Origin Story and Status Report

dispatch from a Canadian conservative

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Today’s post is a guest post by Russell, a Canadian Conservative.

I am very interested in unusual perspectives. I live in Vermont, the one place on earth that appears centrist next to Canada. It is also a border state to Canada, which means that when things appear in two languages around here, instead of the English and Spanish of most of the US, they appear in English and French.

When I met Russell (in the Discord for supporters of my friend Josh Slocum’s show, Disaffected) I was intrigued by the fact that someone from Canada proudly called himself a conservative.

I have always found unusual perspectives to be the most interesting. All of my favorite stories are from unusual perspectives: a school rampage killer’s mother (of which there’s a memoir with this perspective too), a black college professor who comes from generational wealth; a murder mystery told and solved by an autistic teen, which means that the first person limited perspective is actually a third person omniscient experience for the reader.

I asked Russell to write something for my Substack about how a Canadian becomes a conservative and where, as a conservative, he sees his country today.

If that’s a perspective you also find interesting, I think you’ll enjoy his guest post. You can find his podcast, The Canadian Conservative, here, or on your favorite podcast app.

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Origin Story

I was standing with three strangers.

A crowd of about thirty people, mostly obese, middle-aged men, pressed in on us, yelling that we were losers, scabs, and pieces of shit. Their leader was a man whose sweater read: “UNION THUG.” I had my phone out, pretending to film, but I had actually run out of battery. This was 2009, before the modern smartphone. I had none of the live-streaming capabilities that modern phones do, but the ruse was sufficient to keep the crowd from doing anything too drastic.

The event that had brought me and the strangers together, and drawn the ire of the crowd, was a labor strike in Windsor, Ontario. It was one of the worst and most consequential strikes in modern Canadian times. The garbage workers were upset about negotiations not going their way and had been refusing to pick up garbage for quite some time. The outdoor areas had become filthy, and citizens had started taking it upon themselves to do the garbage workers’ jobs for them and make public spaces usable again. A video had gone viral of a city worker confronting an elderly couple cleaning up garbage at Willistead Park. The City worker who witnessed them picking up garbage then tore open and dumped a garbage bag in front of them, cruelly undermining the efforts of this elderly couple to simply be able to spend time outside in peace.

I had seen something online asking for volunteers to come help clean up Forest Glade, a park which was a common hang out area for skateboarders and local teenagers. I went with no idea—though perhaps I should have guessed— that a group of Union city workers were planning on intercepting us. I wasn’t anti-Union. In fact, I had grown up in a middle class factory worker household. This was in the era when it was still possible to largely ignore politics, and my parents never talked much about political topics. I was pretty sure they voted NDP at the time, although I believe my father is now a devout Conservative.

This wasn’t a political act on my part, and certainly not an anti-Union one.

It wasn’t about politics at all for me. I had just had enough of the garbage all over the skate park and our neighborhood in general. When I arrived, another volunteer was present. He gave me a garbage bag, and we got to work collecting garbage.

Our efforts at turning the park back into a park, not an unofficial garbage dump, triggered the Union members on strike to come over and start berating us. They were yelling and demanding that we leave. They told us we were ignorant and that it was Union action like their strike that had secured our rights for us. I shot back that we just wanted a clean park to use.

They laughed and mocked my voice, demonstrating the mentality of middle school children eager to score social points by mockery, not principled adults standing up for a righteous cause. As we continued on, they realized we were not going to be persuaded, so they moved on to physical intimidation. They began trying to box us in. Once they were yelling about “escorting us” out of the area, I took out my flip phone and realized that it had actually died—but I pretended to film and take pictures anyway. It was enough to create some fear of accountability for whatever actions they might take, and the Union members left us alone.  Still, it was a frightening situation, and potentially dangerous—four against a crowd—so we took caution and decided to leave.

As we left, the bags of garbage we had bagged were torn open and dumped onto the ground. During my research to try to find the original news report that featured the video from Willistead Park, I came a woman who also complained that her child was harassed by picketing Union members in the same park area.

