Ladies and gentlemen and other assorted readers of Loonie Politics, I have had what you might call a religious experience.

Specifically, I have recognized the hand of the Divine behind the ordinary workings of public life in Canada.  A confirmation of something I had previously doubted was vouchsafed unto me, and I see the world with new eyes.

For you see, pollster John Duffy took it upon himself to reveal that Canada is ruled by "the civil religion" in a Hill Times article this week.

This incredible and, dare I say, prophetic formulation can be read in one of two ways.

Firstly we have the literal reading.  The official religion in Canada is a civil one, where civility and kindness is given religious importance.

Under this civil religion, partisanship and playing fast and loose with the facts becomes the real corruption.  Thus rudeness and intemperancy become greater offences than actual violations of the law.  Thus harshness and stridency become moral failings, rather than sloth or laziness.

Then we have the far more horrifying interpretation, where the religion is enforced by civil institutions.

The priests and clergy of this civil religion are Liberal politicians, journalists, artists, and teachers.  The established class- yes, the elites with a capital E- do not merely enjoy higher social standing, but are imbued with a sort of serene divinity.  Think of the solemn pronouncements of a Margaret Atwood, or of a David Suzuki.  Surely the holy spirit of the civil religion breathes through them.

And the God of this civil religion is the current Prime Minister- Justin Trudeau, with his coterie of Liberal-friendly Premiers, Mayors, city councilors, acting as de facto archbishops.  These holy men and women are shielded from criticism.  What they do, they do in the name of a higher purpose.  We the laity cannot hope to understand.

A distraught but unbowed Kathleen Wynne apologized for high hydro bills in Ontario recently.  It was "her mistake".  She pledged to "do better."  She seeks absolution from the voters, and it would seem enough have given her the benefit of the doubt.

Meanwhile, her Minister of Energy, Glenn Thibeault, stands accused of corruption.  In response he sits for interviews with journalists where he discusses the impact on his children instead of addressing the accusations.  He chokes up.

You could call this cheap emotional manipulation, as the PC Party has, and is doing.

But to criticize the civil religion is to have sinned.  To be unrepentant in your sinning is to be a heretic.

That's what Stephen Harper, Mike Harris, and Rob Ford were treated as.  And the hatred that surrounds these men makes a lot more sense when you think of it that way.

But the Progressive part of the Progressive Conservative Party hews as closely as it can to the civil religion.  They fear the censure, the excommunication from polite society that inevitably comes with rebellion- and with good reason.

When all sectors of society pile on whoever holds the undistinguished post of PC Party of Ontario leader for going outside the norm- be it through a promise to fund faith-based schools, to cut 10,000 jobs, or to scrap the sex-ed curriculum- it does recall the public stoning sessions of old.

Am I the only one who has noticed how ritualistic and cathartic each election cycle has become, with the PCs used as a scapegoat for all the community's sins, and the party pushed off of a cliff, figuratively and literally speaking?

But the most powerful thing about a religion is that it cannot be destroyed from without.  It is sustained by the faith of the true believers.

And the unshaking faith of the Liberal fold in the sacredness of the party- and their willingness to follow wherever it goes- is the means by which the civil religion can suffer constant degradation and always rise renewed.

So it follows then that what is needed is a new and bolder faith, where the adherents are more ardent in their zeal.

This may be the allure of the populist, Trumpist right- it is a more powerful secular religion than any of the others on offer currently.  And its works are mighty, giving strength to the downtrodden and crestfallen.

How long then shall the PC Party continue to ignore the revival currently being experienced worldwide?

Written by Josh Lieblein

Despite her popular caricature as living embodiment of all that's awful about the modern right, the dilemma Kellie Leitch embodies smoulders in the soul of the left. Anyone with a political memory longer than a week, after all, will recall that Dr. Leitch has long sat "among the reddest of Red Tories," in the words of Adam Daifallah. Her political brand was a Conservative who wandered into the party by accident.

As such, Leitch's proposal to test immigrants for "Canadian values," which she is now inseparably tied, did not originally arise in the context of some alt-rightish worry about the impure tainting the fatherland, but rather a decidedly liberal anxiety that immigrants from the third world might be insufficiently politically-correct. Save us from the hoard who bring "intolerance towards other religions, cultures and sexual orientations, violent and /or misogynistic behaviour," she cried back in September, sounding like a college student searching for a safe space.

