and always will. The problem is that the leftist worldview now gets presented as objective morality while disagreements are considered cruelty. The intolerance towards centrist or right-wing ideas is not some quirk, it is a strategy. A darling intellectual of the Left conceptualized Repressive Tolerance. The idea was that real freedom means tolerating the left and refusing to tolerate the right. That program has been running on campuses for fifty years. Leading to a climate where 25 percent of sociology faculty openly call themselves Marxists and no one flinches.

Then watch what the worldview does to the students it shapes. When you teach people to see everything through oppressor and oppressed, they go looking for their own seat in the oppressed column, even the ones who have everything. Rob Henderson wrote an excellent essay titled America’s Future Leaders Are Learning to Become Grifters. In it, he brings forth concerning data. Large shares of students at prestigious universities are lying about disability status to secure extra time for work and priority housing. At Stanford, forty percent reported having a disability. Contrast this to three or four percent at community colleges. Yet, the elite preaches that the working class is the privileged one.

Peter Turchin had an interesting explanation of this phenomenon. He called it Elite Overproduction. When a society creates far more credentialed people than it has real positions for, those people then realize they were sold a false promise, and the disappointment turns into grievance against the system and victimhood identity.

In this episode, we discuss whether parallel education options will become viable in the near future, what will happen if we continue to run a diploma factory model for higher education, and the dangers of creating a managerial class that believes themselves to be perpetual victims of an oppressive system.

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There’s a quiet trend happening in Canada that almost nobody in official circles wants to talk about. And it’s not immigration coming in. It’s Canadians — ambitious Canadians — looking at the country they grew up in, and getting out.

This includes young professionals, entrepreneurs, builders, and high earners.

A Bank of Canada staff working paper found that roughly 40% of Canadians who would rank in the top 1% of earners have already emigrated to the U.S., along with 30 to 50% of the next nine income percentiles. The same research finds these top earners account for roughly three-quarters of the Canada–U.S. GDP-per-adult gap.

In 2025, total Canadian emigration hit a record high of over 120,000 departures — the largest outflow in Canadian history. Emigration has nearly doubled over the past decade, surging 76.7% back in 2017 (from 67,893 to 119,964) and not surpassed until last year.

See, it used to be that leaving Canada was seen as risky. You left opportunity behind. You gave something up. But now, for a growing number of Canadians, staying feels like the risky decision.

The Math Stopped Working

In 1980, the average Canadian home cost about 2.8 years of household income. Today the price-to-income ratio is 8.4 times income. In cities like Toronto and Vancouver, it’s often well over ten years of income.

In 2025, Canada recorded 140,457 consumer insolvencies — the second-highest annual total ever recorded, behind only the aftermath of the 2009 financial crisis. That’s roughly 385 Canadians filing every day.

The Bank of Canada has noted that productivity growth has fallen from roughly 3% annually decades ago to below 0.5% today. In simple terms, productivity is how much economic value each worker creates.

If productivity grows: wages rise, businesses expand, and living standards improve. If productivity stagnates, wages stagnate, governments collect less revenue, and affordability gets worse.

As of 2024, business investment per worker in Canada was down 15% from what it was in 2014. Over the same period, the United States increased by 21% while the OECD average increased by 11%.

According to the Fraser Institute, the average Canadian family spends 42.3% of its income on taxes. Meanwhile, housing, food, and clothing combined account for 35.5% of income.

Federal government spending in 2025 reached approximately $547.3 billion — compared to $280 billion a decade ago. That’s roughly double, for anyone keeping score.

A G20 Outlier

Canada’s economy has now posted two consecutive quarters of contraction, which means we’re in a recession — the only country in the G20 currently in one. No other major economy in the world is.

As a result, Canadian investment abroad is closing in on $2.5 trillion — up nearly $700 billion in four years. Meanwhile, foreign direct investment in Canada has fallen to $1.60 trillion, creating a near $1 trillion gap. Canadians are now more invested in the rest of the world than the rest of the world is in Canada.

