Will 2024 be the year Canada implements a Universal Basic Income (UBI) program? It isn’t outside the realm of possibility. UBI has a lot of supporters in Canada. Moreover, a bill to bring in UBI – Bill S-233 - has already passed second reading in the Senate. According to Angus Reid, 59% of Canadians support UBI. It is most popular in Quebec and Atlantic Canada and least popular in the Prairie provinces. UBI is supported by 78% of Liberals and enjoys 84% support among the NDP.  Approximately 60% of Conservatives oppose it. As Canadians struggle with inflation and a housing crisis, Liberals have been struggling in the polls. The Liberals might be tempted to pitch a few big policies in hopes of shaking things up, and UBI might be big enough to turn the tides. At the very least, it could salvage them some seats in Eastern Canada. The groundwork has already been laid. At the 2021 Liberal National Convention, both Basic Income policy resolutions were supported by an overwhelming number of delegates, and this isn’t an aberration. The Liberal Party officially adopted policies supporting the creation of basic income in 2014, 2016, and 2018. There is one hiccup. While 59% of Canadians polled say they would support a UBI, 64% would not be willing to pay more in taxes to fund it. Canadians want something for nothing. People want UBI, but not enough to cover its costs. The classic political solution to such a dilemma is to claim that someone else (rich people) will pay the costs so you don’t have to. That is precisely how UBI Works pitches the program. UBI Works is an advocacy group that champions the creation of a basic income sufficient to lift most Canadians out of poverty. They ask the question that a lot of people tend to ask whenever there is talk of the government dolling out $billions to people – “Who pays?” They then provide their answer: “Probably not you” while declaring “those who can pay for it – the wealthiest in Canada – should pay for it.” UBI Works claims that “If your money comes from a paycheque, you likely won’t pay for it.” They insist the program would only cost $51 billion / year, and then they elaborate, “We can fund a basic income without taxing the vast majority of Canadians, while encouraging economic growth. Although there are many ways to fund a basic income, we propose to pay for it with contributions from our financial sector, fewer tax breaks for large companies, and fewer subsidies for the wealthiest.” UBI Works presents a very sophisticated argument – probably the best argument for UBI that I’ve ever seen. They recommend several specific measures to raise the revenues necessary to support their proposed program, including a tax on financial transactions, imposing new taxes on financial institutions, and dramatic reductions in what qualifies for a capital gains exemption. They acknowledge that “taxes can hamper economic development,” but they believe that the measures they propose will “minimize these hampering effects by targeting areas of unproductive money accumulation in the economy, and in turn, giving that money to households who will spend and invest it.” Many of the policies promoted by UBI Works seem reasonable, yet one is tempted to question why these measures haven’t already been implemented to address the federal government’s $40 billion deficit. The Liberals have been in power since 2015, and been propped up by the NDP since 2019, so what’s stopping them from introduction these policies to address our looming debt crisis? Leftists always insist that the Conservatives won’t be able to balance the budget without cutting the social services that Canadians depend upon, yet when they seek to justify an expensive new program to transfer wealth from the rich to the poor, they insist that tens-of-billions in “unproductive money” can easily be raised with just a few simple policies. It is never that simple, but I understand why UBI Works chooses to advance such claims. Canadians want something for nothing. They want better supports and services from the government, but they don’t want to pay for them. The idea of UBI is not completely without merit. Done properly, it could dramatically reduce the number of government ministries and simplify the support systems set up to help people, reducing red tape and the size of government bureaucracies. However, there’s no guarantee that our government will do it correctly. Political ideology and predictable corruption would almost certainly dampen any potential benefits of UBI. Canada’s experience with CERB should give us cause for pause. The federal government’s failure to fortify CERB against fraud resulted in $27.4 billion being sent out under circumstances the Auditor General flagged as “suspicious”, and most of that money will likely never be recovered. CERB ballooned Canada’s federal debt and drove up inflation, which has exacerbated the housing crisis and the affordability crisis, meaning that most of us are paying even if we never drew any direct benefit from CERB. The framework of Bill S-233 also gives us cause for pause. Bill S-233 is the UBI bill brought forward by Senator Kim Pate. If passed, the bill would require the Minister of Finance to develop a national framework to provide “a guaranteed livable basic income” for “any person over the age of 17 in Canada”. The bill specifies that the national framework cannot require “participation in education, training or the labor market” to qualify, and it specifically includes temporary workers and refugee claimants. One must assume that “any” would also include foreign students and adults visiting Canada while on vacation. One can only speculate on what impact this program would have on illegal immigration. After all, if you were homeless in the United States, and you could cross into Canada and qualify for a Universal Basic Income meant to make life affordable to all, might you not choose to move to Canada? Bill S-233 does not define what constitutes a “livable basic income”, so one can only speculate on the costs that would be associated with such a program. UBI Works promotes a plan that would offer a national Guaranteed Basic Income of approximately $1,500/month for individuals and $2,150/month for couples. They would reduce this basic income by $0.50 for every dollar a recipient earned, and it would not impact pensions, payments to seniors, or children. UBI Works suggest that this would lift 1.6 million families out of poverty and make life more affordable for 7.4 million more. Naturally, the program as envisioned by UBI Works would prove to be a disincentive for low-income workers to pursue work. A person making minimum wage would see half of their salary deducted from their UBI payment, but would still bear the usual costs associated with maintaining a job (transportation, child care, etc.). This policy would also incentivize more under-the-counter work and the under-reporting of earnings because unreported income wouldn’t be deducted. Since tying-the-knot would result in significant reductions to one’s UBI payments, it would disincentivize marriage. Their math also reveals that most Canadians won’t collect UBI, and among those who will, most won’t collect the full amount as advertised. UBI Works estimates that the cost of the program would be $81 billion, though it would replace some federal and provincial tax credits, reducing its cost to $51 billion. $51 billion can only cover 7% of Canadians at the full rate of $1500/month. It could cover 20% of Canadians, but only if it offered a monthly benefit of just $500. So, who does UBI benefit? Probably not you. Rob Bogunovic serves as the editor at The Rubicon If you like our content, please consider subscribing and supporting our efforts.

On December 12, 2023, Canada attacked Elon Musk. The culprit was a CBC journalist, Jonathan Montpetit, who wrote a hit piece against Musk and X (formerly known as Twitter). Montpetit used his position as a state-sponsored journalist to attack a free-speech platform in a deliberate attempt to drive advertisers away from the platform. Montpetit isn’t subtle about his intentions, which means when the CBC ran his story, they knew what they were doing. Montpetit opens his article by stating, “A growing number of brands have backed away from X, formerly known as Twitter, amid the unchecked rise in hateful content and owner Elon Musk's seeming endorsement of antisemitic and other far-right conspiracy theories.” The CBC hit piece makes clear how Montpetit manufactured controversy so he could write about it. He hopped on to X and scrolled around the feeds of people who are regarded as being controversial due to some of the views they have expressed - social media influencers like Mike Cernovich, Chaya Raichik (Libs of TikTok), and Britain’s Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) - and if Montpetit saw ads in their feeds from Canadian companies, he called up the company requesting comment for the story he was writing. If the company did not respond to his request, or if they said they were going to continue to advertise on the platform, Montpetit made sure to mention this in his story. To avoid negative publicity, some companies told Montpetit that they’ll be pulling their ads. Bell Media, Angus Reid and Sun Life cut ties with X because of Montpetit’s inquiries, allowing the CBC to attach the headline “Bell Media, Angus Reid and other Canadian brands halt ads on X amid extremism concerns”. This isn’t a case of Montpetit reporting about an existing controversy; Montpetit creates the controversy. He’s inserted himself into the story and has been working the phones to produce a boycott. It isn’t even an original tactic; Media Matters employed the same strategy south of the border. Montpetit works for the CBC, which gets most of its funding – over a $billion per year – from Canada’s federal government. The CBC was very annoyed with Musk when he labelled them “government-funded” on his platform in April 2023. The CBC quickly announced that they’d be pausing activity on all their Twitter accounts while declaring that this accurate label was “untrue and deceptive”. Montpetit’s article is demonstrative of how biased, dishonest, and manipulative the mainstream media outlets have become. The good news is that more and more people seem to be recognizing just how horrible they are. On December 1, 2023, Global News ran a story by Paul Johnson with the headline “Nearly 80% of Canadians believe at least 1 conspiracy theory, new poll finds”. The story states that 1 in 10 Canadians believe that there was some deception in the moon landing, and then spoke incredulously about the belief that Covid was developed as a bioweapon, and “its sister falsehood that governments are covering up dangers about vaccines”. Johnson states that “about a third of Canadians believe in both of those things.” Johnson then declares that a recent poll “turns up staggering levels of belief in things that either aren’t supported by evidence or are just plain wrong.” He offers as an example that 36% believe there was a cover up regarding JFK’s assassination. Johnson then exclaims that “a whopping 55% of Canadians now believe the mainstream media manipulates the information it puts out”. Johnson’s framing and tone made it clear that he regards each of these assertions as absurd. It strikes me as incredible that only 55% of Canadians believe that mainstream media manipulates the information it puts out. There is an abundance of evidence demonstrating that they do, and to assume otherwise is “just plain wrong.” We can’t know what people who saw this story on Global News thought about it, but I find it somewhat gratifying that of the 28,000 who viewed this story on YouTube, less than 1% gave it a thumbs up. We’re not allowed to know how many thumbs down the story received, but the comments section was filled with people mocking Johnson and his assertions. While it seems like things have gotten worse in terms of media dishonesty (and maybe it has), concerns about the malicious and deceitful nature of the press aren’t new. In 1873, Mark Twain gave a talk titled “License of the Press”. Twain proclaimed, “There are laws to protect the freedom of the press's speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press. A libel suit simply brings the plaintiff before a vast newspaper court to be tried before the law tries him, and reviled and ridiculed without mercy.” Twain went on to declare, “It has become a sarcastic proverb that a thing must be true if you saw it in a newspaper. That is the opinion intelligent people have of that lying vehicle in a nutshell. But the trouble is that the stupid people — who constitute the grand overwhelming majority of this and all other nations — do believe and are moulded and convinced by what they get out of a newspaper, and there is where the harm lies. Among us, the newspaper is a tremendous power. It can make or mar any man’s reputation. It has perfect freedom to call the best man in the land a fraud and a thief, and he is destroyed beyond help.” Twain closed his speech declaring, “I have a sort of vague general idea that there is too much liberty of the press in this country, and that through the absence of all wholesome restraint the newspaper has become in a large degree a national curse”. Twain was parroting many of the criticisms voiced by Thomas Jefferson decades earlier. In 1807, Jefferson wrote, “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time”. He goes on to lament, “no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors.” When news media inundates its audiences with a particular sentiment, it usually becomes the dominate sentiment of that audience. That’s why propaganda is effective. Its why advertising is a $600 billion global industry. During the months leading up to the 2015 Federal Election, I frequently heard people declare, “I hate Stephen Harper”. I sometimes asked those voicing this sentiment, “Why do you hate Stephen Harper”. I wanted to know what Conservative policy they opposed, or what quality of the Prime Minister they despised. I usually got blank stares. So many who voiced a hatred of the man could not offer a reason for it. They had a sentiment, but they couldn’t really account for where they had acquired it. When I was a teenager, Brian Mulroney was the Prime Minister we were all supposed to hate, and I did – as did most of my peers and the members of my family. We mostly couldn’t have told you why we hated him, yet before Mulroney left office in 1993, his approval rating dropped to 12% - the lowest rating ever suffered by a Canadian prime minister. As a historian looking back on Mulroney’s record, I’ve had to re-evaluate many of the things I once presumed. My opinion today can best be described as a grudging respect and admiration. It is easy for the media to attack people with made up stories and absurd claims, and there is always an audience such things. Donald Trump is probably the most maligned politician alive today. Well before he won the presidency, the dominant mainstream media narrative was that he was a racist, sexist, homophobic bigot who was literally Hitler and who wanted to have sex with his own daughter. Media coverage of Trump remained overwhelmingly negative throughout his presidency, even when Donald Trump was doing things that would have earned any other President an abundance of praise. Any one supporting Trump was similarly labelled as “racist”, “sexist”, “homophobic”, “transphobic”, “xenophobic” – all the qualities that Hillary Clinton associated with those she labelled as “deplorables”. This messaging was ubiquitous. I have a lot of mixed feelings about the former President. I understand why people hate him so emphatically. The Donald depicted in the media is a vile and loathsome villain deserving of our utter contempt. However, I’m not sure that this Donald truly exists. I think he’s a figment of the media’s Machiavellian machinations. Though I am bothered by what I perceive as his narcissism, I’m also hesitant to employ the term. After all, narcissism is a mental health condition in which people have an unreasonably high sense of their own importance, and I don’t think Trump’s sense of his own importance is unreasonable. He has a huge ego – bigly huge – but I think that maybe it’s justified. Trump was incredibly successful in business, real-estate, branding, and reality television. When he ran for the highest office in the land, having no prior experience in politics, he won. Many people seem to regard him as the gravest threat to their ambitions, and when I judge Donald Trump by the enemies he has made, I’m inclined to regard him as a great man. When Elon Musk pushed to make Twitter a free-speech platform, he made himself many enemies, the CBC included. It isn’t surprising. Free speech is perhaps the ugliest right that we possess because it protects the rights of people to say ugly things. It also empowers people to push back against media narratives being pushed upon them by powerful interests. It gives people a voice. The official CBC Twitter account claims that they are “Bringing you the best of Canada”. Makes me laugh. Rob Bogunovic serves as the editor at The Rubicon If you like our content, please consider subscribing and supporting our efforts.

