Jamie Sarkonak: The rake of diaspora politics hits Nate Erskine-Smith in the face

2026/05/15 Leave a comment

One view is that by allowing Permanent Residents to participate in candidate selection, political parties are facilitation overall integration. In discussions I have had on political representation benchmarks, some have maintained that the overall benchmark should be the number of both citizens and Permanent Residents, rather than citizens only. I favour citizens only and Sarkonak is correct to note the pandering nature and related electoral strategies:

…Well, we’ll see how the investigation goes. Already, some onlookers are gloating, seeing Erskine-Smith’s loss as a strike of karmic justice.

Erskine-Smith was absolutely one of them. He participated in Bangladeshi flag-raisings at city hall; he dressed up in the cultural garb. When he talks about immigration, he speaks in economic terms, not cultural terms. He speaks of the tide of asylum seekers as if they’re an inevitable force of nature, and of his desire to “regularize” the status of people who are in Canada illegally — a point so radical that even the CEO of the Century Initiative told him it’s not worth talking about.

But the conservatives out there should limit their gloating and use the moment to get their own house in order. They engage in diaspora politics all the same.

Without getting into any specific ridings, it’s not unusual for nomination races to be co-opted by diaspora interests. Conservative or Liberal.

Just as Liberals allow non-citizens to vote in their nominations, Conservatives do, too. When some members of the party sought to end the practice of allowing permanent residents to participate in nomination votes, they were shut down by the rest. This is a clear vector for foreign interference.

If individual parties can’t be trusted to ensure that the gears of democracy are turned by citizens only, then their hands should be forced by legislation. And at a higher level, they need to learn that diaspora pandering is like walking through a field of rakes. It might not whack you in the face today, but there’s always a risk it will — just ask Erskine-Smith.

Source: Jamie Sarkonak: The rake of diaspora politics hits Nate Erskine-Smith in the face

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Jamie Sarkonak: Progressive judge spares violent loan shark criminal record to avoid deportation

2026/05/12 Leave a comment

Part of her ongoing series:

…Mandhane treated a case of loan-shark violence by a foreigner against a petite, young woman in a dark street as if it were a toy-sharing dispute between children at a daycare. Every day, courts see a good number of low-stakes, wrong-place-at-wrong-time cases where a conditional discharge is appropriate; this was absolutely not one of them.

The suitable result would have been jail, or at least house arrest or probation. That’s what you see when crime is committed in the course of debt collection: for example, a man in Newfoundland was sentenced to one year in jail in 2022 for participating in a group break-in during which “PAY THE DEBT” was written on the victim’s walls (among other acts of vandalism) and during which he stole some cannabis from the house; the organized crime factor worsened his case, but he was a young, first-time offender like E.A., and he didn’t physically attack anyone. He was a citizen though, and he was evidently not before a soft judge, resulting in a much more appropriate sentence.

“But what stings most about E.A.’s case is the Crown prosecutor’s failure to pursue a proper punishment. No one at court that day stood up for the public interest — not even the guy whose job was specifically that.

This can change, but it’s going to take Ontario’s attorney general toughening up his prosecutions, Parliament prohibiting immigration status from being considered in sentencing, and people making sure that judges know when their decisions bring the administration of justice into disrepute. If we tolerate authorities who do everything they can to keep violent non-citizen rulebreakers in Canada, it’s going to keep happening.

Source: Jamie Sarkonak: Progressive judge spares violent loan shark criminal record to avoid deportation

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Jamie Sarkonak: Canada keeps asking non-citizen criminals to stop. They obviously don’t

2026/04/27 Leave a comment

These policies provide fodder for anti-immigration attitudes and diminish trust in government policies and practices:

…Toothless warnings are only part of why Canada has a reputation for nonchalance towards crime. Non-citizens can also receive sentence discounts to lessen their chances of deportation in some cases, and the deportation process offers many opportunities for criminals to challenge, appeal and delay. The entire system tells outsiders that respect for our rules is optional, and that we’ll do what we can to excuse their bad behaviour. While they enjoy their third, fourth and fifth chances, we have to endure watching our once-high-trust society erode away.

While we don’t have a detailed breakdown of how many stern warning letters have been sent, and how many went ignored by people who went on to commit more crime, we ought to stop the practice entirely. The immigration system isn’t a rehab; it’s a filter that should be working to keep Canadians safe.