Hers was the great unspoken fear of many progressives in this country: what will be the social consequence if Canada continues to import vast numbers of people from parts of the world where attitudes, religious teachings, and laws regarding women and LGBTQ people are, by any objective standard, vastly more regressive than our own? Beyond praying that backwards countries will send only their most perfectly progressive citizens to our shores, there is no viable answer to this dilemma that doesn't require aggressive assimilation or "values screening."

Such attitudes are the inverse of socially conservative immigrant boosters like Jason Kenney, who believe importing regressive beliefs from the third world might not actually be the worst thing for a country getting way too permissive and secular. Pre-Leitch, conservatives partial to this theory were inclined to give immigrants a pass on their "values," not order them to the nearest pride parade.

Trump-Leitch analogies are common, but sloppy. Trump's xenophobia, if that's the right word for it, is narrow and specific. America has too many illegal immigrants, he insists, and they're taking jobs and committing crimes. Like most Republicans, he's praised legal immigration and at times even called for more of it. Leitch's rhetoric, by contrast, is an immigration populism more akin to Europe's — that is, bound to identity and culture. It can be surprising to learn that many of Europe's most virulent immigrant restrictionists are actually quite progressive on matters of feminism and gay rights — the very values, they would say, which are most under attack by Islamists and others.

If Leitch proves successful (and there's no reason to believe she won't be, given how tumultuous politics is these days) it will be because her message will be widely misunderstood. This is a land-of-the-blind-one-eyed-man-is-king type situation; since there is such a strong, all-party consensus in this country to never speak critically of immigration in any way, Leitch has the ability to benefit simply by tying her candidacy to an issue where dissatisfaction with the status quo is high. Because few conservatives really know how left-wing she is, she can be a blank screen to project fantasies.

Her signature policy, it should likewise be said, is not unreasonable. As is often the case with supposedly controversial ideas, it's most useful to ponder the alternative. Should we make no effort whatsoever to determine a would-be immigrant's compatibility with Canadian society? If so, that means we would have to ditch our current regime of citizenship tests, and presumably set fire to the citizenship study book that instructs newcomers not to engage in "barbaric cultural practices."

On the other hand, it has to be conceded that there are also a number of superficial factors working against Leitch. Everyone is too polite to say this openly, but Leitch's gender, voice, appearance, and, well, crying probably do not give her great credibility in the eyes of the sort of people who rallied to Trump's populist message south of the border. Fairly or not, people expect their gutsy contrarian truth-tellers to look and sound a certain way, and I think Leitch's stereotype deficiencies in this department matter a great deal more than the fact she's an anti-elitist with an MBA from Dalhousie, which is the harshest personal attack most mainstream pundits have dared to level.

What the Leitch candidacy does more than anything else is expose the inability of the Canadian political and media establishments to think or speak seriously about substantial issues. She is a clumsy answer in a necessary debate.

Written by J.J McCullough

Justin Trudeau's utopian Canada is only one year young, but the ideals espoused by the Prime Minister are already beginning to unravel.  "Canada's back" — despite the statement's overt arrogance — was supposed to mean our new progressive leader was going to re-establish Canada as a peace-keeping and climate change-combating nation.  It meant championing third-wave feminism, LGBTQ2 rights, and First Nations communities.  Essentially the message was Canada was going to be nice again (as if we'd somehow had a mean streak).

About the same number of Canadians that bought Harper's message of fiscal conservatism and economic stability four years prior now bought into Trudeau's sunny ways (this damn hackneyed cliché will never go away).  The fanfare and jubilation in Trudeau Junior's monumental ascendency to power was palpable.  The press got swept off its feet in the romance, writing puff pieces on his stylish socks, heart-melting good looks, and saccharine sweet nothings.  One especially starry-eyed journalist exclaimed at Trudeau's swearing-in (where our harebrained PM swore allegiance to the Queen and all of her "hairs") that it was "our own Camelot" according to a sardonic American journalist.  According to pollsters, Trudeau still enjoys the majority of the country swooning in an everlasting honeymoon.  The love affair culminated in Trudeau and family visiting progressively cool and lame duck President Barack Obama for a state dinner.  The Canadian mainstream media's hearts were a flutter over the bromance.