In a recent House of Commons exchange, Justin Trudeau received a standing ovation from his caucus when he declared, “The climate denialism of the Conservative Party of Canada is putting future white Christmases at risk, and that’s why on this side of the House WE STAND FOR CHRISTMAS.” Conservative MPs erupted with howls of laughter, with Pierre Poilievre retorting, “That has to be the angriest and most caustic Christmas message I’ve ever seen.” The prologue for this exchange was the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) producing a paper in October that said the statutory holidays of Christmas and Easter were examples of systemic religious discrimination grounded in colonialism. On November 29, 2023, Quebec’s National Assembly voted unanimously on a motion to defend Christmas. Quebec’s Justice Minister, Simon Jolin-Barrette, declared, “We will not apologize for celebrating Christmas in Quebec.” He added, “Honestly, to be told by the Canadian (Human) Rights Commission that Christmas is discriminatory, there are limits.” Mathieu Lévesque, Quebec’s deputy house leader, asked that their motion be sent to the CHRC, the House of Commons, and “to Santa Claus, at the North Pole.” Canadian politicians have often pretended that Santa Claus is real. Ten years ago, the Harper government issued ePassports to Santa Claus and Mrs. Claus. The 2,999,999th and 3,000,000th ePassports were presented at a special ceremony in Vaughan, Ontario. In the House of Commons, prior to the Prime Minister’s “caustic Christmas message”, the leader of the Bloc Quebecois, Yves-François Blanchet, asked the speaker, “I wonder whether Santa Claus is racist. I wonder whether snow has become racist. Mr. Speaker, according to the prime minister, is Christmas racist?” It was an absurd question. Thy CHRC paper concerned the issue of Christmas and Easter as the only statutory holidays that are religious in nature. According to the CHRC: “Our discussion paper explains that, based on current Canadian law, providing a statutory holiday for one religion, and not providing reasonable accommodation for other religions may be considered discrimination. It simply mentions Christmas as an example of a religious holiday that is also a statutory holiday.” The CHRC never said that Christmas was racist. The Prime Minister dismissed the question as “totally ridiculous”. Shortly thereafter, Pierre Poilievre rose “to wish everybody a Merry Christmas” and then accused Trudeau of promising Canadians “nothing but a carbon-tax lump of coal.” That’s when Trudeau claimed his carbon-tax defends the whiteness of Christmas, shouting his angry “WE STAND FOR CHRISTMAS”. There’s a lot in Trudeau’s “caustic Christmas message” that’s concerning, though it isn’t surprising that such an absurd statement comes to us courtesy of our Prime Minister. On March 6, 2018, Trudeau sat next to Bill Nye the Science Guy and shared his belief that “Every single human being starts off as a scientist.” Trudeau said, “When you’re a baby, you are a scientist. If I make this noise, wow, I get milk. If I push this button, or knock this thing off the table, it lands on me and it hurts.’ You’re curious. You’re always asking questions. ‘Why is the sky blue? What does this do? What’s that do? Why is this this way? Well, what do you mean there’s going to be consequences if I do this?’” For Trudeau, science doesn’t require a method. It doesn’t even require the ability to discern fact from fantasy. Indeed, the ‘science’ Trudeau favors is itself more fantasy than fact. Are white Christmases under threat in Canada? Maybe. Comparing the percentages of white Christmases in Canadian cities during the periods 1960-1984 and 1997-2021, we find that the chance of a white Christmas has dropped from 79% to 66%, so it isn’t wrong to say that for most cities in Canada, white Christmases are a little rarer than they used to be. In Vancouver, they’ve always been rare, the chance of a white Christmas being just 8% regardless of which era we look at. In Winnipeg, it dropped from 100% to 96%, meaning they had one Christmas where they had no snow. Edmonton dropped from 100% to 84%, Ottawa fell from 84% to 72%, Montreal fell from 84% to 68%, Calgary dropped from 72% to 64%, and Toronto dropped from 56% to 40%. I could mention other cities, but they don’t have NHL teams, and brevity requires that I draw the line somewhere. Global temperatures have risen since the end of the little ice age, and that trend will impact the chance that Canadians experience a nostalgic white Christmas in any given year. It also reduces all the other effects that snow tends to bring, most of which are negative. Cold weather kills people. Warm weather does as well, but cold weather kills a lot more. In almost all regions of the globe, more people die from the cold than from heat. With increased temperatures, researchers estimate that the world will suffer 400,000 more heat deaths and 1.8 million fewer cold deaths by the mid-century mark. That means, if we are to accept the IPCC projections regarding future warming, it would translate into roughly 14 million fewer deaths per decade by mid-century. Conversely, if the predicted warming doesn’t materialize, Canada will continue to enjoy the nostalgia of our predominately white Christmases. The benefits of warmer temperatures would be most pronounced in temperate climates, like Canada’s. For us, warmer temperatures by the end of the century do not herald apocalyptic numbers. We’re likely to post net benefits. The Climate Impact Lab projects that by the end of the century, climate change will produce economic benefits that will result in a 12% boost to our GDP. Predicted increases in annual temperatures are also projected to reduce our mortality by 194 per 100,000. Based on Canada’s current population, that would equate to 75,000 deaths being averted every year. To put that into perspective, we lost roughly 55,000 to Covid-19 over the last 4 years. It’s not at all clear how many lives were saved by all the measures implemented to flatten the Covid curve. Much that was done appears to have had minimal impact in slowing the spread and saving lives, but the negative effects of these efforts weren’t minimal. Lockdowns resulted in significant social and financial hardships. Many small businesses were ruined. Many jobs were lost. Many lives were disrupted. Many psyches were damaged. During the Covid Christmas season of 2020, traditional celebrations were curtailed or cancelled across Canada. Most people had to severely scale-down their Christmas celebrations. Canadians were restricted in terms of travel. Cities cancelled their Santa Claus parades and schools did not host holiday concerts. In British Columbia, churches were ordered to shut their doors. Christmas literally means “mass on Christ's day” or “Christ’s mass”, yet these were outlawed in B.C. in 2020. Liberals didn’t stand to defend Christmas when its social and religious elements were under attack, yet now they insist on preserving its whiteness. I can only call into question their priorities. The pretext for fighting climate change is preserving the well-being and prosperity of future generations, but the reality of Liberal efforts is the opposite of that. Liberals are spending $billions to increase the fatalities Canadians will suffer in the decades to come, though this presumes that any of their spending is capable of achieving a meaningful reduction in global temperature.  Liberals are simultaneously reducing the economic opportunities of future Canadians by advancing policies that constrict GDP growth and development, and by deficit spending that’ll shackle future generations with crippling levels of debt. Honestly, the whiteness of their Christmases will be the least of their concerns. Rob Bogunovic serves as the editor at The Rubicon If you like our content, please consider subscribing and supporting our efforts.