 Before the Garbage Strike

To understand why the garbage strike was so pivotal in my journey towards becoming a conservative, I need to talk a bit about my development. The Coles Notes version (which in America are called Cliff’s Notes): I grew up in a middle income household. We went to church on Sundays, played sports, and both parents worked. We had everything we needed and a lot of what we wanted.

It was instilled into me at an early age that we were fortunate, and that our good fortune was attributable to hard work. We had an obligation, as people who were succeeding, to help others who were suffering. My mother was a huge believer in volunteerism and changing the world through being involved with the world. I would frequently volunteer as a child in simple ways, such as shoveling my elderly neighbors’ driveway and helping them with outdoor chores. It was important, in the value system of my family, that I not accept money.

Of course, as a child I didn’t see it this way; I wanted to get paid! But as I got older I was grateful for the character development this afforded me, and I began to realize that there was something far greater to be gained through volunteerism. I still volunteer with several high profile organizations and I have received National and Provincial Awards for my volunteer work.

My father was a believer in hard work, both modeling it and instilling it as a practice in the lives of his children. Since the age of 10 or so, I’ve always worked. I started off with an advertisement paper route and then, as I got older, I moved into a newspaper route. I still remember delivering the newspaper the day after 9/11. Every front page had the fireball that looked like the devil on it. It was a very unsettling sight.

Eventually I worked a summer job, doing corn detassling around Essex County. It was dirty and grueling farm work for crap pay, working along side migrant workers and ex-cons who couldn’t get jobs anywhere because of their criminal record. I then moved into fast food. Self-reliance was such a deeply instilled value that it has always been of crucial importance to me that I have a steady income, and I’ve had two jobs for as long as I can remember.

Woke Dynamics Are Abuse Dynamics

Like many people who come to embrace Conservative values and reject Leftist ones, I grew up in a home that, alongside the many positive aspects, had abuse dynamics as part and parcel of everyday life. When the Left started gaslighting the whole world and making it mandatory to believe flatly ridiculous things like that men in dresses are women and women with beards are men, I recognized exactly what was happening. I knew it well.

The flip side of my natal home values growing up stemmed from the fact that my mother suffered from mental health issues, serious ones that would showcase themselves as these deep abuse dynamics. It fascinated me that she could appear to be so kind and loving in public and to others, but when no one was watching could be so cruel and evil to her children. Pitting us against each other, gaslighting us, being loving one second and degrading us for our worst insecurities the next. She was also fond of making up imaginary offenses to our father, who would then hit us. The downward spiral at home accelerated after it was revealed that my sibling had been repeatedly raped by a relative that babysat us for years.

My mother, shortly after that, announced that she had cancer and that she deserved it because of what happened to my sibling—and things just fell apart. The histrionic narcissism of making what happened about her took over the family more deeply than her difficulties had done so before, and everything spiraled downward in short order.

We lived in a building that we called home, but everyone just existed. The abuse against us by my mother accelerated, but to the outside world she was the hard-working mom who was just trying to keep it together. In the world of cluster B personality disorders, this kind of dichotomy between the public and private selves is called “impression management.” Mom was an expert. My father just worked harder and took on more overtime hours so he didn’t have to deal with it.

What happened to my sibling and to the whole family as a result is part of the reason why, on my podcast, I have taken an extremely hardline stance on grooming.

Some have even called my stance extreme, but I don’t believe it to be so. My family fell victim to a groomer, both the sibling who was raped and the rest of us, as well. We all did, and it didn’t happen overnight. It was a slow process of gaining our trust and maintaining it throughout the sexual assaults that he perpetrated.

These days, there’s a contingent on the left who wants to defend grooming, or sometimes even pedophilia, as consensual. I’ll tell you what happens to families where those things occur. It ruins them forever. I understand why so many people hide it, why it becomes a “dirty little secret”. Our family was open about what happened to us, but all that accomplished was seemingly to chase people away. People did not want to know. And if they did admit that they knew, they blamed my sibling, my parents, or other circumstances.

Their denial was understandable; if we could fall victim through no fault of our own, how could they, and their own families and children, be safe?

We became an island as family and friends turned their backs, afraid they’d catch a case of the rape. Meanwhile the pervert did most of his time in minimum security, which is basically day camp for diddlers. We had to be notified whenever he moved to a new place so they told us he was in minimum security (which doesn’t even have a fence).

