We've had two instances of lefty-on-lefty crime in as many weeks, and in both cases, conservatives (despite having no dog in either fight) enthusiastically and loudly picked a side, as if there was something to be gained by them from doing so.

If you haven't been paying attention lately, you missed conservatives rallying around the Toronto Star  of all newspapers because it wasn't doing enough to support the activism of Desmond Cole, a journalist and Black Lives Matter-affiliated activist who wrote for the paper until recently.

Trudeau puff-piece fashioner Jonathan Kay has also become a conservative hero of sorts after he resigned as editor of The Walrus magazine after a backlash which ensured after he defended another liberal, Hal Niedzviecki, who also resigned after he wrote that he didn't believe in cultural appropriation of First Nations culture but that there should be a prize for the best cultural appropriators or some other hastily written piffle.

If I haven't given these two situations their due consideration and context, it's because I unlike the liberals and associated conservatives who just HAVE to give their opinion on issues they know nothing about don't have the appropriate level of understanding and I'm not going to pretend that I do.

And even if I was somehow an expert on carding, or issues facing First Nations, I still wouldn't feel this overriding need to write about it in the pages of a newspaper.  Because I am a conservative, and unless I've misread the situation completely, there's not much conservatives can add to the discussion without being dismissed out of hand at best.

Truth be told, I can't see how any of the participants in either of these clusterkludges found themselves better off for having done so.  I don't know what they are trying to prove, or who they feel the need to prove it to.

Is the hope that Hal Niedzviecki or the editorial board of the Toronto Star will realize what fools they've been and spontaneously revert to writing about ballooning deficits and the folly of carbon taxes?

Do we start forming an exploratory committee for a Jon Kay Toronto mayoral bid for 2018?

Allegedly principled conservatives across the country are so desperate to hold back the left wing tide of terror that they are sacrificing themselves on the altar of anything or anyone who may have a fighting chance, from the Maxime Bernier campaign to the Patrick Brown experiment to the BC Liberals.

They are praying that a resistance to political correctness gone mad will spontaneously form.

But as Jon Kay's sad end demonstrates, there is little support out there for those who try to fight back or compromise.

So we conservatives can continue to put our faith and resources into lost liberal causes, or we can let the centrists reap the whirlwind that they have sown.

For after all, this mess is of their own making.  They're the ones who gave the radicals a platform in the first place.  Their attempts to impose progress when it wasn't called for opened the floodgates.

And now, as a result, more and more speech is being classified as unacceptable and deserving of censure.

So let us then be silent, and let the centrist meddlers wear their shame.  Let them come to us for a change, when their high position is threatened.

Photo Credit: National Post

Written by Josh Lieblein

So, I don't know what the heck is going on in British Columbia.  I don't know who's going to be Premier two weeks from now or what the seat breakdown will be.  I don't know why Christy Clark declared victory, why John Horgan told his faithful to wait out the vote counting, and why there have been so many articles Andrew Weaver "holding the balance of power".

I do know this, however: unless the NDP wind up with a crushing majority which they probably won't Patrick Brown needs to start realizing how screwed he is.

Why?  Because the NDP should have won a crushing majority in this election.  This election should not have been too close to call, and it should not still be being decided.  The BC Liberals ran a horrific campaign that included their leader getting ambushed at a grocery store by an angry voter.  Throughout the campaign a narrative of the virtuous plucky union underdogs taking on a bunch of corrupt corporate lackeys who were Liberal in name only was allowed to develop.  News stories calling the BC Liberals out on their spin were published unanswered.

As a smug Ontarian watching all of this, my reaction was the same as it usually is watching a provincial election in a province other than my own: one of bemusement.  How delightfully quaint and precious, I thought.

If you are from BC or another province, you might be surprised to learn that no news organization would dare publish a story calling out the Ontario Liberals on their crap in the middle of an election.  The de facto response from the Ontario Liberals if this happens is to openly question that organization's integrity and professionalism and announce that if it happens again there will be no further access to cabinet ministers or the Premier.

If a voter would be so presumptuous as to actually tell the Premier of Ontario to his or her face that they think the government is doing a lousy job, Liberal campaign staffers would immediately as they did one time in Strathroy, Ontario during Election 2011 put their personal safety at risk to create a human shield around the Premier.