When policies appear to have detrimental impacts, a friend of mine often quips that “the result is the intention”. He presumes that the bad result was the intended result. This is in stark contrast to Hanlon’s razor, an adage that states, “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” When he was Finance Minister, Bill Morneau declared that “A strong and independent news media is crucial to a well-functioning democracy. It empowers citizens by providing them with the information they need to make sound decisions on important issues.” True words, but Liberal efforts to ensure a “strong and independent news media” have produced a series of policies that collectively eroded the viability, legitimacy, and independence of Canada’s media news outlets. Was this an accident, the product of a series of stupid miscalculations, or is the result the intention? Canada began down this road with the publishing of The Shattered Mirror: News, Democracy and Trust in the Digital Age. Liberals commissioned the Public Policy Forum to produce this report on the state of Canadian journalism back in 2016. It was released on January 26, 2017. At the time, many print newspaper publications were shutting down because people are mostly accessing news on digital platforms. Due to the enormous costs of printing and distribution, printed newspapers tend to be loss leaders. The Shattered Mirror argues that the economic degradation of traditional media is deepening, the development of digital-only news providers is slow and uncertain, and digital news revenues are disproportionately going to distributors (Facebook and Google) rather than producers. The report warns that the streams of news informing citizens is becoming polluted by fake news laced with lies, hate, and possible manipulations by foreign powers. Edward Greenspon, the President of the Public Policy Forum, declared, “Make no mistake: the situation for journalism and therefore democracy is getting worse.” Greenspon added, “Canada's news industry is in the midst of an existential crisis. So, therefore, is our democracy.” Ironically, The Shattered Mirror manufactured the appearance of this “existential crisis” through its heavy reliance on rhetoric and disinformation. At one point it claimed that Postmedia had lost $352 million in its 2015-16 fiscal year, but this was just a trick of creative accounting. Operationally, Postmedia had earned a net profit of $82 million. The report claims that jobs were being lost in journalism – which was technically true. However, Dwayne Winseck, a professor at Carleton University, accused them of “goosing the numbers”. His 2019 study, co-authored with Sabrina Wilkinson, cited Statistics Canada data that showed the number of employed journalists increased from about 6,000 in 1998 to a peak of 13,000 in 2013, and then fell back to about 11,000 in 2017. Winseck asserts, “There are in fact more journalists in absolute terms at the time of writing than at most points in the past 30 years.” While there were about 2,000 jobs lost as regards the 2013 peak, the numbers employed had more than doubled in twenty years. It is also ridiculous to assume, as The Shattered Mirror does, that a loss of journalism jobs equates to less journalism. Digital technology enables media outlets to put out more information with fewer people. In the 1980s, a television crew sent to cover an event would include a reporter, producer, soundman, and cameraman. Today that same event can be covered by one person with a digital camera, yet The Shattered Mirror doesn’t even speculate on how many of the lost jobs were due to digital efficiency. This “existential crisis” is merely a shift in the way media operates. It should surprise no one that a shift to the Digital Age would shake things up in terms of how people produce and consume the news. We can trust that, even if legacy media outlets collapse into obsolescence, serious journalism will continue because the demand for it still exists. This journalism might appear in unfamiliar forms, and it may become decentralized, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If the Liberals truly valued a “strong and independent” news media, they’d want to dramatically reduce the subsidization of legacy media outlets, and they would celebrate the emergence of diverse viewpoints online. They don’t. The Shattered Mirror gave the Liberals the pretext to dramatically increase the regulation and subsidization of journalism. They used this fabricated crisis to justify offering $595 million in bailouts to Canada’s media outlets. Liberals did this in advance of the 2019 Federal election. As the legacy media held out their hands for massive government bailouts, they simultaneously used their voice to promote Liberal narratives. On May 5, 2019, while addressing the Parliamentary Press Gallery dinner, Justin Trudeau joked, “You sometimes hear about liberal bias in the media these days, how they’re constantly letting our government off the hook for no good reason. Frankly, I think that’s insulting. It’s clear that they let us off the hook for a very good reason: because we pay them $600 million. You don’t get stellar headlines like these (a small handful of negative headlines appears on the screen behind him) without greasing the wheels a bit.” The “joke” didn’t land very well. These millions were not the only subsidies being offered by the Liberals in 2019. They also introduced the Journalism Labour Tax Credit that allows certain news organizations to claim a refundable tax credit on wages paid to eligible newsroom employees – up to 25% of $55,000 in salary or wages. That equates to $13,750 per individual per year, which is a pretty nice subsidy for the news outlets that qualify. Massive bailouts invite various media players to aggressively lobby government officials, and it incentivizes media outlets to promote Liberal causes. You don’t bite the hand that feeds you, and the Liberals have made themselves the hand that feeds Canadian journalism. Conservative Party leaders have said they would end these media bailouts, which means the media has an incentive to make Liberals look good and Conservatives look bad. Subsidized media outlets haven’t written many stories about how much money they have been given, and our government has not been transparent on the issue. What can be learned from mostly independent sources (like Canadaland) paints a picture of pork barrel binging at a time when many media outlets are posting substantial profits. Bell Canada’s net earnings have exceeded $2 billion dollars for thirteen years straight. Canada’s Journalism Labour Tax Credit requires that recipients be Qualified Canadian Journalism Organizations (QCJOs). In December 2019, the Liberals announced that an independent advisory board would be established to make recommendations on whether an organization meets certain criteria necessary to be designated as a QCJO. Through an order-in-council, Trudeau’s Cabinet established the Independent Advisory Board on Eligibility for Journalism Tax Measures (the Advisory Board) in March 2020. When Rebel News applied to this “independent” advisory board, they were denied a QCJO designation. The Advisory Board said that “less than 1 per cent of the content” of Rebel News “meets the criteria for original news content.” They based this evaluation on a secret review of 276 Rebel News stories. Rebel News is an organization that is often critical of Justin Trudeau and the Liberals. Rebel journalists have broken many stories that have damaged the Liberals’ brand. That they can so easily be denied the QCJO designation suggests that the Advisory Board might be actively working to punish one of the most effective critics of the Liberal government, and that is an alarming development. It suggests that the Liberals have created a regulatory mechanism to financially reward news outlets they like and punish those they don’t. Ezra Levant, the founder of Rebel News Media, stated: “I don’t know if there are other journalists who are being censored; I know if they succeed, we won’t be the last. I think we’re likely the only ones who can and will fight back. Good news is, we’ve got an absolute top-notch legal team.” On April 5, 2022, the Liberals introduced Bill C-18 - The Online News Act. Like Bill C-11, which is controversial for reasons too many to discuss here, Bill C-18 aims to grant vague, undefined powers to the CRTC. Bill C-18 also picks a fight with big tech platforms like Google and Meta (Facebook, Instagram). The Liberals have tried to force these corporations to pay for news content that is freely shared on their platforms. There is not much incentive for these companies to pay, so to comply with the law – which received royal accent on June 22, 2023 – Meta chose to block Canadian news on their platforms. Because of this, Canadian news outlets are having a harder time connecting their content with their audiences, which is impacting on their revenues. To address this crisis of their own making, Liberals have decided to dramatically expand their Journalism Labour Tax Credit. Chrystia Freeland announced in the 2023 Fall Economic Statement that, retroactive to January 1, 2023, the federal government will “increase the yearly limit on labour costs that can be claimed per eligible employee from $55,000 to $85,000, and temporarily increase the tax credit rate from 25 per cent to 35 per cent for a period of four years”. This means that instead of claiming $13,750 per employee, QCJOs will be able to claim $29,750. The tax credit has more than doubled. The Liberals require the support of another party to make this happen, but the New Democratic Party (NDP) has promised to support them until 2025, and this media subsidy was originally their idea. On February 27, 2020, before the Covid-19 lockdowns and before Bill C-18, the NDP called on the Liberal government to make “key changes to the federal media support fund”. They asked the Liberals to “move the cap for a salary admissible for a tax credit from $55,000 to $85,000” and “increase the amount of the salary admissible for a tax credit from 25% to 35%.” The NDP, like the Liberals, benefit from a refusal by legacy media to challenge various narratives that the two party’s support. The 2023 Fall Economic Statement asserted that “Independent journalism makes our democracy stronger”. That being the case, Liberals should be trying to reduce the media’s dependence on subsidies and limit the influence of their lobbyists. The Liberals have been doing the opposite of this for seven years now. Every move they have made seems designed to reduce journalistic independence. Can this be explained as mere stupidity, or is the result the intention? Rob Bogunovic serves as the editor at The Rubicon If you like our content, please consider subscribing and supporting our efforts.