In retrospect, this was pivotal in my journey towards becoming a Conservative. My experience seeing the Criminal Justice System fail miserably to achieve anything like real justice for my sibling and my family hardened me towards a very Conservative stance on criminal justice.

And yet, as is often the case in the United States, voicing any views other than Leftist ones was dangerous. It took me awhile to grow into the courage to own myself and my beliefs.

Like my mother, I found myself living in two worlds. In one world, I was a punk rocker who was down with the cause. I supported all left-leaning causes and swore I was a communist (although I don’t think I ever really believed that). I smoked way too much pot, drank a lot, partied incessantly, and got myself into trouble hanging out with societal rejects. I went to punk shows. I played in a punk band. I hated police and authority figures and I didn’t try hard in school (as evidenced by my awful grades).

Yet at the same time, I was enrolled in lacrosse, took martial arts, volunteered at my local church, had a part time job, loved reading books, and was an Army cadet.

Talk about cognitive dissonance!

Maybe I was trying to integrate my shadow? Above all, what I really wanted during this confusing time of figuring out who I was and what parts of my beliefs and values I could proudly own, was to be at home as little as possible. I hated going to that place and the less time I spent there doing just about anything the better. Looking back at it now, it is only through sheer dumb luck that I didn’t end up with a criminal record. It is easy, in retrospect, to see times when I barely avoided being beaten really badly. I also feel fortunate that I never got hooked on hardcore drugs, a challenge that many of my former leftist friends have to face.

As I got older, I saw how my two groups of friends were living and what their standards of living were, and I had to make a decision because my worlds were colliding. My leftist friends leaned heavily on me. In that friend group, I was the only one with a car and money, because I was the only one with a job. So now I was taking my vehicle and myself into sketchy situations for people that only ever really cared about themselves at the end of the day. My risk tolerance for that behavior grew shorter and shorter, until eventually I began cutting those people out of my life altogether. The punk rock band I was in fell apart because of my insistence that we get serious about practice and recording.

I eventually went on to attend college, and that brings us back to the 2009 Windsor Garbage Strike.

A Pivotal Moment

The Windsor Garbage Strike was the tipping point for me. The Union members whose dissatisfaction with their lots in life led to absurd situations like elderly people being confronted on camera for cleaning up their neighborhood were not suffering working class people standing up for themselves. These men were married to trophy wives, living in riverfront homes, driving fancy cars, walking purebred dogs, and dropping their kids off at private schools.

Their self-declared narrative, that they were heroes of the working class, fell apart the minute it was presented with the slightest scrutiny.

I, the person whose work cleaning up a park they so proudly denounced, actually was a member of the working class. I was working two jobs, attending college, and living in a cockroach-infested shit pit. My car had gotten broken into several times, so I just left the doors unlocked. My neighbors were drug addicts who fought all night and slept all day. Yet I was supposed to believe that these people had my best interests in mind, that their “suffering” was for workers’ rights?

The hypocrisy was the biggest issue for me.  It was a red pill, years before “red pilled” was common vernacular. I learned a lot about cognitive dissonance in my natal home, more from my own experience of trying to navigate two worlds, and even more from this absurd situation.

The workers were still living a fantasy that they were noble working class crusaders standing up to the evil corporation that was trying to keep them down. Some of them actually believed it. Not all, but enough of them.

Their rhetoric, just like that I see spewed from the mouths of the left, is all condescending, lying and utter bullshit. These people don’t care about the real working class. The working class are the waiters, the bartenders, the security guard, the Tim Horton’s worker, the hotel cleaner, the Walmart shelf stocker, etc. Not unionized municipal employees. The real working class are minimum wage wage-slaves meant to cater to the chattering class, the upper class unionized whiners. I saw a fucking Karen yelling at a Walmart employee once about how she was a Nurse and she didn’t deserve this bullshit.

Obsessed with Power, But Not the Way They Claim

It’s all about power and prestige to these leftists. They claim victimhood while carrying the Institutional power and wielding it like a cudgel against their opponents. Yes, there are probably Conservatives in these positions that have a similar attitude and if they do, shame on them as well. Yet it was leftists who were out there threatening me, threatening elderly people, and throwing temper tantrums that they aren’t getting enough.

