It's past time for the Conservative Party of Canada to end slavish devotion to the supply management cartel. It violates our free market principles, inflates food prices for struggling families, and undermines our global trade interests which impairs other, much larger sectors of Canadian agriculture. All of this to appeal to 9000 quota farmers, half of whom are in Quebec. And this👇is what the pandering has gotten the @CPC_HQ: the dairy lobby wedded to the Liberals. Enough already. Australia and New Zealand have shown the way. Both ended their supply management systems, and saw the sector thrive and grow as a result. Of course, Canada should not do this unilaterally given pressure from the US. As @jengerson has argued, phasing out supply management to benefit Canadians wouldn't require dropping tariffs / quotas on US dairy exports, without reciprocal trade concessions from the US. (As I've noted before, US ag protectionism and subsidies are much broader than Canadian supply management.) Regardless, Conservatives should be true to our principles by reverting to the Reform Party era policy of free market farming. Politically, that would mean championing the interests of 40 million consumers over those of 9000 supply management operators.

1% of the male population of Newfoundland was killed in the Great War. Memorial University was given its name to be a living, permanent memorial to their sacrifice. None of those men, or those who served with them, would now be eligible to teach at the university named in honour of their sacrifice. DEI has gone too far for too long. (BTW, I wonder if the same discriminatory hiring practices apply to janitorial, food services, and facility maintenance jobs. Or does the unjust treatment only apply to "elite" tenure track positions?)

In 2010 I brought in sweeping reforms to Canada’s asylum system, which won all party support. Even the Toronto Star endorsed the changes! The core statutory reforms were in the Balanced Refugee Reform Act. As a result of these legal, policy, and operational changes (including judicious use of visa impositions on countries that were large sources of false claims, e.g. Mexico,) we managed to get total new claims down to a record low of 10,000 by 2013! This meant we could process new claims within weeks, rather than years, giving certainty and protection to bona fide refugees quickly, while removing bogus claimants within months rather than years. Word went out to international migration networks, including the huge industry of human smugglers and agents who facilitate fake refugee claims, that Canada was no longer a soft target. But then the Trudeau government systematically reversed those reforms, apparently driven by a toxic combination of naive virtue signalling, and administrative incompetence. Having blown holes in the model asylum system that we had designed, the Trudeau government then made the catastrophic error of issuing millions of Temporary Resident Visas to low skilled foreign students and workers. The vast majority of those people came with the hope and expectation that their temporary status would lead to permanent residency. Many (most?) paid large fees to sleazy immigration promoters here and abroad who *promise* their often vulnerable clients that a work or study permit will lead to PR, and with it the ability to sponsor their families to come to Canada. Every day thousands of those temporary residents “fall out of status,” i.e. their temporary visas expire. Some respect the terms of their admission and leave; others just overstay / go underground, creating an ever larger population of people here illegally; and a growing number make inland asylum claims. The same crooked immigration consultants who promised them a false bill of goods in coming to Canada will often facilitate bogus asylum claims, with cookie cutter templates. The more claims are made, the larger the queue and the longer the processing times. This becomes a pull factor in itself, as it means people who otherwise would have to leave the country, or go underground, can stay for years benefitting from taxpayer funded housing, health care, and welfare benefits. That’s even if they are from a safe democracy and they have manifestly unfounded asylum claims. That’s why our asylum system has been overwhelmed by new claims, with 174,000 being filed last year, an increase of 1800% from 2013. This means years to adjudicate claims, and years more to remove bogus claimants who have abused Canada’s generosity. At the same time, under political pressure from the Trudeau government, the Immigration and Refugee Board has massively increased its acceptance rate for asylum claims, in some cases giving rubber stamped approval to all claims from certain countries without so much as an oral hearing. Of course, this just creates yet another pull factor. (More on this scandal at a later date.) Canada has always been an open and welcoming country. We have a moral obligation to provide protection to people here who have a well founded fear of persecution. But there are practical limits to our generosity. The post war consensus codified in the 1951 Refugee Convention was about creating an orderly, rules based system to protect people facing discrete cases of serious risk, which compelled them to flee tyrannical states. It was never intended to be a back door for mass illegal and irregular migration, exploited by human smugglers and the global migration industry. Even the Economist, a strongly pro-immigration bulwark of elite liberal opinion, recently recognized this reality. It is past time for Canada to save the asylum system from total collapse. Reverting to the sensible 2010 era reforms is an obvious place to start.