Canadians are in the midst of a battle against tyranny. Government overreach is now so common it's accepted as “normal” by two thirds of our fellow Canadians. Two recent court decisions make this abundantly clear. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Bill C-69, called The Impact Assessment Act by Trudeau's government and the "No More Pipelines Act" by its critics, is unconstitutional, stating, "Environmental protection remains one of today's most pressing challenges. To meet this challenge, Parliament has the power to enact a scheme of environmental assessment. Parliament also has the duty however, to act within the enduring division of powers framework laid out in the Constitution." Justin Trudeau's utter contempt for provincial authority led to this decision, and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is extremely pleased, declaring, “If you believe in fairness, common sense and the sanctity of the Canadian Constitution, today is a great day. Today's decision significantly strengthens our legal position as we work to protect Albertans and all Canadians from federal intrusion into our provincial jurisdiction.” The second SCC decision dealt with the Trudeau government's decision to label "single-use plastics" as toxic. This government decision led to the banning of plastic straws (but oddly not the plastic lids the straws poked through) and plastic bags at grocery stores, etc. "I agree that the national concern doctrine is not a justiciable issue in this case," wrote Justice Angela Furlanetto. "Moreover, even if it could be raised, it is my view that reliance on such doctrine in defence of the constitutional challenge is not appropriate as the listing of PMI does not have a singleness, distinctiveness and indivisibility that clearly distinguishes it from matters of provincial concern." He added, "I find the Order and its corresponding listing of PMI on Schedule 1 of the List of Toxic Substances to be both unreasonable and unconstitutional." While other nations choose to defend individual freedom, Canada’s Liberal government is committed to a path of tyrannical self-destruction. The Prime Minister is supposed to be a public servant who governs in the best interests of all Canadians, not a tyrant who subjugates a nation to his personal whims. Given Trudeau's penchant for imposing his personal beliefs on the rest of us, it's unlikely he ever comprehended this distinction. This is reflected in polling numbers by every major pollster. Trudeau's stock plummets further every day, while the political stock of those who claim to support individual rights and freedoms skyrocket. As interesting as these polls are, they proves that politicians are followers, not leaders, and those seeking the public's favour will set their sails based on what ordinary Canadians like you and me believe. The rest are stuck in the doldrums, albeit with great weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth. BUT... The only opinion poll that matters is called an election, be it municipal, provincial or federal. If you sit on the sidelines and complain, you get the government you deserve. If you believe your school board, your city council, your provincial or federal government, are moving in the wrong direction, it is your duty, your obligation to yourself, your family and your future generations, to get involved politically. Christopher di Armani strives to awaken the passion for freedom and liberty that exists inside every person. It is this passion that motivates him in every aspect of his life. He is a communications professional with 50 published books and multiple successful election campaigns (as communications director) to his credit. You can reach him at ChristopherDiArmani.org

One of the best ways to lose an argument is to overstate it. Climate alarmists often rely on emotionally charged, simplistic assertions that presume improbable worst-case scenarios. Eventually, people will learn the truth, learn that they’ve been lied too, and they’ll become disillusioned. The propaganda around rising seas epitomizes this. Alarmists have for decades warned that major cities will flood and whole nations will be lost, and that it’ll happen within our own lifetimes. Bill Nye, in a 2017 interview with Tucker Carlson, claimed that climate change, “instead of happening on timescales of millions of years or let’s say 15,000 years, it’s happening on the timescale of decades and now years”. He also said that “half the people in the world live on seacoasts” and “people living on seacoasts will be displaced”. It is absurdly hyperbolic to suggest that we’re currently seeing a timeline where 15,000 years of sea level rise is being compressed into a few years or decades. The last 15,000 years saw sea levels rise by about 100 meters, helped along by the melting of the Laurentide Ice Sheet that once buried Canada beneath a kilometer of ice. Regarding where people live and how many are threatened, Nye is off by a magnitude of five. Roughly 40% of the global population lives within 50 kilometers of a coastline, but only a quarter of these live in low-elevation coastal zones. This means that 10 percent live at an elevation that would potentially be threatened by rapidly rising seas, not 50% as Nye proclaimed. These were all incredibly stupid assertions by Nye, yet many still seem to regard him as a credible authority on such issues because, when we were children, Bill Nye was “the science guy”, and we tend to trust science. Sea levels are rising, and the rate of sea level rise appears to have accelerated. Sea levels used to rise at a rate of just less than 2 mm / year (roughly the thickness of a quarter). In 120 years this produced about a foot of sea level rise. In recent decades this rate appears to have risen to about 3.7 mm/year – doubling. It should be noted that some skeptics dispute this claim, but for alarmists, this doubling is touted as a great cause for concern. Coasts are dynamic environments, with tides rising and falling several feet every single day. At the Battery in New York, tides have been recorded going back to 1856, and the record shows an average rate of rise of 2.88 mm/year. Prior to 1900 it was roughly 2.5 mm/year. Then it dropped to 2 mm for about thirty years (1900-1930), rose to just over 4 mm for about thirty years (1930-1960), dropped below 2 mm for thirty years (1960-1990), and then rose again to about 4.7 mm/year. One can interpret this as a doubling of sea level rise, though it would also be accurate – and significantly less alarming - to say the rate has increased by 17% over what it was in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. For its September 2013 edition on Rising Seas, National Geographic choose to show the Statue of Liberty waste deep in water. This imagines a world where all the ice in Greenland and Antarctica melted. Of course, that’s what it would take – the melting of the world’s last two surviving ice sheets. Greenland’s sheet has enough water locked away in its ice to raise sea levels around 7.2 meters, and Antarctica’s much larger ice sheet could raise it another 57.8 meters if it were all to melt. But how likely is it to melt? And how quickly might this happen? Melting does occur along the periphery of the Greenland ice sheet, but it isn’t all going to melt – at least, not any time soon. An ensemble of 256 ice sheet models predict that Greenland may lose enough ice to raise global sea levels by between 2 and 10 cm by 2100. Less than 2% of the ice sheet is expected to melt. Antarctica is even more stable. It is hard to imagine a scenario where the bulk of either ice sheet could melt within the next millennia. While we can’t know precisely how much the seas will rise in the next one hundred years, the IPCC assessment reports consistently estimates something between 25 cm and 88 cm. When alarmists show images of the Statue of Liberty treading water, they have divorced themselves from reality. Lady Liberty stands on a pedestal and foundation that is 46.98 meters tall. At a rate of 2.88 mm/year, it’ll take over 16,000 years for saltwater to touch the foot of the Statue of Liberty. If we take a higher rate of 4.7 mm, it will take about 10,000 years. There is really no scenario where Lady Liberty ends up drowning in anything less than a thousand years. The doomsday scenarios used by alarmists always seem to promote numbers that are extremely unlikely. In An Inconvenient Truth, a 2006 documentary designed to scare people, Al Gore projected 6 meters of sea level rise as he showed animations of cities being flooded. Six meters would cause 20% of Florida to flood and destroy coastal cities like Venice, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Jakarta, and St. Petersburg. It would submerge the Bahamas, the Netherlands, the Maldives, and force the rebuilding of port facilities all around the world. However, this scenario will likely take more than a thousand years to come to pass. Al Gore makes it sound imminent. He also fails to mention that the technology to adapt to rising seas already exists and is widely being implemented in some of the world’s largest port cities. Shanghai is one of the “threatened” cities named by Gore, yet China isn’t about to evacuate their largest city. They’ve opted for adaptation. By building seawalls off their coast to capture outflowing sediment, and by dredging large volumes of sand, Shanghai has added over 580 square kilometers of land to its shorelines since 1985. That’s over 110 square kilometers larger than Andorra – Europe’s sixth smallest country. The process of reclaiming land is expensive, but not prohibitively so. Chinese news reports that it can cost between $310,000 and $670,000 per hectare. Compared to the cost of land in many of our major cities, that price tag seems like a bargain. There is a cost to acting, and a cost to inaction. The cost of inaction is perhaps best demonstrated by Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans on August 29, 2005. Hundreds died, and the cost to repair the city was approximately $125 billion dollars. Images of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina were used by those sounding the alarm on global warming, including Al Gore, but global warming probably wasn’t a factor. Louisiana’s inadequate dikes were the obvious culprits. For decades it had been known that New Orleans would be severely flooded by any hurricane striking its shores, and such a hurricane was all but inevitable. In a 1995 documentary on cyclones, National Geographic predicted disaster for the city, stating that “five, perhaps fifty years from now, a hurricane like Andrews might descend on New Orleans”. Ten years before disaster struck New Orleans, National Geographic described how the city would flood, with waters rising above roof tops, killing many. On October 29, 2012, Superstorm Sandy hit New York City. Wind, rain, and a large storm surge did a lot of damage, estimated at $19 billion. Forty-four of the city’s residents were killed, including 35 who drowned. This could have been avoided if New York had developed the proper infrastructure and defenses. Malcolm Bowman, a physical oceanographer, had for years advocated the construction of a harbor-spanning storm-surge barrier. In 2005, following Hurricane Katrina, Bowman wrote a New York Times op-ed where he states, “the question is not if a catastrophic hurricane or northeaster will hit New York, but when.” He pointed out that other cities have built levees and storm barriers, and he specifically names Shanghai among them. Regarding Sandy, Bowman said “If a system of properly designed storm-surge barriers had been built—and strengthened with sand dunes at both ends along the low-lying coastal areas—there would have been no flooding damage”. The costs associated with such a project are high. In the case of the two barriers Bowman advocates, one barrier alone might cost upwards of $15 billion dollars. However, Bowman believes the barrier could support a six-lane highway and a light-rail line connecting Newark and John F. Kennedy Airports. He said, “It could be an asset to the region”, adding, “Eventually the city will have to face up to this … Otherwise we’re mortgaging the future and leaving the next generation to cope as best it can.” Alarmists have long pointed to island nations like the Maldives as being especially at risk due to rising seas. In 2009, playing upon the hysteria, the government of the Maldives held an underwater cabinet meeting, becoming the poster child of climate catastrophe. In the wake of this media stunt, their re-estate market skyrocketed as more and more people discovered this tropical paradise. The Maldives government began construction of the City of Hope, building a new artificial island that was higher than the natural ones making up their nation. Honeymoon Water Villa Resorts got free advertising due to the news reports about the looming climate disaster. The Maldivian economy has boomed due to the increased tourism business and economic investments. And the news for the Maldives gets even better as new research suggests they probably won’t inevitably disappear under rising seas. Researchers connected with the University of Plymouth examined the impact of tides on reef islands like the Maldives and found that rising tides move sediment to create higher elevations. The islands can naturally adapt and raise themselves up above encroaching waves. This helps explain how the Maldives formed at a time when sea level was higher than it is today. Despite the dire predictions of alarmists, we’ve not begun evacuations of New York and Shanghai, and we’re not relocating the citizens of Florida to higher ground. We’ve mostly been doing the opposite. Florida is the fastest growing U.S. state, and the world has seen enormous investments being made into beach front properties, including by some who publicly advocate alarmism on this issue. I find it hard to imagine that all these resorts and homes will end up as beach front boondoggles, but time will tell. Rob Bogunovic serves as the editor at The Rubicon If you like our content, please consider subscribing and supporting our efforts.