If that’s not enough, Canada’s Crime Severity Index rose from 66.9 in 2014 to 77.9 in 2024, with violent crime specifically rising from 70.7 to 99.9 over the same period. And roughly 6.5 million Canadians can’t find a family doctor, with about 15,000 dying annually on wait lists.

From Comfort to Feasibility

So Canadians aren’t just thinking about comfort anymore. They’re thinking about feasibility.

They’re asking whether the basic building blocks of life — a home, stability, maybe a family — are even realistic anymore. That changes how people think about a country.

And that’s the story here. Canada may still feel okay day-to-day, but more and more people are starting to feel like it’s becoming a harder place to build anything meaningful. A business, career, and future. Effectively, a life.

Meanwhile, you look at places like Texas or Florida, or even Dubai, and whether you love them or not, the signal is the same: faster growth, lower friction, and a stronger link between effort and outcome. That’s what people are really reacting to.

And here’s the bigger problem, Canada: once ambition starts flowing out of a country, it doesn’t come back anytime soon.

At least fourteen countries are implementing the same policy within months of each other. France approved a bill barring children under fifteen from social media. The United Kingdom announced a ban on under-sixteens. Canada introduced a digital safety bill to do the same. Behind them, Denmark, Greece, Germany, Malaysia, Poland, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, and Austria have their own versions in motion. All of them following Australia, which led the charge with a world-first ban in December 2025.

Fourteen countries. Fourteen governments, legal systems, constitutions, and sets of voters, each with its own history and its own concerns. One policy, arriving in near unison.

This is not a commentary on the policy itself, and the policy is not the interesting part. Set the merits aside completely. Assume the ban is wise. The troubling question remains: why does it look the same everywhere at once? If these governments act on behalf of their own distinct peoples, how do they all reach for the identical policy at the identical moment?

What Self-Rule Should Produce

We are told these governments belong to their peoples. Ottawa answers to Canadians, Westminster to Britons, Paris to the French. Each nation, the story goes, has its own priorities and its own problems, and the people it elects are the instrument through which it governs itself. That is the premise of sovereignty. It is what we teach our schoolchildren was worth fighting for.

So stress test the premise. Suppose every one of these countries genuinely, on its own, decided that youth and the screen had become a problem worth solving. What would you expect to see?

Diversity of approach, for one. France, worried about screen time and a wave of school violence, might start by pulling phones out of classrooms. Britain, with its complex history around speech and the state, might lean on platform liability and leave the age question alone. Canada might reach for parental tools, or age checks, or another five years of studying the matter while a committee files reports. Different countries should produce different solutions, on their own timelines. Some bold, some timid, some doing nothing at all.

That is what self-rule produces. It is messy, slow, and local. And it is the mark of a people actually guiding its own affairs.

What Actually Happened

That is not what happened.

What unfolded instead: Australia passed a ban, and almost immediately France, Britain, and Canada were all reaching for the same one. The same age line, give or take a year. The same enforcement mechanism. The same framing about protecting children from harm. Then the smaller states fell in behind. It did not spread the way independent nations stumble toward a shared worry, each in its own way. It spread like a memo through a head office.

Some readers will rightly push back: the bans are not identical. France drew its line at fifteen, Australia and Britain at sixteen. Canada wrote in exemptions for platforms that can prove they meet certain government-set standards. Fair enough.

But these are the tweaks you’d expect a head office to let each branch make for the local market while selling the same product. The skeleton underneath is identical, however the face changes: an age threshold, mandatory verification through digital ID, and a phase-in sorted by the size of the platform. That is seems less like a coincidence of national priorities and more like one law, lightly localized, dropped into one country after another.

The Blueprint Carries Its Own Politics

The phase-in by size deserves more attention.

Sorting the ban by platform size sounds neutral. But every choice has consequences. Freeze the rules around the current giants, and the platforms below the line are left standing — and those platforms are not a random sample.

You can watch this unfold in Britain, in a question the ruling class will not answer: where does BlueSky land? Some outlets reported the platform looks set to escape the rules. Others listed it among those likely to be covered. The problem is not the speculation but that the government has not published its final list. Imagine passing a major tax and refusing to say who it applies to.