They’ve gotten smarter over the years, more aware of optics, and the direct confrontation like what I experienced in the park has changed. Now, in a similar situation, they would be calling me a racist and a bigot and filming me and trying to find out where I work or go to school. They’ve gotten smarter because they’ve taken control of the language that we find morally repugnant in society and they use that as a weapon against their opponents. Are you anti-union? You’re probably far right, transphobic, bigoted and a neo-nazi!

I finished my degree and went on to work for a security company that specialized in labor disputes. I worked on picket lines escorting vehicles across, wrote reports, drove around compounds, escorted management personnel, and got my bearings in the world of providing professional physical security.

Going Home Again

It was good, satisfying work, and solidified my Conservative values. But then my sense of family duty required me to go home and live with my mother and a sibling for a time, as my mother’s mental health issues had gotten worse. I often had to intervene with my mother’s increasingly psychotic behavior and her failure to take care of herself.

During this period, I would have to book off from work to sit in the waiting room for anywhere between 14-18 hours until she was seen. (This is the reality of Canadian healthcare.) Often the hospital would be so overcrowded that if she was admitted, she would be in a very public area until a bed in a private area opened up. She had become hooked on her pain medication, which caused issues of all sorts.

The progression had a clear cause: my siblings and I becoming adults robbed her of the narcissistic supply that we had provided her as children. When she needed some attention, she would take a bunch of her pain medication at once and then tell us she was going to die, thus prompting a 911 call. She became almost infantile in her behavior. She wasn’t even the same person anymore, just a shell of the former person I knew.

The year this occurred, 2010, was an odd one for me. I dealt with family drama as I watched the police kettle in peaceful protesters while allowing radical “Black Bloc” militants to destroy businesses in Toronto during the G20 Summit. I noticed that people who tried to intervene were shouted down or even threatened by protesters carrying Union flags. I became even more disillusioned by the media coverage because what I saw on YouTube did not match up at all with what I saw in the newspaper and on the television. The era of independent journalism was starting and now anyone with a camera and a YouTube channel could practice journalism. And ordinary people often did much better than the legacy media.

Things got better in 2012. I moved to Saskatchewan, having finally secured meaningful and well-paid work. Things were starting to rapidly change in the political landscape. Conservatism was declining in the East. Social media had given rise to Woke activists, or slacktivists as I like to call them.

I didn’t know much about Western Canada; it might as well have been another country when I first moved here. People here were friendlier and things moved slower, but there was (and still remains) a very anti-Ottawa attitude. I ramped up my volunteering to meet new people and make friends. I was very active in several non-profits that delivered services directly to vulnerable people. I participated in several large scale evacuations of Indigenous reserves due to natural disasters and traveled to Indigenous communities to do presentations. I got to see firsthand the conditions that some of these people had to live in and it wasn’t—still isn’t—good.

Status Report

A Sleeping Frog in a Woke Pot

After the Conservatives were beaten federally in 2015 by the Liberal Party, things didn’t change overnight. Like a frog in a pot, the heat of Woke ideological indoctrination was a slow cooker. Marijuana was legalized, although it’s so heavily regulated that everyone I know who smokes still gets their pot from the gray market. It seemed like every time there was something that made the government look bad, or some unique problem, the solution was to pass more laws. The goal was to restrict more and more, but it didn’t happen fast at first. Justin Trudeau, our Prime Minister, is a joke in Western Canada and on the world stage. Bret Weinstein calls him “a duplicitous Ken doll” and that’s so funny in large part because it’s just about right.

But how did he win two more elections despite the never-ending plague of scandals that follow him and his office everywhere? Two things, really.

1. He has a script that he sticks with that seems to blindly work every time.

2. The Conservative movement is fractured.

 Steven Harper and his Conservative government, prior to 2015, were excellent fiscal managers but horrible at social policy. The social policy that they refused to take a hard line stance on is exactly what has been used against them the past three election cycles. When the Liberals are feeling heat, they bring the three weaknesses the Conservative Party refuses to address properly: firearms, abortion and equity.