“That’s f***ing stupid,” my father-in-law exclaimed when he learned that the paper straws replacing plastic ones weren’t coated in wax like in his day. Prior to that realization, he was wondering what the big deal was as all the straws were paper when he was young – only they were different. Today’s straws tend to disintegrate into our drinks because – and I know this must come as a shock to all the policy wonks – paper breaks down when it gets wet. To combat this, modern manufacturers aren’t using wax. Instead, they coat the straws with PFAS (per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances) to render them more “water-repellent”. This is problematic because PFAS can be toxic and water-soluble, which means that toxins are likely bleeding from these paper straws into our drinks. PFAS are known as “forever chemicals”, so the impact of these straws on both us and the environment is likely worse than any threat posed to us by plastic straws. Scientists at Belgium University conducted a review of 39 brands of drinking straws, examining those made from plastic, paper, stainless steel, bamboo, and glass. They detected PFAS in 27 brands, and paper straws were the worst offenders among the lot. Bamboo and glass brands were also not great, having higher concentrations of PFAS than the plastic ones. The best performers were stainless steel brands. There was tremendous variation among the brands, so while it is possible for a paper straw to perform better than a plastic one, that mostly wasn’t the case. Paper straws are advertised as being eco-friendly, but the Belgium study suggests that this isn’t necessarily true. This should come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the track record of “eco-friendly” products. Plastic grocery bags have a bad reputation, yet they also tend to outperform many of their “eco-friendly” rivals, and we have known this to be the case since long before plastic bags were banned in our grocery stores. In 2005, the Scottish government commissioned a life-cycle bag analysis that found that in comparison to plastic, paper bags consumed 10% more energy, used 4 times the water, and emitted three times more greenhouse gases, while generating 14 times more water pollution and three times more solid waste. The U.K.'s Environment Agency (UKEA) commissioned a study in 2011 that found “the paper bag has to be used four or more times to reduce its global warming potential to below that of the conventional [plastic] bag”, and found that “it is unlikely the paper bag can be regularly reused … due to its low durability”. The report concludes that paper bags were “significantly worse for human toxicity and terrestrial ecotoxicity due to the effect of paper production.” There is another problem with paper versus plastic – weight. Two thousand paper grocery bags weigh 280 pounds, which is 250 pounds more than what 2,000 single-use plastic bags weigh. Paper is heavier and bulkier, and so a lot more trucks are required to transport the same number of bags. But what about cotton tote bags? Turns out that cotton is even worse than paper. A cotton bag would have to be reused 131 times before it reduced its ecological impact to match a plastic bag, and while people are more likely to reuse a cotton bag, they aren’t likely to reuse it 131 times. Study after study shows that plastic bags had the smallest ecological footprint in terms of production, yet governments around the world have still moved to ban them. They perceive plastic bags as being problematic – because they are. They are difficult to recycle, flying out of bins and clogging up machinery, and when improperly disposed of they can linger in the environment for decades, refusing to break down, and when they break apart, they become micro-plastics which introduce their own sets of issues. That’s why the Federal Liberals have sought to eliminate their presence in Canada. In December 2022, Environment Canada made it illegal to manufacture or import plastic straws, plastic cutlery, plastic grocery bags, and a number of other disposable plastic products. This comes at a cost to Canadians – principally in terms of inconvenience, but our pocketbooks take a small hit as well – upwards of $50 per person per year. On November 16, 2023, Canada’s Federal Court overturned this ban on single-use plastics, deeming the policy “unrealistic and unconstitutional” because the classifications were too broad and because the government acted outside of its authority (the ban was instituted through an order-in-council, bypassing the usual parliamentary processes). The government is likely to appeal this decision, and a lot of environmentalists are hoping that they do and that they win, but is this plastic-ban the right policy? People still need bags to pack up and carry their groceries. If the “eco-friendly” alternatives are not actually demonstrably better than the plastic bag or the plastic straw, should they be banned? If the goal is to reduce the use of plastics, bans can work, but if the goal is to improve the environment, bans may be doing the opposite. While plastic contamination is one of the most pressing environmental concerns facing us today, we should probably ensure that we’re not simply substituting one type of pollution for another. Plastics are a problem - a very big problem. The chemical structure of most plastics renders them resistant to many natural processes of degradation. Degradation only breaks the plastic up into smaller pieces, and no matter how small the pieces become, they remain plastic. As a consequence, year after year the prevalence of plastic in our rivers and oceans has increased. Many living organisms are being harmed by this, either by mechanical effects (such as entanglement in plastic objects), problems related to the ingestion of plastic waste, or through exposure to the chemicals within plastics that interfere with their physiology. Of special concern is increasing exposure of animals to the chemical pollutants BPA (Bisphenol A) and PS oligomer. Both have been proven to cause hormone disruptions in animals, and both are released when certain plastics decompose or are metabolized subsequent to ingestion. 2019 saw about 360 million tonnes of plastic produced worldwide, and since the 1950s more than 7 billion tonnes of plastic have been produced worldwide. Only about 9% of this has been recycled. Another 12% has been incinerated. The rest becomes litter or landfill, and the litter tends to end up in streams, and rivers, and then our lakes, seas, and oceans. Over 6 million tonnes leak into the world’s rivers and oceans each year. Presently, more than 139 million tonnes of plastic pollutes our rivers and oceans. By 2050, the weight of the plastic in the world’s rivers and oceans may well exceed the weight of the fish. Canada’s own numbers often reflect stark global realities. Canada produces about 3.3 million tonnes of plastic waste per year. Despite being among the first nations to introduce roadside recycling programs, only about 8% gets recycled. 86% of Canada’s plastic (about 2.8 million tonnes) still ends up in landfills, and the remaining 6% either gets incinerated or ends up as litter. As part of our waste management systems, Canada sends shiploads of plastic waste to Asian nations for processing, though because it doesn’t all get recycled, this ends up polluting these other countries and, by extension, the oceans. Canada generates about 29,000 tonnes of plastic pollution, 2,500 tonnes of which enters the oceans each year, and this is not counting the plastic waste we send overseas. In contrast, China sends 1.5 million tonnes of plastic waste into the Yangze River each year. That means that one river in China contributes more than 51 Canadas. If Canada could partner with China in improving its waste management systems along the Yangze, and if that partnership managed to reduce plastic pollution there by just 10%, it would eliminate 5 Canadas worth of plastic pollution. In the battle to stop the buildup of plastics in our oceans, a top priority should be helping China manage its waste, but that hasn’t been a priority for us. Instead, we’re banning plastic straws and plastic bags and ignoring the spinoff environmental impacts this has. Within Canada itself, many policies can be adopted that are more effective than the Liberal’s plastic ban, especially if our goal is to reduce waste and environmental harms. In my city, a by-law was imposed requiring businesses to sell bags to customers at a cost of $0.25/paper bag and $2/reusable bag. When our McDonalds started asking if we wanted bags at a cost of 25 cents, a lot of customers balked, and a lot of burgers and fries were handed over bagless. This was a nuisance for staff, especially those working the drive through. To remedy this laughable situation, McDonald’s staff stopped asking and the charge became automatically applied to the sale. When McDonald’s made this change, they didn’t seem to grasp that the whole point of the tax was to reduce the number of bags being used. I can be an extraordinarily absent-minded individual at times, especially when I go shopping. I almost always seem to forget my reuseable bags. I often end up carrying my groceries out unbagged, which is inconvenient, but better for the environment and my own pocketbook. While I hate taxes that nickel-and-dime-and quarter us out of our hard-earned, they are effective. One who has studied this is Tatiana Homonoff, an assistant professor of economics and public policy at New York University. She studied the impact of a February 2017 tax implemented in Chicago – a 7-cent tax on checkout bags. Homonoff said, “That’s where we see big changes in disposable bag use.” After the implementation of this tax, “Customers were much less likely to use a disposable bag, and switched to reusable bags or no bags at all.” While switching to reusable bags has dubious benefit, forgoing the use of bags seems like a win for the environment, and that is what was observed in Chicago. Prior to the tax, only about 10% went bagless. Afterwards, roughly half did. According to Homonoff, studies like this demonstrate that “very small financial incentives can lead to big behavioral change.” All this shows the difference that a good policy makes. That municipal by-law reduces the number of bags being used, whereas the Liberal’s ban on single-use plastics simply drives people to alternatives that are not as eco-friendly as advertised. We end up with paper straws that dissolve as they release toxins into our drinks. To once again quote my father-in-law, “That’s F***ing stupid”. Rob Bogunovic serves as the editor at The Rubicon If you like our content, please consider subscribing and supporting our efforts.

Freedom of expression is a fundamental right within a liberal democratic society, yet this fundamental right is rife with paradoxes. It has been the battleground of the culture war that often pits the Left and the Right against each other. Amy Eileen Hamm is currently on the frontlines of that battle. Hamm is a nurse in British Columbia, and she’s on trial before a professional disciplinary body because of opinions she’s expressed on social media – including her love for J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series who has drawn much ire from trans-activists. Hamm, like Rowling, has posted comments defending the rights of women to gender-exclusive spaces like washrooms, change rooms, and prisons. Hamm insists “I’m not transphobic. I don’t have an issue with trans people”. She has a dim view of those who are pushing for access to sex-segregated spaces, saying that “It's a movement that is infringing on the rights of women and pushing institutions to adopt what are false and delusional beliefs." The specific allegation brought against Hamm is that “Between approximately July 2018 and March 2021, you made discriminatory and derogatory statements regarding transgender people, while identifying yourself as a nurse or nurse educator. These statements were made across various online platforms, including but not limited to, podcasts, videos, published writings and social media.” Hamm is defending her actions before the Panel of the Discipline Committee of the British Columbia College of Nurses and Midwives (BCCNM). The BCCNM’s Inquiry Committee states, “This conduct is contrary to one or more of the following Professional Standards: the Responsibility and Accountability Professional Standard, the Client–Focused Provision of Service Professional Standard and the Ethical Practice Professional Standard. This conduct also constitutes unprofessional conduct, or breach of the Act or bylaws, under s.39 (1) of the Act.” Having reviewed these standards, it isn’t obvious to me which one or more Hamm violated, but that isn’t at all surprising. Professional standards are often vague and open to interpretation, with expectations that are implied rather than explicitly stated. This allows panels and investigators the ability to read into the standards their own interpretations. The allegation does not concern Hamm’s treatment of her clients. The issue is her social media posts, which include Hamm referring to transgender women as “men” and suggesting that some men might pose a danger to women and children given access to sex-segregated spaces. Hamm has declared, "Whether or not I agree with certain policies, I limit my advocacy for changing policies to outside of work." The allegation asserts that Hamm did so “while identifying yourself as a nurse or nurse educator”, which implies that had Hamm divorced her social media commentary from her professional identity, she might not have become the target of complaints or discipline. If that is the BCCNM’s position, it suggests that professionals under their authority may publicly express their opinion, or their identity, but not both. Many perceive this case as an effort to censor and suppress certain views in violation of Canada’s fundamental freedom of expression. That’s how Lisa Bildy, one of Hamm’s lawyers, frames the issue. Bildy states, “This case is fundamentally about speech: whether a nurse can publicly debate a topic that is as politically charged as this one; whether she can advocate on her own time for women’s rights to not have intact male bodies in their prisons, changerooms, rape crisis centres, and sports teams, and for care to be taken not to rush children and adolescents into life-altering and permanent changes to their bodies.” Bilby adds, “more broadly, this is a case about two irreconcilable worldviews that have come into conflict, and conflicts are best solved by discussion and debate, not censorship and punishment. The College is tasked with keeping patients safe and regulating the profession in the public interest. But professional misconduct must not be redefined to include speaking unpopular truths. To do so is to undermine the very foundations of liberal democracy.” I like Bildy’s assertions and her conclusion, but Bildy’s appeal seems to presume that most people want to preserve the foundations of liberal democracy. The reality is that growing numbers