Source: Jamie Sarkonak: Canada keeps asking non-citizen criminals to stop. They obviously don’t

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Jamie Sarkonak: The Liberal state always wins

2026/04/20 Leave a comment

Arguing for purges and inspired by Orban and Trump. Countering one set of excesses by a reverse set of excesses not helpful:

…It can be overcome, but that starts close to home, with provincial governments actively taking back what is rightfully theirs and installing onside allies — not thoughtless centrist donors who fear alienation from their Liberal-voting friends more than they want to win. It takes a careful and concerted effort to take back professional schools, not by defunding them, but by funding academic chairs to break the monoculture, provide role models to onside students, and provide alternative experts to lean on during contentious policy debates. The federal party can’t do much of this, but it can certainly build relationships with onside provinces to make it happen — or hammer them for failing to live up to their responsibility.

It means firing every activist and replacing every Liberal appointee at the top of any public department, every member of a public board, and abolishing those that exist only to prop up Liberal ideology. That means abandoning gender and anti-racism initiatives, something that even Alberta and Ontario struggle to do.

At this point, defund-everything libertarianism is a gambling strategy: it puts all the movement’s eggs into the basket that is the party’s election platform, and takes a crisis in the Liberal party to have any viability at all. In the off-chance it does result in victory, it is incapable of perpetuating itself.

Aimless tax and budget cuts don’t build movements or develop the careers of up-and-comers; they actually impede your future performance by depriving you of the necessary pipeline of manpower required to run complex institutions for years to come. “Just go to the private sector” doesn’t work, by the way, when the major corporations and companies have some kind of Liberal dependency, which is true for all the major consulting firms, law firms, pipeline companies and banks.

The wisdom that institutional control is the easy path to victory was internalized by the Liberals long ago. It’s time Conservatives started thinking the same way. It won’t deliver overnight, but that’s what it’s going to take to build a machine that can win in the absence of a catastrophic Liberal mistake. Anything less is just rolling the dice.

Source: Jamie Sarkonak: The Liberal state always wins

The right should not shy away from doing this when they regain power, which is hopefully a matter of when, not if. A government that refuses to stack the deck with its own people is effectively subsidizing a sort of Viet Cong within the state it supposedly heads. As the Americans learned painfully in the Vietnam War, merely shrinking the size of the Viet Cong with napalm did not eliminate the threat. Familiar or friendly and trusted people can be empowered a great deal within the bounds of the law.

Allies should be rewarded, and parallel institutions should supplant or compete with those that already exist. For example, the Conservative government of Stephen Harper made the mistake of not doing more to support the Sun News Network, which might have blossomed into a true conservative institution in the private sector.

§source: Geoff Russ: Orbán gave Conservatives a blueprint for capturing institutions

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Jamie Sarkonak: New Liberal ‘inclusion’ council heralds more division

2026/02/09 Leave a comment

Simplistic and overly biased. Better to bring different groups together than have ongoing separate envoys. Of course, selection of members is key, ideally one wants to find persons from the different groups that are not part of a particular advocacy organization but have visibility and credibility from the group. The Cross Cultural Round Table on Security under the Harper government was relatively useful as while some of the members were tied to specific groups, some were not:

….“It seems that the more reconciliation and diversity the government promotes, the more division we get. Nearly half of the country says it’s “time to move on” from residential schools. Half of Canadians are opposed to new immigration. Half of those born outside of Canada believe the country belongs to Indigenous people. Half of Canadians claim to have witnessed systemic racism. These are all stats from 2025. And then, there’s the general vibe: conversations and comments sections seem to be more racially charged than ever.

The Liberal response to the overdose crisis was to give more drugs to addicts, and it left everyone worse off. On social cohesion, they’re doing something similar: put everyone into boxes and make up reasons to treat some of them better than others, and then wonder how society got so divided.

The answer, which Miller’s committee is unlikely to arrive at, is to drop the agenda of discrimination and start promoting Canadian history — not the abridged version that only focuses on dark parts, enclaves, and the legal victories of progressives. If you want Canadians to feel like they are one people, you need to treat them like it.”

Source: “Jamie Sarkonak: New Liberal ‘inclusion’ council heralds more division”

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Jamie Sarkonak: The federal judge determined to dismantle Canada’s immigration safeguards

2026/01/12 Leave a comment

Judicial appointments matter and have impact. Column would have been more balanced if it had more examples of rejections:

In 2013, Toronto lawyer Avvy Yao-Yao Go described herself as a “loudmouth activist for politicians to contend with.” She was an advocate of chain migration, a former member of the Ontario law society’s equity committee, a vocal critic of journalists and politicians, and once, she even tried to force the government to pay reparations to descendants of Chinese-Canadians impacted by the head tax (after losing one appeal in this process, her organization accused an appeal judge of racism; the complaint was tossed out).