Politics is downstream of culture and the Conservatives ceded ground continuously on the cultural front; or worse, didn’t address issues at all. This carried on well after the 2015 election with Conservative Party Leaders Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole. Both were suffering from the shadow of years of social conservatism neglect. It wasn’t good enough to simply be a fiscal Conservative anymore, but they didn’t and in many cases still don’t, know how to tackle social policy in public. Their inability to take hard stances on controversial social issues, in-fighting and the notorious failure to lead Conservatives during COVID  led to the rise of the right-wing libertarian party known as the People’s Party of Canada.

The rise of Trump populism in the States has had a destabilizing effect in Canada as it seemed—and still seems daily—that our country sends more and more money out and accepts more and more asylum seekers at a now-infamous illegal land crossing called Roxham Road.

This goes on while our overburdened socialist safety nets break more and more spectacularly. Our federal government seems hellbent on being as woke as possible. In this period, DEI courses and departments were being set up and the federal government began actively funding as many LGBT+ charities as possible. It has been full Woke ahead, while Provinces and Cities crumble as each day goes by. One of my biggest criticisms of the Woke remains that they are a safe outlet for blue haired, nose ring, Starbucks drinking and obnoxious-attitude-having wannabes to pretend they care about the most vulnerable in society—but in reality, they do little to effect change, insisting on continuing to break the West.

In all my years of volunteering, I have yet to actually work with even one 300-pound pink haired, androgynous non-binary commie: not one, not a single time. The vast majority of the people I see volunteering are religious people: Christians, Muslims and Jewish people, elderly people and legal immigrants to Canada. Volunteers are largely people who by morals or a feeling of patriotism want to give back to their communities.

And no, I’m not letting the far right off the hook either, for all their whining about “Canada First” and “helping veterans,” I haven’t seen them out delivering meals to veterans, driving them to appointments, or helping set up a Remembrance Day service. I don’t see them, for all their talk about community, helping bag sandwiches for the homeless or collecting donations for domestic violence shelters. They aren’t helping youth in their communities by being involved in after school programs that promote leadership or citizenship. So they can fuck off too, the fucking hypocrites. They’re really not that different from the far left they whine about.

Horseshoe Theory is real.

Evergreen and C-16

The final phase in my journey, leading to today’s post-COVID clarity, happened around 2017 or so. The floodgates let loose and the insanity peaked. Bret Weinstein had already been run out of Evergreen and Jordan Peterson was eating only meat. Even in my workplace, there were mandatory Diversity Training sessions in development. I got to see a draft as I was an occasional facilitator for certain trainings, and they were looking for instructors for this new program. The battle line were being drawn for the culture war. The right, however, was still playing defense. Conservatives that spoke too loudly (particularly ones that didn’t have the backing of tenure or the right wing funding machine) were starting to get de-platformed. Conservatives online were targeting each other and there was (and still is) a pretty hardcore grift. Lauren Southern did a good expose on this.

Conservatives suffer from a central problem: everyone wants “their brand” of Conservatism to be the prominent one. The left is focused on the total physical, emotional, mental and spiritual destruction of their opponents. There is no transgression they will not forgive if it is in service of the higher cause. Should a leftist step out of line, they are more than willing to complete “re-education” sessions to bring them back into the fold. The end result they are driving towards, in my opinion, is the elimination of Conservatives and individualism, and the bringing about of a hyper-rationalist scientism-based religion. They truly want a Utopian state, a goal they believe will be brought about when the individual is fully ceded to a societal collective imperative. Conservatives can’t seem to agree on what is worth conserving for the future. This is coming to a head, similar to Emmanuel Kant’s philosophy on the Categorical Imperative, that the decline of the religious right has led to some moral confusion. This is partly why many Conservatives are now identifying as agnostic or atheist. Whereas the abortion debate may have had a deep religious connection previously, many non-religious Conservatives still oppose abortion because it is in their minds morally unjustified and leads to a less reasonable society overall. The non-religious right gets put into the same category as those that oppose on religious grounds by the left, which just leads to in-fighting between Conservatives.