want to destroy those foundations, and many others have been cowed into letting that happen. The foundations of a liberal democracy were laid down by political philosophers like John Locke and John Stuart Mill. In On Liberty, Mill argued that free speech enables society to detect errors and address them, and that even misinformation brings a benefit to society because, when those errors are allowed to be addressed through public discourse, what emerges is a “clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.” President Thomas Jefferson, in his 1st inaugural address, said “Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” One of the greatest attacks against the liberal democracy paradigm came by way of Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse laid the intellectual foundation for the 1960s counterculture with his 1955 book Eros and Civilization. His scholarship was consumed by radical intellectuals and political activists during the 60s and 70s, and the media dubbed him the “Father of the New Left”. He urged on the 60s sexual revolution and is often credited with coining the slogan “Make Love, Not War.” In 1965, Marcuse wrote the essay “Repressive Tolerance”, which offers a justification for selectively suppressing freedom of speech. The logic Marcuse presents is a justification of sorts for “political correctness”. This isn’t a term that he used, but it is what Marcuse promotes as the remedy for what he sees as a failure of our liberal democracy. Political correctness has become a powerful weapon in the arsenal of the “progressive”, used to shut down voices of dissent and to shame those they regard as the opposition – who are mostly conservatives. Its advocates often believe they’re helping to liberate people, but in employing words like “tolerance”, “respect”, “diversity” and “inclusion”, these advocates mostly ignore what these words mean. They’ll mandate that people be sensitive to the feelings of others as they advocate for “kindness”, but political correctness is not kind, and it shows no sensitivity towards the feelings of those oppressed by it. Political correctness has only one tool to compel the kind of behavior and speech that it imposes upon everyone – fear. Its goal is to make the price of voicing dissent too high (lost friends, lost wages, lost careers, etc.). Marcuse wrote at a time when most of the society leaned towards capitalism and Christian conservatism. He began his essay with his conclusion that “the realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed.” In other words, society must prohibit expressions that reinforce the dominant biases of the culture and empower voices traditionally outlawed or suppressed. Marcuse argued that indiscriminate tolerance “refrains from taking sides--but in doing so it actually protects the already established machinery of discrimination.” Marcuse’s rejection of this classic liberal conception of liberty hinged on his belief that modern society undermined man’s capacity to reason. Mill had placed an important condition on his doctrine of liberty: it applied only to “human beings in the maturity of their faculties.” People had to be “capable of being improved by free and equal discussion.” Marcuse contended that people lacked the necessary maturity, that discussions could not be free and equal because of the influences of dominating societal institutions. Conservative and capitalist beliefs were reinforced by the media, by education, by courts, and by churches, so an indiscriminate tolerance would only serve to repress various minorities and uphold the status quo. Marcuse regarded the Right as a party of aggression and hate; he viewed the Left as a movement for peace and for humanity. He argued that intolerance of the Right was often justifiable, and that intolerance could go beyond mere attempts to censure and could include acts of violence. For Marcuse, “Liberating tolerance … would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.” In a 1968 postscript to his essay, Marcuse said, “I suggested … the practice of discriminating tolerance in an inverse direction, as a means of shifting the balance between Right and Left by restraining the liberty of the Right, thus counteracting the pervasive inequality of freedom … and strengthening the oppressed against the oppressors.” I would like those advocating this sort of “liberating tolerance” to answer two simple questions: 1) How many acts of oppression can one commit before one becomes the oppressor? 2) How many acts of oppression against the oppressor does it take before the oppressor becomes oppressed? The answers to these questions matter a great deal. Is Amy Eileen Hamm part of the empowered majority fighting to cruelly oppress a minority, or is she on the side that’s currently being oppressed? And if it is the former, why is she facing severe repercussions for advocating opinions that those in power don’t want to hear? What’s happening to Amy Eileen Hamm isn’t an aberration. This sort of oppression is happening more than most people realize. Professional bodies are increasingly restricting what views are permitted by the professionals they govern. Moreover, most victims of this sort of censorship are not even allowed to publicly discuss what’s being done to them without essentially ensuring the loss of their jobs and their licenses. The few who do speak up have their careers destroyed. The rest of the profession sees this, and the message is received - comply or be next. Marcuse wrote in his day that “no power, no authority, no government exists which would translate liberating tolerance into practice”. Today there are plenty of powers, authorities, and governments willing to censor the Right in what is clearly a partisan effort to push a “progressive” agenda that appears increasingly regressive in nature. Marcuse’s writings concerned his perceptions of a world that ceased to exist some time ago, and I don’t believe Marcuse perceived things accurately even in his day. I think any suggestion that the Left is for peace and for humanity is a little naïve, and categorically dismissing one’s ideological opponents as hateful is – well – hateful. Society was more stable and homogenous back in the day, but today, everything is turmoil. There isn’t a majority opinion on hardly any issue. Instead, we have polarized viewpoints with the majority being rather indifferent to the question and the answers being offered by either side. Since the publishing of “Repressive Tolerance”, the welfare state was created and expanded past what present generations can afford, Jim Crow era segregation ended, and women have made enormous gains over time, as have the LGBTQ+. These gains didn’t require a “repressive tolerance” of the kind Marcuse advocated. The architects of these movements mostly won by appealing to our better angels, and by exploiting one of the greatest and most challenging rights that Western liberalism has ever given to an oppressed population – the ability to speak and be heard. Amy Eileen Hamm deserves that same right. Rob Bogunovic serves as the editor at The Rubicon If you like our content, please consider subscribing and supporting our efforts.

Remembrance Day isn’t a Hallmark Holiday or paid day off to do whatever we please. We set aside November 11th to remember and honour the brave men and women who gave their lives in the defense of our Rights and Freedoms. Remembrance Day is also a day (not “the” day) to honour those men and women who survived the horrors of war, came home, and picked up their lives where they left off years before. Expressing our gratitude for their sacrifice is a duty to these brave souls. Attending your local Remembrance Day service is the bare minimum we must do, rain or shine. They suffered so much worse and for far longer than one hour one day a year. Our current culture of entitlement is the polar opposite of what these brave men and woman fought for. You are not entitled to anything other than to breath air and die. You are not entitled to a job. You must earn that. You’re not entitled to a home. You must pay for that. You’re not entitled to the contents of someone else’s wallet, also known as government welfare or Universal Basic Income. Not even if politicians tell you otherwise. Someone must work to earn the money so the government can take it from them and give it to you. You’re not entitled to anything just because you’re alive. Brave men and women fought in wars, conflicts and other “peacekeeping actions” to defend our Rights and Freedoms, not our overblown sense of entitlement. So, if you can find it within your heart, take 60 minutes out of your life to express gratitude to our veterans. On November 11th, step out of your home and your comfort zone and go to your local Remembrance Day Ceremony. Honour them. Then, when the service is over, do this one simple thing. Walk up to a veteran, put out your hand in an expression of fellowship and say, “Thank You.” That’s it. Nothing outrageous. Nothing extravagant. Just. “Thank You.” It’s hard to believe today, but that total stranger believed it was their duty to serve and protect YOUR rights and freedoms. Thanking one of these veterans is the very least you can do in light of their sacrifice. If you want to REALLY go out of your way, do the same thing tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after that, too. Go to your local Legion or anywhere else you can find a veteran. Thank them. Buy them a coffee or a drink. Buy them dinner. Talk with them or sit in silence with them, whichever they prefer. That’s what honouring someone is… doing whatever it is they would have you do for them. Christopher di Armani strives to awaken the passion for freedom and liberty that exists inside every person. It is this passion that motivates him in every aspect of his life. He is a communications professional with 50 published books and multiple successful election campaigns (as communications director) to his credit. You can reach Christopher at ChristopherDiArmani.org

In 2017 Michael Knowles “wrote” Reasons To Vote For Democrats, a book with no words that became a best seller. In a homage to that brilliant bit of trollery, I’ve sometimes contemplated “writing” Canadian Politics For Dummies. Every page would have in big bold letters the same two words: VOTE LIBERAL. I doubt the For Dummies franchise would let me get away with it, and I hesitate to label all Liberal voters as dummies, but I’m reasonably confident that it would become a Canadian best seller and recent events in Ottawa have renewed my interest in the idea. “Elect more Liberals” was the astoundingly stupid advice a Liberal Minister recently gave to those who don’t want to pay the Liberal carbon tax. On October 29, 2023, Canada’s Minister of Rural Economic Development, Gudie Hutchings, was being interviewed by CTV’s Vassy Kapelos. The topic was the new carbon carve-out policies introduced by Trudeau’s Liberals, which disproportionately benefit Atlantic Canada. Kapelos asked, “Is your government open to … looking at other carve-outs for other types of home heating in the future?” Hutchings answered, “That’s a discussion that we’ll have to have down the road. We know that this one is working, but I can tell you the Atlantic caucus was vocal with what they’ve heard from their constituents and perhaps they need to elect more Liberals on the Prairies so that we can have that conversation as well.” Kapelos responded, “With respect, Minister, does that mean because there aren’t Liberals in the Prairies right now representing around the caucus or around the cabinet table that the people of Alberta will have to live a more unaffordable life than the people in Atlantic Canada? Does that seem fair?” Hutchings was given the chance to correct the record, but she didn’t. The next day Pierre Poilievre rose in the House of Commons and skewered the Liberals for their new carbon carve-out policy and the Minister’s slip-up. He began his monologue, “I was moments away from holding a massive thousand-person rally of common-sense Nova Scotians – to axe the tax. The Prime Minister heard the news. He was huddled up in a ball in the fetal position, sweating bullets as Liberal MPs pounded on his office door asking for some relief – but only some relief came, Mr. Speaker. Not for everyone everywhere.” Then he asked, “Will I need to hold massive axe the tax rallies in every Liberal riding to finally do away with the tax?” Next Poilievre emphasized how Trudeau’s “Rural Affairs Minister said that other Canadians could have had the same pause but for the fact that they didn’t elect Liberals. Apparently, we’re going to have different tax rates in different constituencies depending on how people vote.” He then asked, “Why is it, Mr. Speaker, that Liberal MPs in Thunder Bay, North Bay, Sudbury, Sault Ste. Marie, other freezing cold communities, are not getting the same break? Is it because their local Liberal MP is utterly useless?” Poilievre followed this by saying, “When the Liberal’s Rural Affairs Minister says that if Canadians want a pause from the carbon tax they need to elect a local Liberal MP, she’s got it exactly wrong. What they need to do is elect a common-sense Conservative government that will axe the tax entirely. This in not only hurting the pocketbook of Canadians; they’re forcing seniors to choose between eating and heating. Now Saskatchewan, Alberta, B.C., and Ontario are asking for similar breaks. In fact, the Saskatchewan government is refusing to collect the tax on the utility.” Then he asked, “Does the Prime Minister realize that he is not only bankrupting Canadians and leaving them in the cold, he's actually dividing our country?” If you’re wondering why I don’t include Liberal answers to these questions, it is because these House of Commons exchanges are called Question Periods. Questions get asked; they rarely get answered. That’s why the opposition gets away with asking such loaded questions as “Does the Prime Minister realize … ?” A “yes” accepts the premise, and a “no” paints Trudeau as oblivious. Poilievre might as well ask whether the Prime Minister still beats his wife. The backlash to this carbon carve-out appears to have caught the Liberals off-guard, which is understandable. This isn’t even the first carbon carve-out the Liberals have allowed. While other provinces are paying 14 cents per litre, Quebec charges 10 cents. By 2030, the Liberal plan has Canadians paying 37 cents per litre, which will be 14 cents more than what Quebeckers will be made to pay. I don’t begrudge the fact that Quebec pays less. Quebec’s emissions per capita are the lowest in Canada, being half the national average. They also started paying in 2007, long before Trudeau forced a carbon tax upon other provinces. Quebec speaks to a reality that Liberals have long ignored: Canada is a diverse nation, and a one size fits all approach to carbon emissions isn’t going to work well because one size doesn’t fit all. People who use home heating oil are hurting more than those who heat using natural gas or heat pumps, so Liberals are right to address this