But just like the cocksure captain at the helm of the Costa Concordia, our dream-boat PM's easy sailing couldn't last.  Despite Trudeau's "tremendous confidence" and faith in the American people not to vote in an anti-PC brute, and Obama's best effort to reinstate his former failed Secretary of State back into the White House, the star-crossed lovers were destined for calamity.

President-elect Donald Trump is very much the antithesis of Trudeau.  Trump sees climate change as a crock propagated by the UN's globalist agenda, meanwhile Trudeau sees it as the single gravest threat to humanity in the 21st century.  Trump sees a strong Western military dominance as necessary for maintaining peace and order in the world, meanwhile Trudeau sees peacekeeping, appeasement, and the UN as a panacea of peace.  Trump sees the world as a meritocracy, Trudeau sees inequality created by a patriarchy that needs to be rectified by an egalitarian government.

Perhaps these irreconcilable differences are why Trudeau has spent the last couple weeks avoiding the American iconoclast, excepting the obligatory phone call of forced congratulation.  It appears our PM would rather stay in NeverTrumpLand, spending the past week traveling in theoretically egalitarian but — in actuality — utterly corrupt Latin America nations of Cuba, Argentina, and Peru.  Trudeau cozied up with the despotic Castro family, dined with the Argentine president at a "lavish, beautiful" state dinner, and hung out one last time with his pal Obama at the APEC summit.  Of course, this trip was planned well in advance, but the lack of reaction and engagement to the surprise election and President-elect must speak volumes to the billionaire.

Even Trudeau sycophant Craig Oliver was surprised by the inaction of Trudeau, and suggested the PM cancel his plans and fly out to New York to meet Trump in person.

Trudeau's ostensible ignoring of the President-elect, continued commitment to enacting and enforcing carbon pricing in Canada, and pledge to forge ahead with TPP without America all suggest that the PM plans to play an antagonistic role with President Trump.

When Trump demands all NATO countries pay 2 per cent of GDP towards the military (Canada currently spends less than 1 per cent) will Trudeau decline?  If Trump reopens NAFTA is Trudeau going to refuse the President's demands?  Is Trudeau going to argue with President Trump over the Paris Agreement he plans to reject?  Furthermore, will Trudeau seriously continue with his carbon tax scheme — putting Canadian businesses at a competitive disadvantage and raise the cost of living of all Canadians — even though it will be as fruitless and futile an endeavour as the quest for the Holy Grail?

Undoubtedly Trudeau doesn't like the predicament Trump has plopped him in, but regardless his feelings towards the political maverick he must accept that his and Canada's fates are now intertwined with Trump.  The incoming president will be a foil for Trudeau, revealing the PM's character.  Outgoing President Obama has already pitted the two against each other with his comments in Peru last weekend: "I have to say that there are few leaders around the world who can combine vision and talent and values the way that Justin does, and I am very much looking forward to his continued leadership in the years to come."

It appears Obama wants "the Justin" to help fight and protect the 44th president's vulnerable and lacklustre legacy from the Donald.

Will our PM oblige Obama and stubbornly stick to his pie in the sky ideals or take the conciliatory path of pragmatism in dealing with President Trump?  If he chooses the former, the electorate in 2019 will likely tell him that Canadians want to get back down to brass tacks.

Written by Graeme C. Gordon

Look at one of those color-coded election maps of this country and you're immediately struck by all the orange. The NDP only elected 44 MPs in 2015 yet it looks like they control half of Canada. This is because many of the seats they did win — ridings like Skeena—Bulkley Valley in British Columbia or Timmins-James Bay, Ontario — are among the physically largest, with sparse populations housed in broad borders.

Contrary to what you might be hearing from the Toronto Star, Donald Trump was not carried to the presidency by an army of skinheads — his share of the white vote was actually lower than Mitt Romney's. He did, however, disproportionally capture a certain kind of white voter that had either been chronically missing in action or presumed incurably Democrat: less-educated, working-class whites in rural, "rust belt" states. Thus, while city-dwelling whites fled him (he lost Manhattan by 90%), Trump mitigated the loss by cruising to an electoral college victory on the backs of industrial midwestern states like Wisconsin and Michigan that hadn't gone Republican since the 1980s.