I am not asserting that left-leaning platforms like BlueSky will be exempt. We do not know — and the not knowing is itself the problem. But if such a platform falls outside the ban on account of its smaller size, follow the effect through. Clear out its larger competition and its growth is guaranteed. Every curious teenager left online gets funnelled toward a narrower slice of the world.

The point is that the same sorting rule has been copied from one country to the next, and nobody paused to ask who it favours. The trouble is not merely that these governments are all pushing a social-media ban. It is that they are reaching for identical machinery — only years after we watched a coordinated censorship campaign cross national lines in the name of curbing COVID misinformation. And it is worth remembering what those same authorities once classified as settled, unquestionable truth turned out, in the end, to be largely false.

How a Memo Becomes a Law

None of this requires a smoking room or a secret signature. It is duller and more troubling than that.

One progressive think tank writes the model law. It becomes the reference everyone cites at the global conference and in the white paper. The media defends it. The ministers nod along at the summit. “International best practice” becomes a thing you adopt rather than a thing you debate, and the national legislature is handed a draft to ratify rather than a problem to solve.

Listen to how the French president frames it. He has said he wants the rule pushed up to the level of the entire European Union — one standard for everyone, all at once. That is not the language of a man tailoring policy to France and its particular children. That is the language of a man rolling out a product line and looking for the widest distribution he can get. In that sentence the nation stops being the customer the policy is meant to serve. The nation becomes the channel through which the policy is shipped.

Represented, or Administered

We need to stop arguing about the worth of any single policy and start asking where all of them are coming from.

A country whose laws are written for its own people, by people loyal to that nation first, does not move in lockstep with thirteen others on the same question, at the same time, with the same strategy. The lockstep is the concerning part. It tells you the decisions are being made far from where your vote is cast.

No rational person would call that representation. It is much closer to administration. The official you thought you elected to serve your interests looks more and more like a branch manager implementing a rollout that was drawn up outside your border.

Your “leaders” are better understood as middle managers. They implement the policy hoping to climb the ladder, to inch closer to the halls of global governance — confident that if they serve upper management well enough, they will be promoted to head office before anyone downstairs works out what was done to them.

Canada's fertility rate just hit 1.25 births per woman, the lowest number ever recorded in this country. That puts us in the ultra-low club with Japan and South Korea. Spain sits at 1.2, its worst showing since 1941. Italy declared a national emergency at 1.1, and the EU's population peaked this year and tipped into decline. Put in plainer terms: for every 100 Canadians alive today, roughly 60 children are being born to replace them. We are watching a crisis unfold.

Governments have noticed. More than 60 percent of countries below replacement have rolled out baby bonuses, parental leave, and tax breaks, and almost none of it has worked. Hungary spent big, climbed, then slid back down. Poland’s flagship family program went nowhere. The one Western nation still above replacement is Israel, and the reason is not a clever subsidy. It is faith, family, and a culture that treats children as the point of life rather than a cost on a spreadsheet.

The economic case is real, and on this week’s episode Jonathan laid it out. The average Canadian family of four, paying today’s averages across the board, loses ten to twelve thousand dollars a year. We spend 35 percent of our money on food, clothing, and shelter, and 42 percent on taxes. Raising one child to seventeen runs somewhere between $230,000 and $310,000. We built an economy that demands two full-time incomes and then act surprised when nobody has time or money for a third kid.

But the money is a symptom. Abraham Lincoln buried three of his four sons, and nobody in his century asked whether children were worth it. People far poorer than us kept having kids because their faith and their culture told them life was worth handing on. What changed is the story we tell. Simone de Beauvoir said in 1975 that no woman should be authorized to stay home and raise her children, because given the choice, too many women would take it. That thinking now runs the universities. Girls are taught from fifteen that a career is the most meaningful thing they will ever hold, and that wanting more makes something wrong with them.