inequality – but they should admit that they created this inequality in the first place. On an issue like this, I think today’s Liberals could learn a thing or two by studying our longest serving Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King. In 1930 King made comments similar to those by Gudie Hutchings. These comments came at a time when many Canadians were struggling. Premiers were facing fiscal challenges, and they were looking to Ottawa to help them out. Most of the premiers, seven-of-nine, were Tories. The Prime Minister was a Liberal. William Lyon Mackenzie King held the office as Prime Minister for an unparalleled twenty-two years. His temperament was very different than our current Prime Minister. King was an introvert who never married. He was a cautious, pragmatic, ambiguous individual who was an adroit manager of the affairs of the nation. The Socialist Poet F.R. Scott dedicated one of his most famous poems to King. The closing stanzas of W.L.M.K. proclaim: He seemed to be in the centre Because we had no centre, No vision To pierce the smoke-screen of his politics. Truly he will be remembered Wherever men honour ingenuity, Ambiguity, inactivity, and political longevity. Let us raise up a temple To the cult of mediocrity, Do nothing by halves Which can be done by quarters. King delivered what became known as the Five Cent Speech on April 3, 1930. The Prime Minister was speaking without the benefit of notes while addressing a growing unemployment crisis. He thought Conservative premiers were simply grandstanding on the issue – and some of that was going on. King told the House-of-Commons, “With respect to giving money out of the federal treasury to any Tory government in this country for these unemployment purposes, with those governments situated as they are today with policies diametrically opposed to those of this government, I would not give them a five-cent piece.” In his diary the next day, King wrote, “The slip I made yesterday. I am persuaded it was such, was in not seeing the single remark would be taken out of its context and misrepresented and the rest of the speech would go by the boards. I am sorry for this. Also, as Prime Minister, speaking in House of Commons, I went perhaps too far.” In Canadian History For Dummies, Will Ferguson wrote that “Mackenzie King was a master of vague language, but in a rash moment he had declared that he wouldn’t give ‘a five-cent piece’ of relief money to any province with a Tory government. The new leader of the Conservative Party, R.B. (Richard Bedford) Bennett pounced on King’s threat as an example of how corrupt and uncaring the Liberals had become”. Canadians went to the polls four months later, and the Liberal government was defeated. However, losing was the best result possible for King and his party. Conservatives inherited the insurmountable challenges brought upon the nation by the Great Depression, the next five years being among the darkest Canada has ever experienced. People tend to blame the party-in-power for their misery, so they blamed R.B. Bennett, and in 1935 King and his Liberals were returned to power with the strongest majority government Canada had yet seen. Liberals would win five straight Federal elections – winning each by huge margins. One of the keys to King’s political longevity is encapsulated in one of his most famous quotes: “Far more has been accomplished for the welfare and progress of mankind by preventing bad actions than by doing good ones.” King understood that sometimes the best policy was for the government to get out of the way. When it comes to carbon policies, Canadian premiers have been asking the Liberals to get out of the way, but Liberals haven’t been very receptive to that message. Which brings me to the most egregious thing I’ve heard during the climate debate between Liberals and Conservatives. It wasn’t that comment by Gudie Hutchings – as crass as hers was. This comment mostly got missed in the mess. In that October 30th skewering of Liberals by Pierre Poilievre, Karina Gould rose to “answer” him, and said, “Our climate policy has resulted in 53 megatons being removed. That’s the equivalent of 11 million cars.” Gould is the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons, one of the most prominent positions in Parliament. Her boast is meant to trick Canadians into believing that Canada’s carbon tax is working, but Liberals are merely playing a game with statistics. Gould is comparing pre-Covid years to post-Covid years. She credits Liberal policies, not the lingering impacts of lockdowns and the global pandemic. Moreover, this reduction is reflective of a general trend towards decarbonization that has been reducing per capita carbon emissions in most Western jurisdictions for twenty years. Gould dismisses all the work that has been done by provincial legislatures, city councils, industrial leaders, and concerned Canadians sea-to-sea. The 53 megatons removed was not the result of Liberal efforts only, yet Gould takes full credit on behalf of her party. Furthermore, this reduction might well have been despite the Liberal’s carbon pricing efforts, not because of them. Our closest trading partner is the United States, and from 2015 through to 2020 the United States saw significantly greater reductions in their total CO2 emissions. President Trump was not even pushing an aggressive anti-carbon agenda, yet the United States reduced their number by 15.5%, which was almost twice Canada’s 8.1%. The United Kingdom, meanwhile, cut their number by almost 30%. Canada has the worst reduction rate in the G7. In terms of carbon reduction, Canada hasn’t done particularly well. The Liberals seem to assume that us dummies wouldn’t notice. Rob Bogunovic serves as the editor at The Rubicon If you like our content, please consider subscribing and supporting our efforts.

In 1993 Paul Hawken published his ground-breaking book, The Ecology of Commerce (1993), introducing the term “the death of birth” as simply the effect of humanity causing the extinction of life on earth. The phrase captures the finality of the event – there is no coming back from extinction. Recent years have produced headlines regarding a sixth mass-extinction event that is happening faster than expected and that is entirely our fault. We are told the Earth might lose one million species in the coming decades, with a third of all species going extinct by 2070, or maybe its half of all species going extinct by 2050. These are all very alarming claims. The question is, how credible are such headlines? In 2007, Ahmed Djoghlaf, the Executive Secretary of the U.N.’s Convention on Biological Diversity, said that “We are indeed experiencing the greatest wave of extinctions since the disappearance of the dinosaurs. Extinction rates are rising by a factor of up to 1,000 above natural rates. Every hour, three species disappear. Every day, up to 150 species are lost. Every year, between 18,000 and 55,000 species become extinct. The cause: human activities.” Djoghlaf’s math doesn’t make much sense. If we are losing 3 species an hour, then we’d be losing 72 a day, which is less than the 150 claimed and more than the 18,000 low end estimation for the year. Furthermore, if true, one might expect that we could identify thousands of plants and animals known to have gone extinct in the last few decades, yet we can’t. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) keeps a list of species known to have become extinct since the year 1500. In 2010 it listed 842 animal and plant species (mostly animal). If 150 species are being lost every day, why can we only list 842 species having gone extinct in the last 510 years? Why this huge discrepancy between numbers that are known and numbers that are claimed? The reason is actually very simple: no one knows how many species exist, and since no one knows, activist voices can claim whatever they want regarding the numbers and be confident that they’ll not be proven wrong. Consider the case of entomologist Terry Erwin, who in 1971 fogged the canopies of 19 Luehea seemannii trees in Panama. From these 19 trees Erwin collected 1,200 species of beetles, 80% of which were previously undiscovered. Erwin’s work demonstrated that the vast majority of insect species were yet to be discovered. From 19 trees in Panama, Erwin managed to collect more species of beetles than the total number of species appearing on IUCN’s extinction list. We don’t know if there are 2.5 million species on the Earth, or 100 million. The median estimate is about 8.7 million. We’ve only identified approximately 2.1 million, and claims like Djoghlaf’s mostly concern species going extinct before they could be identified. Proving that an extinction has occurred is almost impossible when it has not yet been demonstrated that the species even existed. The list of known species is dominated by insects, though there is speculation that fungi species number in the millions, and these numbers don’t include about a trillion species of microbes. When Djoghlaf states that extinction rates are up to 1,000 above natural rates, it begs the question: what are the natural rates? Here again there is a lot of conjecture and speculation. The basic estimate is that 1 species per million goes extinct every year. If there are 8.7 million species, that would mean 87 would go extinct in a decade. A rate one thousand times that would produce 87,000 extinctions in a decade – which would constitute a loss of 1% of the total. By that estimate, we might speculate that we’ll lose 3% or less of the total number of species by the year 2050, which is alarming – but not nearly as alarming as claims that we’ll lose half. And we should remember that Djoghlaf said the rate was up to 1000. It could be a lot lower. One recent study reports that the extinction rate is only “35 times higher than expected background rates prevailing in the last million years under the absence of human impacts”. This study was conducted by Gerardo Ceballos and Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich is a neo-Malthusian who is best known for his 1968 book The Population Bomb, which advanced a litany of alarmist predictions that mostly failed to materialize. On the First Earth Day (1970), Ehrlich warned that by 1980 “all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish." Then in 1980 Ehrlich declared, “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” The 2023 study by Ceballos and Ehrlich is meant to emphasis the gravity of the situation. so it bears the ominous title: “Mutilation of the tree of life via mass extinction of animal genera”. They examined 5,400 genera (one level above a species) of land-dwelling vertebrate animals, which encompassed 34,600 species. 73 of the 5,400 genera had become extinct since 1500. That represents a loss of 1.4% in 523 years. The study also reveals that 48% of species are seeing declines in their numbers, while 49% of populations are stable and 3% are increasing. The paper calls this a “biological annihilation”. Ceballos declared, “As scientists, we have to be careful not to be alarmist”, which makes me wonder why he chose to work with Paul Ehrlich. Naturally, the study calls for “Immediate political, economic, and social efforts of an unprecedented scale”. Ceballos and Ehrlich found an extinction rate 35 times higher than the expected background rate, which is very problematic to Djoghlaf’s math. If true, and if there are approximately 8.7 million species, and if the background rate is one species per million per year, it would mean that 305 species go extinct every year, not 18,000 to 55,000. However, this is all just speculative. No one knows the true number. And please don’t interpret any of this as suggesting that we don’t have a problem when it comes to species extinction. We clearly do, but the scope and scale of that problem is quite possibly being massively overstated by activist scientists and U.N. officials. The Millenium Ecosystem Assessment gives us some insight into the overall impact that we have had upon the Earth’s biomes. From 2001 to 2005, at the invitation of the United Nations, 1,360 experts participated in the Assessment, and their report popularized the term “ecosystem services”. The Assessment predicted tough days ahead for planet Earth. According to their assessment, “over the past 50 years, humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel. This has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth.” The Assessment’s conclusion was that we are depleting the Earth’s natural capital. Based on criteria for assessing threats of extinction (as utilized by the IUCN), some 14% of bird species, and 25% of mammals, are currently threatened with extinction. In addition, 40% of amphibians are threatened with extinction. Aquatic organisms (including both marine and freshwater) have not been tracked to the same degree as terrestrial ones, and this may mask similarly alarming threats of aquatic extinction. The Assessment also predicts that 10-20% of current grassland and forestland is projected to be converted to other uses by 2050, mostly due to the expansion of agriculture. This will result in habitat loss. Only 4 of the 24 ecosystem services examined in this assessment were found to be enhanced: crops, livestock, aquaculture, and carbon sequestration. In contrast, 15 other services were found to be degraded, including capture fisheries, timber production, water supply, waste treatment and detoxification, water purification, natural hazard protection, regulation of air quality, regulation of regional and local climate, and regulation of soil erosion. We have cultivated large swaths of the globe, approximately 40% of the total landmass. The effect has been a loss of genetic diversity, especially among domesticated plants (crops) and animals (livestock).The Earth’s population has increased by 122% since 1970, so more land has been cultivated. Agriculture accounts for about 90% of global deforestation and consumes 70% of the Earth’s freshwater. The good news is the area of cultivated lands has only increased by 8% during this period, and the world has seen a 25% increase in food production / person, with grain yields per hectare rising by 2/3rds. Farmers have also reduced their dependency on pesticides. Moreover, the world’s population growth rate has slowed from over 2% in 1970 to under 1% today. Humanity has never possessed such a capacity to influence nature as we do today, but that increased capacity also comes with increased awareness and a growing desire to preserve and restore natural habitats. In his famous 2009 commencement address, Paul Hawken declared, “When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on Earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this Earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse.” Things are bad, but they probably aren’t as bad as you’ve been led to believe, and there is every reason to believe that things will get better. Rob Bogunovic serves as the editor at The Rubicon If you like our content, please consider subscribing and supporting our efforts.