And let me be quite clear the very idea of a narrative developing during election time where a party is seen to have the government on the defensive is out of the question here in Upper Canada.  Sure, there are lots of embarrassing stories about Wynne now, but as soon the writ drops you won't be able to find a single column inch that doesn't list two Liberal positives to every one PC or NDP positive.

My point is don't talk to an Ontarian about BC's so called corporate media that favours the Liberals above all else and against all reasons.  Here, the powerful interests make sure ALL parties bend to their will, not just one.

This is a province where, in 2018, no party will campaign to ease restrictions on the beer monopoly.  Where no party will dare to offend the mighty teacher's unions or green energy lobbyists.  Where if either of the two opposition parties stray out of the narrowly defined message box even for a microsecond the entirety of #onpoli will rise up in righteous indignation and punish the offending party until that party's partisans will be afraid to even speak privately of whatever it was that caused the social media firestorm.

(If you doubt this, find a PC Party of Ontario staffer who kept their job after the last election and whisper "10,000 jobs!" when they don't expect it, and watch them spontaneously drop into a fetal position.)

Which brings me back to why our old friend P-Bizzle should be very, very concerned if a bunch of left coast socialists couldn't take down Christy Clark.

In his heart of hearts, Patrick no doubt wishes for a campaign like the BC NDP had, where they got lots of opportunities to get their message out and there were lots of own-goals by the government.  But it will not happen, and he knows it.

How do I know this?

Because a poorly kept secret is that Patrick's people are Christy Clark's people, and Christy Clark's people are Patrick's people.  The PC Party of Ontario and the Ontario Liberals too contract their services out to the BC Liberals at election time, just like they did during the 2014 election.

Yes, when an election call goes out in BC, the OLP and PCPO stop trying to kill each other and take a nice vacation to the West Coast together so they can clobber the NDP for a few weeks.  And while they are there, they talk.

Once those votes are counted out West, there aren't going to be too many surprises left for one party to spring on the other when they return.  Both likely know exactly what the others are really thinking, and when they resume the charade of pretending like one party wants to unseat the other, it'll be as clear as ever that it's all for show.

Written by Josh Lieblein

Last week Trudeau's technocratic tinkering continued with Ottawa giving universities an ultimatum that they either ensure their distribution of federal academic grants better mirror Canada's demography or risk their research funding yanked.  Forget competition and meritocracy as the determinants in awarding funding, universities must now discriminate between things like skin colour and sex of applicants in deciding who should be awarded, all in the ironical name of equity.

One of the major reasons stipulated for this decree from upon high on Trudeau's Hill is that only 30 per cent of federal grant recipients are women.  Yet, does anyone really think that universities — in this safe space, social justice warrior climate — are still by-and-large discriminating against women?  Perhaps there is another, simpler explanation than patriarchal hegemony for the gap.

The Canada Research Chairs Program invests $265 million per year in university research in engineering and the natural sciences, health sciences, humanities and social sciences.  When breaking down the divvying up of these 2,000 annual research chairs into different categories of study, it turns out that 45 per cent are for the natural sciences and engineering, 35 per cent are for health sciences, and 20 per cent are for social sciences and humanities.  So 80 per cent of these research chairs are given to those in STEM fields.

Now let's look at the proportion of women and men who pursue a STEM education.  In 2011, the most recent numbers from Statistics Canada, men made up 60.9 per cent of STEM degrees from the ages of 25 to 34 (it's even more lopsided when older graduates are included).  In engineering and mathematics it was even more pronounced.  Men hold 76.4 and 69.6 per cent of degrees in these disciplines respectively.  When looking at those who attain masters and doctorate degrees in these disciplines, the concentration of men increases even more drastically.  Even the social sciences and humanities, now dominated by women, which only receives 20 per cent of the Canada Research Chairs, becomes more of an even split between the sexes in the share of doctorates.

So, we have a much higher percentage of men getting doctorate degrees in the fields of study given the lionshare of the Canadian Research Chairs.  Thus a similarly high percentage of recipients are also men.  Yet the government demands universities meet higher quotas of women recipients, raw numbers be damned; Trudeau's gender-equal cabinet all over again.