In this country, popular lore suggests the Tories are the rural party, but as the maps illustrate, this is not quite true, and certainly wasn't true in 2015. Last year the Maclean's people attempted to answer "who won Canada's rural vote" and found the Conservatives only captured "46 per cent of all rural ridings" — or 70 seats, mostly in Alberta and Saskatchewan — compared to the left-wing parties, who won 79. Maclean's similarly counted 18 "rurban" ridings which straddle geographic definition but could certainly be considered "blue collar" areas — in which the conservatives won only six.

To be sure, some of Canada's electoral realities are incomparable to anything found in America. The mere existence of the NDP can hurt and help Conservatives in various complicated ways that have no equivalent for Republicans. Ditto the esoteric politics of Quebec. Like America, it's also true that Canada's most contested electoral territory continues to be in neither-fish-nor-fowl suburbia. Yet as they languish in opposition, the Tory party could certainly do worse than seek lessons from the most incredible political upset of our generation.

Trump's appeal to blue collar America was both cultural and economic.

Culturally, he rebutted the crusading, judgemental, hyper-sensitive political correctness that has come to define modern liberalism. His refusal to be cowed for often wildly misrepresented statements and deeds made him a cypher for any American tired of being labeled a bigot on vastly shakier grounds.

Economically, the billionaire was a conservative heretic, promising make-work infrastructure jobs, torn up trade deals, and a lockbox for medicare and social security. Democrats and orthodox Republicans were outraged, but it proved an attractive pitch with bipartisan appeal.

This nouveau strategy of class warfare could surely find hospitable battlefields north of the border.

The urban, university-educated elite — whom Trump voters were not shy about identifying as the enemy — are certainly every bit as insulated in Canada as America. Rural Canada remains mysterious to our betters, and what they know they don't like.

They hold the region's natural resources industry, which provides livelihoods for thousands of families, in contempt, viewing it as an obstacle to "meeting Canada's goals" on climate change — an extremely abstract objective mostly about improving the country's diplomatic standing. They offer exaggerated, superficial reverence for aboriginal culture as a way to atone for their "white privilege" and perpetuate a fact-free narrative of flyover Canada as a place where innocent Natives are slaughtered by white bigots. They insist the only reason Conservatives lose elections is because they aren't like themselves — that is, blindly supportive of things like Syrian refugees, niqabs, and the CBC — and insist Tories must champion nothing beyond consensus economic issues that would leave them indistinguishable from the Liberals.

Elite-level Conservatives remain captive to similar bubble-logic. Insecure about their reputation in prestigious circles, they obsessively try to out-cosmopolitan the left through an ostentatious embrace of things like pride parades and minority candidates. They hold economically depressed parts of the country, particularly Atlantic Canada, as fundamentally pathetic places deserving of their fate. They offer uncritical support for grandiose trade deals and endlessly increasing immigration, defining economic prosperity entirely through GDP growth.

As I've written before, I think the Canadian political system is basically rigged against populism, making it difficult to imagine the path for a true Canadian Trump. But there was a time when people presumed American politics was far more controlled than it appears to be, and books like The Party Decides now gather dust in the bargain bin. As Marine Le Pen, who obviously feels the wind at her sails right now, put it, "movement is part of the life of nations."

These laws apply to Canada as much as anywhere else.

Written by J.J McCullough

Before we return to the saga of Ontario politics, I must take a moment to publicly flog myself and eat a crow sandwich for declaring Donald Trump's campaign dead a month ago.  I was super wrong.  I was wrong wrongiddy wrong wrong wrongo wrong.

Proceeding under the usually fairly safe assumption that campaigns matter above all, and allowing for the fact that without a visible ground game, the support of the party he had been nominated for, or regular access to his Twitter account, I believed right up until about 8 PM on the 8th that Trump could have won if he'd stuck to pure unvarnished resentment without apologizing- which he did.

Since there was by definition no way to measure the support of his in-the-closet supporters, and since Ann Coulter had been reduced to tweeting on the morning of Trump Tuesday about how he would have won in a landslide if only people with all four grandparents born in America were allowed to vote, I made an educated guess that he'd blown it.  Serves me right for trying to do an educated anything when it comes to The Donald.

But mistakes are fine so long as you learn from them.  I've learned never again to underestimate the deplorables, and that a protest vote is a protest vote, campaigns be damned.  But I'm not so sure Patrick Brown has.