Underneath all of it sit two worldviews: life is a blessing, or life is a burden? Every policy, every excuse, every empty crib flows downstream from that. The fix will not come from Ottawa. It comes from the ground, from people who marry, have kids, and let the joy of it show. We are status-seeking creatures, so hand out status for the right things — praise the mothers, praise the fathers, and watch the behaviour spread through a friend group. None of this turns around by tomorrow. It is generational work, and that has never made it meaningless.

Listen to The Blendr Report EP166 on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Rumble.

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Why are western governments flooding their countries with immigrants? Why are housing markets collapsing under population growth? Why are social programs becoming more expensive? Why are governments becoming increasingly desperate to find new taxpayers?

Most people assume these are separate problems, but they’re not. They may all stem from a single issue that almost nobody wants to talk about: fertility collapse.

The reason why speaking about fertility is so controversial is because many say it leads to telling women what to do with their bodies. Assigning traditional duties to women is often seen as oppressive. I say “traditional duties” specifically because the feminist movement has made it perfectly fine to burden women with economic obligations like getting an education or a job, however traditional duties like getting married and having children have been demonized.

However, the fertility crisis is one that the world should not ignore considering many problems stem from it. At this point it is becoming harder to ignore an uncomfortable pattern across Western countries like Canada, the US and the UK: almost every major political crisis we are dealing with today—mass immigration, strained public services, housing pressure, wage stagnation, and even cultural fragmentation—can be traced back to the collapse of fertility.

It is not just a small decline either, but a sustained fall below replacement level that has now lasted long enough to fundamentally reshape how Western states function, finance themselves, and justify their own policies.

Canada currently sits at roughly 1.25 children per woman, replacement is 2.1. That gap is a structural deficit in population reproduction that compounds every generation. Once you understand that most Western governments rely heavily on continuous economic expansion, tax intake growth, and a stable working-age population to sustain their systems, the consequences start to stack up quickly.

A modern welfare state does not run on ideals, it runs on contributors and the problem is that the contributor base is shrinking.

When you take a look at Canada’s current workforce you start to see the picture clearly. According to Stats Canada, there are a total of 21 million people employed in Canada currently. That means about half of the country is creating tax revenue to fuel the entire nation’s government spending. This alone is not ideal, especially since Canada has such a robust social state. However, when you remove part time workers the situation takes an even worse turn.

About 82% of Canada’s workers work a full time position. That is just over 17 million people working full time in a country of 41.5 million, which adds up to only 41.5% of people working a full time job in Canada.

With that we can conclude that more than half of Canadians are likely to be net beneficiaries when it comes to tax expenditures and it’s also likely that even many full time workers cost more than they contribute in terms of taxes.

When you include that Canada is losing high earners, capital and businesses then it starts to paint an even darker picture. So, it is not a stretch to say that most Canadians receive more in tax funded services than they pay.

As a matter of fact, a study done by the Financial Accountability Office of Ontario already concluded this for Ontario families. They found that 60% of Ontario families were net beneficiaries of provincial services, 20% were neutral and only 20% were net contributors. Now imagine that on a national scale, if only 20% of people put in more than they take out, how is that a sustainable system?

We have built a system where most people take out more than they put in and it is unsustainable. Then when you consider how much government spending is bolstering the economy this becomes a problem you cannot ignore.

In Canada, government activity—when you include direct spending, tax expenditures, and regulatory influence—accounts for a large share of economic output, about 44-64% according to a study done by MacDonald Laurier. Estimates vary depending on measurement, but the broader point remains consistent: the state is not a passive referee in the economy, it is one of the largest participants in it.

So what happens when that system loses its demographic fuel source?

Well, you import it.

That is where immigration enters the picture, not as an ideological choice, but as a mathematical response to workforce shortages and fiscal pressure. If you have a shrinking base of working-age citizens supporting an expanding cohort of retirees and dependents, you only have a few options: reduce benefits, raise taxes, increase productivity dramatically, or bring in more workers.

Most governments choose the path of least immediate resistance, but this creates its own downstream effects. Mass immigration does not occur in a vacuum—it interacts with housing supply, wage levels, infrastructure capacity, and cultural assimilation speed.