Ideally, she wouldn’t be in charge of waving migrants into the country from a judicial seat. Nevertheless, Go was made a Federal Court judge in 2021 and much of her job is playing immigration gatekeeper. The results are what you’d expect, and they’re not favourable to Canadians….

Go doesn’t wave every single asylum seeker through; her record includes rejections, too. But her decisions in the last year alone show a pattern of leniency for rule-breakers, country-shoppers and, for lack of a better term, bulls–tters. Each instance takes state capacity away from cases that truly matter. It might be that Go feels the need to hold the door open for others, but it’s the rest of us who have to pay for the riff-raff who accept the invitation.

Source: Jamie Sarkonak: The federal judge determined to dismantle Canada’s immigration safeguards

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ICYMI – Jamie Sarkonak: The CRTC’s top-down diversity mandate comes for Big Streaming ICYMI

2025/12/03 2 Comments

While some like Sarkonak find this ill-thought, there is a history behind these initiatives as many government programs overly favoured previous beneficiaries or incumbents rather than ensuring better representation. And having good or better data is a basic (the Employment Equity Act relative success is arguably largely based on public diversity reporting:

…In addition, the Broadcasting Act now states that the broadcasting system should support programming created by and for non-white communities. While it didn’t outright state that quotas and demographic tracking were now required, that’s increasingly how it’s being interpreted.

In its decision to mandate the collection of diversity statistics, the CRTC notes that some television and radio broadcasters are currently required to include statistics on the presence of women in “key production roles” and track spending on content by Indigenous and official language minority producers.

It considers those data collection initiatives a success, and thus, “the Commission is of the view that the report lends itself well to be expanded to gather information on all equity-deserving groups (specifically, racialized people, people with disabilities and individuals who identify as 2SLGBTQI+, in addition to women).”

Big online streamers operating in Canada under this new regime will have to submit these diversity statistics as part of this. The current lack of data, the CRTC complained, “results in a partial picture of production spending and representation of equity-deserving groups in the production sector.” That information is important because it helps to “monitor compliance and trends and to ensure policy goals are met, especially when it comes to representation of equity-deserving groups.”

We aren’t at the point where the CRTC is ordering Netflix, HBO and Paramount+ to spend a minimum proportion of their production budgets on “diverse” shows and production teams, but we’re awfully close. In 2022, the CRTC ordered the CBC to do just that with its budget for commissioned TV and documentary programs. This year, the English side of CBC was required to dedicate 30 per cent of spending in that category to “diverse” production teams.

Last year, the CRTC also announced that it would be taking a five per cent cut from online streamers to redistribute to industry groups in Canada whose missions include the advancement of DEI in broadcasting. And in July, the CRTC tweaked its funding formula for online news to incentivize coverage of “diverse” communities….

Source: Jamie Sarkonak: The CRTC’s top-down diversity mandate comes for Big Streaming

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Jamie Sarkonak: Carney’s budget is more subtle on wokeness, but the agenda is still strong

2025/11/06 Leave a comment

Noting the change but discounting the extent:

Tuesday’s budget wasn’t like those of the high Trudeau years, encrusted with identity politics at every turn. But the spirit of the old regime lives on under Prime Minister Mark Carney, who has opted for a deficit of $78.3 billion along with the continuation of social justice programs and diversity mandates.

This year, one-time “investments” are numerous. The federal anti-racism secretariat — the entity that spurred a government-wide clampdown on forced diversity and hiring quotas in Ottawa in 2021, in response to the Black Lives Matter movement — is getting $2 million in 2025-26, and nothing else after that. The Canadian Heritage program for DEI in sport is getting $8 million in 2025-26, and, again, nothing afterwards.

Even better, the Liberals are spending $28 million over the next two years on Canadian Heritage’s Digital Citizen Initiative, which has been around for years now. It could arguably be called a propaganda program, as it essentially involves funding government-aligned influencers to dispel “disinformation” and researchers to track “anti-Liberal” media, among other things. This budget claims that the funding tap will shut off in 2027 … but we’ll see about that.

The National Film Board, which restricts non-Indigenous individuals from using archive footage for commercial purposes, is getting a $4 million bonus next year. Federal museums, which have been slammed with diversity mandates in the Liberal era, will get $12 million.