In the era B.T. (Before Trump) the hapless PC Party leader wasn't willing to fully embrace the crazy.  His support for a carbon tax and repudiation of sex-ed are old news at this point.

But with two byelections on the horizon- which the PCs are fated to win not because of Brown's distancing himself from the edge, but in spite of it Patrick may want to consider reinventing himself yet again.

When chants of "Drain The Swamp" can be heard in Ottawa Vanier the safest Liberal seat in Ottawa and possibly the province the time for being "inclusive" and sticking to pocketbook issues and corruption may have passed.

It's unclear whether the relative silence of the Liberals is because they think they are giving the PC's enough rope to hang themselves, or if they have finally been stunned into shamed silence by the charges laid against Gerry Lougheed in the wake of the Sudbury byelection.  It hardly matters, though.  Like it was in Scarborough Rouge-River, the fire seems to be out of the Liberals' hearts.

Calls for Wynne's resignation will echo loudly if Vanier goes blue.  The OLP powerbrokers may pull an Allison Redford and yank her from the Premier's chair against her will, flushing the toilet before the PC's have a chance and throwing the party into a quickie leadership race.

Vaughan MPP Steven Del Duca, Don Valley East MPP Michael Coteau, and Ottawa Centre's Yasir Naqvi are names I've heard tossed around for her replacement.  All three men can match Brown's hustle and ruthless aggression.

But even if the party chooses to stick with Wynne, the pressure on Patrick to go hard against the Liberals is going to intensify.  Can he resist?  Should he?

Well, if my opinion counts anymore after getting stumped by Trump, I'd urge him to do what I'm doing and wait before pouncing….and keep a close eye on his fellow Simcoe County politician, Kellie Leitch, who is currently testing the limits of what is acceptable in Canadian politics.

Brown's missteps have come when he is being too hasty.  His support for a carbon tax came as a surprise during what was supposed to be a happy moment at a PC Party Convention, and the sex-ed fumble caught many off guard as well.

Populist or not, if he is ever to become Premier, his long game could use a little work.

Let him sit back, enjoy his showing in the byelections and hunker down for what promises to be a long and bitter winter of discontent.

Written by Josh Lieblein

In a Federal Court judgment released Thursday, Justice Robert Barnes ruled that the government did not infringe on the start-up and strict-paywall online news outlet Blacklock's Reporter's copyright when a Finance Canada employee obtained—without request—two of the news site's articles about the federal department via email, and then shared with several other Finance employees.

In Justice Barnes ruling he stated the Defendants had the legal right to use and share the two articles with others in Finance under the Copyright Act's fair dealing because "[a]s a source, the Department had a direct and immediate interest in their content."  Justice Barnes also highlighted in his ruling that the two articles were not infringed copies as the Blacklock's subscriber, who sent Finance the articles, and the Finance employees were unaware and had not "agreed" to Blacklock's terms and conditions.  Justice Barnes also found the provisions within the terms and conditions "did not unambiguously prohibit the circulation of Blacklock's copy for personal or non-commercial purposes."

The Federal Court judge made it clear he thought the news site was overreaching its rights under the Act: "…Blacklock's is not entitled to special treatment because its financial interests may be adversely affected by the fair use of its material."

Justice Barnes also threw out the government's counsel's argument that Blacklock's is a "copyright troll" abusing its rights to its copy.

Blacklock's publisher Holly Doan had no comment after the ruling.  But Doan, before the trial, said, "The facts in the cases are all different and Blacklock's intends to litigate each one."

Some of the other nearly dozen other claims Blacklock's has filed against multiple federal departments and agencies involve employees registering for single user accounts with the news outlet and then proceeding to distribute to dozens or hundreds of people within the department.  These other cases—currently under a stay of proceedings—will likely further define what scale of distribution is acceptable as fair dealing under the Act, and may also test the Harper government's Copyright Modernization Act legislation, which amended the Act to include "technology protection measures" (i.e. paywalls) as a legitimate tool for creators to protect their content online.

Whether the other cases go to trial will depend on the lifting of the stay of proceedings and if Blacklock's and its counsel decide to continue to pursue litigating the government after this unfavourable ruling.

Justice Barnes's dismissal of Blacklock's claim also includes the plaintiff covering the legal costs of the defendant.

Written by Graeme C. Gordon