When the scale is large enough, it does not just “add people” to a system, it reshapes the system itself. After all, immigrants do not just bring economic activity to a nation, they bring their traditions, languages and culture. This is where the public reaction starts to split.

Some people see immigration as a solution to labour shortages and fiscal imbalance. Others see it as destabilizing cultural cohesion and accelerating social fragmentation. Both perspectives often miss the upstream cause that forced the policy choice in the first place, a shrinking domestic population.

So the question becomes: why is fertility collapsing so broadly across advanced economies?

There are competing explanations—cost of living, housing prices, cultural shifts, changing values—but one variable stands out in cross-country data patterns: the expansion of higher education, particularly among women, and its correlation with delayed family formation and reduced lifetime fertility.

A 2022 paper in the Economics of Education Review examined the relationship between female educational attainment and fertility outcomes. While it does not claim a single causal story, it reinforces a consistent finding in the literature: as educational participation increases, fertility tends to decline, often through delayed childbirth and reduced total number of children.

When you line up global maps of rising female higher education enrollment with global fertility decline over the same period, the directional pattern is difficult to ignore. They move in opposite directions across most developed regions over multiple decades.

This is what those charts look like when they overlap, demonstrating that fertility falls at almost the exact same rate of higher education for women increasing.

Now the key question is not whether education is “good” or “bad.” That framing misses the point entirely. The real question is what kind of society you get when your most educated cohorts systematically delay or reduce childbearing while the economic system still depends on continuous population renewal to sustain itself.

That mismatch does not resolve itself, it compounds and governments are left managing the gap in real time. Which brings us back to immigration again.

If domestic fertility does not recover—and there is little evidence across OECD countries that it is rebounding to replacement levels—then maintaining current welfare structures requires external population inflows. Not as a preference, but as a constraint.

At that point, immigration policy stops being purely about cultural openness or border philosophy and becomes a form of demographic and fiscal maintenance.

However, this creates a political contradiction. The same populations that rely on expanded social programs are often the most resistant to the economic and cultural adjustments required to sustain them. Therefore, governments operating under electoral pressure are incentivized to preserve both conditions at once: high service provision and high population inflow to fund it.

That tension is not stable long term. It produces a slow structural drift where policy becomes reactive rather than strategic, and where demographic substitution is used instead of demographic recovery.

So what are the actual long-term options? In theory, there are only a few:

One, fertility rebounds significantly enough to restore population balance domestically. Although, based on the data that would require women prioritizing having children over education and career.

Two, productivity growth accelerates enough to decouple economic output from population growth. However, with Canada’s aging population, and shrinking economy that would take a lot of reduction to red tape and incentives.

Three, social programs contract to match a smaller tax base. Though this is political suicide, campaigning on reducing social spending will almost certainly get any politician to lose the base in which social spending reduction effects.

Or lastly option four, immigration continues to compensate for the gap indefinitely. However, many Canadians will continue to be outraged by the demographic and cultural changes of the nation.

The uncomfortable reality is that many of the political conflicts we are seeing today are downstream symptoms of this demographic imbalance rather than independent phenomena. Immigration debates, housing crises, fiscal strain, even cultural polarization—they are all interacting with the same structural constraint.

A population that is no longer reproducing itself at replacement level.

Once that becomes the baseline condition, almost every other policy debate starts to orbit around it, whether explicitly acknowledged or not.

The question is no longer whether this is happening, it is how long current systems can continue to absorb the consequences without completely collapsing.

*Paid subscribers can find the ad-free version of the episode at the bottom of this article.*

This week on the Blendr Report, returning guest Brian Isted, an 11-year veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces who deployed to Iraq with Canadian Forces Intelligence Command, helps us make sense of the leaked confidential report explaining how Canada’s military is breaking down, the 300,000-soldier mobilization fantasy signed by Canada's Chief of Defence Staff, Jennie Carignan. The hybrid war Brian was monitoring as a cyber intelligence analyst in real time without realizing the enemy had already won. And Meta's overnight deletion of millions of bot accounts.