Endings Bring Clarity and Courage

In 2019, I received word that my mother was in the hospital dying. I flew down immediately. She had declined even more mentally and physically, but we had a few good conversations. We watched TV in the hospital room as the media talked about an emerging virus in China, unknown to me that in a few months our lives were going to get turned upside down. There was no malice. I don’t have it in my heart to hate the dying or dead, as there is simply no point. The years of abuse were, by me anyway, forgotten, which was a blessing as I don’t think she even remembered most of it. The doctors told us her lungs were filling up with fluids and there was nothing we could do but make her comfortable.

My mother’s biggest fear was dying alone. She didn’t die alone, but she didn’t go quietly either. I’ve seen some horrible things in my life. I’ve seen people die, I’ve seen people stabbed, punched, kicked, beaten with objects, burnt by fire, I’ve seen overdoses and I’ve seen people violate their bodies in awful and disgusting ways. Yet to this day watching my own mother slowly suffocate on her own lung fluids, her breath slowly becoming more shallow, the priest coming in to do the last rites, her sobbing and begging for more time until she had to be medicated for dignity’s sake so she could pass on will be one of the toughest.

It was a life-changing experience. I had to really sit there in the moment and evaluate my life choices. Was I living life on my own terms? In a way, yes.

I was successful at work, volunteerism, I had received National accolades for my volunteer work by getting a chance to meet the Governor General; I had a spouse, a house, and I could probably ride the rest of my life out pretty comfortably without too much friction.

Be The Change You Want to See In the World

However this was too easy, it was too simple and it was too safe. I’ve always been an overall introverted person. People may be surprised to learn that considering that I podcast for a hobby now, but I’ve generally played it pretty safe so far in life.

The clarity I found in the wake of my mother’s death and the implosion of Canadian institutions and freedoms during COVID brought me to a new point in my life. I decided that I would put myself out there more. I decided I would take up Podcasting, so I just began, always trying to learn along the way. I told myself that I would be as high-minded as I could manage, never personally attacking people if I could help it but try to focus on attacking the ideas they present.

 One of my favorite ideas, and one I’m basing the rest of my life on, is this: a man lives two lives. His first life ends when he fully realizes that he is on limited time, and the second begins when he chooses to make his mark before the inevitable.

Only months into 2020 and the world turned completely upside down. I learned quickly that all the moral lessons we were supposed to learn and take heed of in the past 100 years or so had meant absolutely nothing. We let our Governments take full control of everything instead of reasonable measures. What it led too was a culmination of anger and resentment that drove to Ottawa during the coldest time of the year to make their voices heard. It revealed a very sick and depraved side of our Government and the citizenry that propped it up. The freedom convoy managed to bring Canadians together and drive them apart like never before. It was a true protest, achieving in a few weeks what months of planning with Occupy Wall Street could only dream of.

In the end, it led to our Government suspending freedom temporarily in Canada and revealing the utter failure of our Charter and our democracy. We don’t live in a Democracy in Canada, we live in the shadow of what we would like to call a democracy. Many of my liberal friends have woken up to this, but there remains a hardcore upper middle class and upper class contingent comprised of Neo-Liberals who are continuing to prop up this autocratic Government. They view themselves as the working class but they are the chattering/laptop/management class and they believe that they have the moral and ethical obligation to lead us “unclean” people to enlightenment.

It’s a scary time, but it’s also a time of opportunity for people to make a difference and get this Country back on track.

I hope that you have seen how my path has led me here.

What is Conservatism? Wow, big question I could fill out another 2,500 words easily and dive into all sorts of topics and really get caught in the weeds. To me it’s not simply about conserving old culture and being rigid in one’s beliefs. Being Conservative to me boils down to rugged individuality, chivalry, community, protecting the most vulnerable, supporting the traditional family structure, supporting religious freedoms, and small overall Government. I am always learning more about myself, about other people and cutting the edge of my beliefs as I match them against societal issues at large.

Sometimes I get it right. Most of the time I get it at least partly wrong. Like all of us, all I can do is try to get less wrong over time.

I appreciate the time you took to read this and I hope it brought you Americans some insight into your neighbor to the north.

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