This is the inevitable problem underlying affirmative action.  You discriminate between people not based on actual achievement, but instead on things like race or sex, lowering the standards for some, and, in the process, unfairly raising the standards for others.  Of course the technocrat argues this double standard is necessary for the sake of encouraging more women into these careers they wouldn't otherwise feel welcome to pursue.  But anyone looking at how women are now the majority in fields like medicine and law can plainly see this argument is largely bunk, especially considering there are plenty of scholarship incentives to steer women towards pursuing male-majority fields.

The groundbreaking book Why Men Earn More (2005) by feminist Warren Farrel still rings true today and debunks the above myth, instead revealing how the sexes have general affinities towards different career paths.

Farrel's book dispelled the largely mythic gender wage gap the Trudeau government continues to perpetuate.

Farrel layed out 25 complex reasons why men earn more than women on average.  Although too numerous to list here, among the reasons: jobs ranked the worst (although usually paying above the average income) are male-dominated because women tend to avoid these undesirable or dangerous jobs; men are more likely to take financial risks that can yield high payoffs, while women generally prefer a more secure career; and men work longer paid hours on average than women, which can significantly increase income.  Farrel found as little as a 13 per cent increase in hourly work per week translated to whopping average of 45 per cent more annual income.

In Canada, Women work 35.5 hours a week on average compared to men working 41.1 hours on average.  The primary reason for this disparity is women still spend more time doing domestic work and raising children.  It's intellectually dishonest for Trudeau's government to conflate this major factor in the two sexes differences in earnings by blaming it on the so-called wage gap of women making 87 cents to the dollar of their male colleagues.  Trudeau's technocrats then justify tailoring bad policy to address the wage gap misnomer.

The Liberals' 2017 "gender-sensitive" budget devoted a whole section on "equal opportunity" for the genders, but it only attempts to address the problems of women.  In 2014 there were a total of 515,865 postsecondary graduates in Canada.  57.7 per cent of all graduates and 58.8 per cent of university graduates were women according to Statistics Canada.  Furthermore, 8.5 per cent of men ages 25 to 34 haven't graduated high school compared to 5.4 per cent of women.  Instead of addressing this growing disparity in education, Trudeau's government is exacerbating it by enhancing the Canada Student Loans Program, which the budget says "benefit[s] women in particular."  Beyond the folly of mainly investing in a surplus of superfluous liberal arts degrees, this government policy also completely ignores that men are underrepresented in the number of postsecondary graduates.

Trudeau's government also doesn't seem to care about its own sexism.  A Statistics Canada study revealed 71 per cent of the 4.1 million government public-sector workers are women, and half of the executive positions are now held by women, despite women only making up 47 per cent of the Canadian workforce as a whole.  The Liberal government has no qualms about its own unbalanced hiring of women over men for these premium jobs.

The tinkering Liberals also don't seem concerned in addressing the suicide rate of men being three times higher than that of women; the mass incarceration rates and deaths of indigenous men ("National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls"); men making up the vast majority of serious workplace injuries and fatalities; the often absurd pecuniary and parental custody punishments of many men in divorce courts; and major job losses predominantly affecting men in the downturn of the oil sands and manufacturing.

For obvious political purposes it makes sense for Trudeau's government to focus on women's issues, ignoring men's plights.  The 2015 election saw 68 per cent turnout of women voters compared to only 64.1 per cent of men, a disparity two percentage points higher than in the 2011 election.  Not to mention women tend to be more Liberal-leaning in the first place.  Hence Trudeau's broken record: "I'm a feminist."

Furthermore, reductionist talking points like the 87 cent wage gap build a powerful narrative that men in all realms of society just have it better off than women, and to raise any objections to this notion is to be cast as a misogynistic men's rights activist.

Recently second-wave feminist Camille Paglia was on CBC Radio cutting through today's feminist gospel that stubbornly overlooks the inherent differences between the two sexes, which cause likewise differences in outcomes.

"It's absolutely atrocious that we have gender studies, women studies programs and courses being taught without any reference whatsoever to biology… Most men have anywhere from 8 to ten times as much … testosterone than women have in their own bodies.  You don't think that is causing some differences in the brain, instincts, in the way we approach the world?" said Paglia to an incredulous host.

Unfortunately if the Liberal government continues to (willfully?) misdiagnose disparities between the sexes by tinkering in the name of feminism, while turning a blind eye to the (sometimes literally) grave problems of men, it's only a matter of time before more of the latter is languishing in more idleness, suicide and crime.

Written by Graeme C. Gordon