Each story arrives like a separate news cycle. Brian’s read is that they’re the same story.

Take recruitment. Canada lowered the threshold so far that the basic officer course, designed to pass people, is no longer passing them. Brian’s framing puts the problem on the brass, not on numbers. The same leadership that condemned its own barracks for mold and houses its troops in modular tents is now floating a plan to expand the supplementary reserve from 4,384 retired members to 300,000 ordinary Canadians and public servants. There’s no budget attached, no timeline, no plan for who would train these people. What it has is a paperwork structure that could be repurposed for conscription if the moment ever arrives.

Take fentanyl. Precursor chemicals ship from China. If a foreign nation killed 100,000 people a year with bullets, the country would call it war. Because it happens through black markets and supply chains, nobody calls it anything.

What ties the four stories together is a single question Brian keeps circling: what does it mean to defend a country whose institutions are already losing the non-kinetic war?

Listen to The Blendr Report EP165 on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Rumble.

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Extended and Ad Free Version of Blendr Report EP165: Ex-Soldier Explains Why Canada’s Military is Collapsing From Within

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*Paid subscribers can find the ad-free version of the episode at the bottom of this article.*

In Episode 164 of The Blendr Report, we examine four stories that reveal the fractures running through Canada's institutions. From the Armed Forces to policing, from economic policy to street protests.

The CAF Cohesion Crisis

A Canadian Armed Forces training platoon composed of 83% non-citizens reportedly devolved into ethnic infighting, exposing a fundamental problem with the military’s rapid diversification efforts. When the institution responsible for national defence can’t maintain cohesion in a training environment, what does that signal about operational readiness?

This isn’t just about recruitment numbers or meeting quotas. It’s about whether you can build a functional fighting force when the overwhelming majority of a unit doesn’t share citizenship, let alone common values or cultural frameworks. The military requires a level of trust and cohesion that transcends normal workplace dynamics — these are people who must be willing to risk their lives for one another.

The ethnic infighting reveals what happens when you prioritize demographic targets over operational effectiveness. As Jonathan observed, the military is supposed to be a family where everyone has each other’s back. When deep-rooted cultural differences create division instead of unity, you don’t have a team.

Carney’s $25 Billion Gambit

Mark Carney announced Canada’s first sovereign wealth fund with $25 billion in seed money, positioning it as an economic strategy to build national wealth. But the timing raises questions about whether this represents genuine long-term economic planning or pre-election political maneuvering.

We analyze whether a sovereign wealth fund makes sense for a country already running massive deficits, and whether the Carney government has the fiscal discipline to make this work or if it’s simply another vehicle for political spending dressed up as economic policy.

May Day Violence & Double Standards

Montreal’s annual May Day protest once again clashed with police, continuing a pattern of sanctioned left-wing protest violence that stands in stark contrast to how the Freedom Convoy was treated. While the convoy was characterized as a foreign-funded insurrection despite zero evidence, these annual labor protests — openly endorsed by communist organizations, Cuban government fronts, and foreign revolutionary groups — receive virtually no scrutiny.

Ontario labor unions are openly allied with the Consulate General of Cuba, the Bolshevik Tendency, and the Worker Communist Party of Iran. Yet somehow this doesn’t qualify as foreign influence, while a grassroots trucker protest becomes a national security threat.

The double standard isn’t accidental.

The Policing Collapse

In our paid subscriber segment, we examine the collapse of police clearance rates across Canada, where half of all violent crimes now go unsolved. This represents a fundamental breakdown in public safety and the social contract — when crimes don’t get solved, when criminals don’t face consequences, the entire justice system loses legitimacy.

These four stories aren’t separate issues. They’re symptoms of the same institutional decay: a military that can’t maintain cohesion, economic policy driven by political calculation, protests with obvious foreign backing ignored while grassroots movements are crushed, and a justice system that can’t clear half its violent crimes.

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Extended and Ad Free Version of Blendr Report EP164: Ethnic Rifts in Canada’s Military, Carney’s New Debt Fund & May Day Protests

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