Identity-based business funding is back, as well. The federal women’s entrepreneurship program is supposed to get $39 million next year, with nothing to come after. Black entrepreneurs, meanwhile, were told in September that they were getting another $189 million over the next five years for race-based business funding (this wasn’t written into the budget documents, however).

How many of these programs will actually end in a year or two, it’s hard to say. It’s easy for the government change its mind next budget season — better, even, because doing this helps keep the projected deficit lower….

Perhaps most disappointing of all is the continued existence of Women and Gender Equality Canada, which will be getting $500 million over the years 2026 to 2030. The department exists to funnel government money to Liberal-aligned social justice organizations and create new crises relating to menstruation, among other things, and really doesn’t have a point in an age where gender equality has largely been achieved.

Regardless of any spending cuts, the core philosophy of the Liberal government has remained the same since 2015: spend on the mosaic model of culture; prioritize supports on the basis of identity and privilege. Under Carney, it’s no different.

Source: Jamie Sarkonak: Carney’s budget is more subtle on wokeness, but the agenda is still strong

Filed under DEI, gender, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Jamie Sarkonak: Liberal diversity mandates must end if we’re to solve the judge shortage

2025/11/03 2 Comments

Not sure if there is real evidence for the assertion “focus on diversity necessarily comes at the expense of excellence” and citing one example rather than a broader sample does not cut it. The shortages assertion may or may not be true, as the government has a record in many areas of not meeting targets and levels:

…This tends to involve standard-bending because the pool of bench-eligible senior lawyers is going to be more white and more male than the country as a whole. The senior tiers of any profession reflect the demographics of students in professional schools 40 years ago, not today. While excellent candidates can be found from all walks of life, the Liberal focus on diversity necessarily comes at the expense of excellence. And because the Liberals are obsessed with maintaining an acceptable ratio of white male to “diverse” appointees, we can infer that they’d rather leave some seats empty until a correct number of diverse judges can be put forward at the same time. Shortages ensue….

Source: Jamie Sarkonak: Liberal diversity mandates must end if we’re to solve the judge shortage

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Jamie Sarkonak: Canada doesn’t owe the world’s children a passport

2025/10/14 Leave a comment

More support for curbing birthright citizenship:

Anyone in the world can come to Canada, have a baby, and secure that child a lifetime of Canadian benefits along with a family link to this country for later chain migration. They don’t have to speak English or French; they don’t have to share our taboos against incest and rape; they don’t need to contribute anything to Canadian society. There are no guardrails.

But on Tuesday, we got a glimpse of how good things could be when Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel Garner proposed a simple change to the law that would prevent citizenship from being granted to children born in Canada to non-citizens — unless at least one parent has permanent residency.

This would close Canada’s widest and most longstanding chain migration entry point without being too harsh on the foreign nationals who have established a connection to the country (though we do need higher standards for PR, too). It’s about as fair as you can get. Alas, Rempel Garner’s amendment was promptly shot down by the Bloc Québécois and the Liberals, who believe in the extreme approach of handing passports out like candy at a parade.

The rest of the world has noticed our complete lack of boundaries and is taking advantage of it. Non-resident births in 2021-22 doubled to 5,698 from the previous year’s 2,245. It’s a cottage industry in B.C., and in one study of 102 birth tourists at a Calgary hospital, the most popular source country was Nigeria, but parents also came from the Middle East, India and Mexico. Keep in mind that these are just the non-residents — there are plenty of other temporary residents giving birth here, but we don’t seem to be keeping track.

Even if these children grow up and never set foot in Canada again, they’ll be entitled to all the benefits of citizenship. They’ll be able to run for office, vote, and obtain consular services if unrest engulfs whatever country their family has chosen to raise them in. If they ever join a terror organization like ISIS, Canadian officials will be expected to retrieve them.

Not to mention the privilege of low domestic tuition, a right to public health care, the unfettered ability to re-enter the country, the ability to claim all kinds of social benefits, the absolute impossibility of deportation should they ever commit a heinous crime, and the guarantee that their children will be eligible for Canadian citizenship, too — and their children, if the Liberals pass Bill C-3, which has now cleared committee.

It’s not just the developing world’s rich who are using this loophole. It’s an avenue that’s open to any economic migrant: from “students” of strip-mall colleges, to temporary workers, to bogus asylum seekers. Having a child in Canada bolsters their applications to remain, particularly if they ever face deportation….

Source: Jamie Sarkonak: Canada doesn’t owe the world’s children a passport

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