On October 25, 2023, Ben Shapiro opened his show by declaring, “Yesterday the secretary-general of the United Nations, António Guterres, took the floor of the United Nations to blame Israel for the murder of 1,500 of its own citizens and the kidnapping of another 200 plus.” After playing a short clip of Guterres speaking, Shapiro exclaimed, “This is, simply put, Jew hatred. Full stop! Jew hatred. It is apology for terrorism.” I’ve listened to Ben Shapiro on-and-off for years and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so unhinged. I think his reaction speaks to the psychological toll that this conflict is exerting on those deeply invested in one side or the other, and I think it demonstrates a problem with perception – though maybe its my perception that is the problem. António Guterres delivered a short speech addressing the Gaza conflict and the growing humanitarian crisis that is emerging in the region. Guterres opened by saying, “The situation in the Middle East is growing more dire by the hour. The war in Gaza is raging and risks spiralling throughout the region. Divisions are splintering societies. Tensions threaten to boil over.” Guterres then said, “At a crucial moment like this, it is vital to be clear on principles -- starting with the fundamental principle of respecting and protecting civilians. I have condemned unequivocally the horrifying and unprecedented 7 October acts of terror by Hamas in Israel. Nothing can justify the deliberate killing, injuring and kidnapping of civilians – or the launching of rockets against civilian targets. All hostages must be treated humanely and released immediately and without conditions. I respectfully note the presence among us of members of their families.” Then Guterres said, “It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.” Guterres then stated, “But the grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas. And those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.” Guterres was presenting a principled position that urged the protection of civilians and the liberation of hostages. He did not excuse or make apologies for Hamas, and what he declared regarding the Palestinian position seems reasonably accurate. They have been displaced. They have been plagued by violence. Their economy has been stifled, and their hopes for a political solution has been vanishing. They have suffered a suffocating occupation for roughly 56 years – approximately 19 years under Egyptian and Jordian rule prior to the Six Day War (1967), and approximately 37 years following that conflict. The Israeli occupation ended with the withdrawal of Israelis personnel in 2005, but by that time Hamas had grown into a very powerful and dangerous political entity in the Gaza. The only objectionable aspect of this analysis was Guterres’ statement that Palestinians “have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements”. Some may protest that the land in question doesn’t belong to the Palestinians. However, Guterres is succinctly articulating a long-held UN position regarding the settlements. Guterres goes on to call for all parties to exercise “care in the conduct of military operations to spare civilians”, to “uphold and respect their obligations under international humanitarian law”, and he insisted that a two-State solution remains “the only realistic foundation for a true peace and stability”. He stated, “Israelis must see their legitimate needs for security materialized, and Palestinians must see their legitimate aspirations for an independent State realized, in line with United Nations resolutions, international law and previous agreements.” As regards Hamas’ strategy of using civilians as human shields and the bombardment of the Gaza by Israeli forces, Guterres declared, “The protection of civilians is paramount in any armed conflict. Protecting civilians can never mean using them as human shields. Protecting civilians does not mean ordering more than one million people to evacuate to the south, where there is no shelter, no food, no water, no medicine and no fuel, and then continuing to bomb the south itself.” He had already warned that the UN was running out of food and fuel, stating that “The people of Gaza need continuous aid delivery at a level that corresponds to the enormous needs.” Guterres closes by saying, “Polarization and dehumanization are being fueled by a tsunami of disinformation. We must stand up to the forces of antisemitism, anti-Muslim bigotry and all forms of hate … I appeal to all to pull back from the brink before the violence claims even more lives and spreads even farther.” The title of the Ben Shapiro episode was “F*** The United Nations”, and Shapiro’s criticism mostly concerned the organization. Much of Shapiro’s criticism seems valid. The organization does appear to target Israel with wildly disproportionate condemnations in comparison to the rest of the world and all its bad actors. There are over fifty Muslim majority countries that lobby hard against the one existing Jewish-majority state. Abba Eban, a diplomat who was the first permanent representative of Israel to the United Nations, once quipped, “If Algeria introduced a resolution that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions.” Israelis have every reason to be dubious regarding the United Nations, but Shapiro’s opening diatribe isn’t addressing this history. He’s addressing a speech delivered by one man. The speech takes neither side, presents a fair analysis, and articulates clear principles. Again, maybe there’s something I’m missing. Guterres declared that a two-state solution is “the only realistic foundation for a true peace and stability”. The sad truth is that he’s probably right, and it’s a sad truth because it’s incredibly unlikely. Numerous peace summits have been held over the years, yet no viable peace plan has ever emerged. Every peace attempt has hit certain seemingly insurmountable hurdles. For one, they have never been able to settle who shall control Jerusalem. Israel has named Jerusalem, whole and undivided, as their capital, but Palestinians insist on East Jerusalem being the capital of any sovereign Palestinian state. Jerusalem is the site of the Temple Mount, upon which the First Temple and the Second Temple once stood. The Temple Mount includes the Western Wall (one of the holiest sites for Jews), the Al-Aqsa Mosque (the third holiest site in Islam), and the Dome of the Rock. Neither side trusts the other with the protection of these sacred sites. Another hurdle is the demand for a right of return for Palestinian exiles. Israel has never offered more than a limited return (a few hundred thousand), while Palestinians want a full right of return (potentially millions). Security concerns involved in a full right of return are simply too many for Israel to ignore. In 2000, U.S. President Bill Clinton hosted the Camp David Summit, and during the talks Ehud Barak (the Israeli PM) offered a plan for the establishment of a Palestinian state, but Yasser Arafat rejected the offer and ordered an Intifada – so an effort at peace ended with a wave of violence, and Israel began construction of the Israeli West Bank barrier that kept them safe right up until the moment it didn’t. Israel has been waging a war on terror for decades, yet despite the massive technological advantage they possess and the finest efforts of their soldiers and intelligence officers, it seems that victory in that war has never been further out-of-reach. Nor is this a problem unique to Israel. While I believe Israel has the right to defend itself against foreign threats and terrorism, I’d also caution Israel to consider lessons that ought to be learn regarding America’s recent Global War on Terror. On September 11th, 2001, al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial jets, and before the day was over, New York’s World Trade Center was in ruins, the Pentagon was struck, and all commercial flights in the United States were grounded. 9/11 was the worst terrorist attack in world history, with 2,996 people killed and more than 6,000 wounded. In the wake of 9/11, President George W. Bush proclaimed a “Global War on Terror”, targeting regimes his government labeled the “Axis of Evil”, and the United States went to war with two nations: Afghanistan (whose Taliban government was shielding al-Qaeda leaders), and Iraq. The Afghanistan War began in 2001, lasted two decades, and claimed the lives of almost 100,000 people, including 2,324 U.S. military personnel, 2,324 U.S. contractors, and 1,144 allied soldiers (including 158 Canadians). The war cost the United States $2.3 trillion, and ended with a victory for the Taliban. The Iraq War began in 2003 with a “shock and awe” campaign that quickly overwhelmed the Iraqi army. Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, was captured (he was executed three years later), but the occupation proved more difficult than the invasion. A power vacuum in the region created insurgency movements and an escalation of sectarian violence between Shias and Sunnis. The war resulted in approximately 500,000 deaths, including almost 4,500 American soldiers. The first seven years of the war cost the United States $3 trillion dollars, and as American forces withdrew in 2011, Syria’s Civil War began. In 2014 ISIS (Jihadi terrorists) captured Mosul from Iraqi forces, acquiring a vast quantity of American weaponry and causing the near collapse of the Iraqi government. The battle against ISIS then prompted a renewal of US military action in Iraq in 2014. While no one can say for sure what the consequence would have been had there not been a Global War on Terror, there is good reason to believe that U.S. counterterrorism costs more lives than it saves, costs more American lives than it saves, and creates more problems than it solves. It is estimated that this war on terror has cost the global economy more than $8 trillion, has caused 900,000 deaths while creating millions of refugees, and it may be having the exact opposite effect as was intended. Refugee camps and failed states create conditions that produce terrorists. Admittedly, Israel’s calculations differ considerably from those of other Western nations, including the United States. For most Westerners the actual threat of terrorism is objectively small. Israel is surrounded by potential enemies, many who have sworn to obliterate her completely. The Arab League members who attacked Israel in 1948 have a combined population exceeding 220 million, and Iran (who funds Hezbollah) has 87 million citizens. For Israel, this is an existential crisis, but Israel can’t kill their way to peace. Rob Bogunovic serves as the editor at The Rubicon If you like our content, please consider subscribing and supporting our efforts.