March 1st, 2026 | Grant Johnson

Decline: Canada's Plague Of Self-Inflicted Nothingness

Recently the Globe and Mail published an article about how Canada is poorer than Alabama. This article apparently hit the chattering classes hard down east, but for those of us on the right in Canada we likely already know this and have for quite some time. If you want to read the article without the paywall you can do so here.

The conclusion of the article says it all: ”there is a glaring lesson in the Deep South: If Canadians remain complacent, the rest of the world will eat our lunch.”

This has been happening now for generations. The demise of Nortel and Blackberry were the obvious signs that Canada is not going to be the tech hub that Laurentian elites dream of. Our tech sector isn’t actually too bad, but everything is farm league. When the company gets big enough they leave or get bought out. The United States has a tech sector that is 20 times larger than ours. 

Industry is another issue. We’ve used our open access to the United States market for decades now and our low dollar has allowed us to reap the rewards of lots of direct investment. Now that those open ended days of free trade are over, we no longer have to the access to the U.S. and consequently we are going to see a massive amount of deindustrialization. 

Mark Carney is flying around the world trying to handshake his way into the economies overseas, but none of this is amounting to anything concrete. This is a fact that seems lost on the Elbows Up! crowd. They are interpreting soaring speeches with real life results. Unlike Alabama, Canada is still stuck in Woketardia and isn’t doing what needs to be done in order to make Canada an attractive place to do business. 

It’s going to get worse.

Canadians are so propagandized by anti-Trump media that they are rallying behind a guy who was basically Trudeau’s puppeteer. Everything he fundamentally values is the opposite of what Canada needs in order to be successful by normal conservative standards. We keep hearing from the chattering classes that we need to reduce red tape, lower taxes, cut bureaucracy, free up internal trade restrictions between provinces and develop a culture of innovation to address the productivity gap we have with the United States.

But nothing ever happens.

Carney comes back from some trade meeting with the President of Cambodia or whatever and has a Memorandum of Understanding, stating the two countries would like to investigate doing more business with one another and the Liberal media starts doing victory laps as though it means something.

I’m old enough to remember Jean Chretien doing his Team Canada approach and travelling around the world to “sign deals” and “do business”. Harper too signed all sorts of Mark Carney styled “deals” and “understandings”...51 in total with countries as diverse as Jordan and Honduras. And yet, as Jason Kenney conceded in a recent podcast, not much happened with it. You can sign the deals but you actually have to trade. We don’t. So all this celebration about Mark Carney building massive European trade alliances is going to amount to nothing. 

The nothingness is now palpable and it is showing up in unemployment and food bank lines and housing prices and wage stagnation and grocery inflation. The nothingness has gone on for far too long while the regime that rules over us minces about warm weather in the future and gender wang. 

I’m getting awfully tired of listening to podcasts and reading articles and scrolling social media and watching news media clips in which people keep reiterating the same old prescriptions while nothing ever changes. Frankly, I think it is too late. Not in a hopeless sense, but in the sense that any sort of restoration is possible. The time to radically change directions and correct course would have been the 2019 election. As shitty as Andrew Scheer is, if he had gotten a slim minority and punted Trudeau, then Canada could have maybe reformed or at least continued on the Harper path of incrementalism towards reform.

Our only way out now is through. 

After Covid insanity and now Carney-mania, it is clear that the old Canada is gone and not coming back. We’re going to have to enjoy the decline until we reach a new zenith in which a new order can be installed. 

I’ve said before that Canada’s trajectory will be that of Argentina before the rise of Milei. We’re going to look at declining public services. Increasing unemployment. Debased currency. Bigger brain drains. It will be slow enough that people won’t really truly notice it. Year by year decline will leave us further and further behind. That’s the thing about all the Trump hate. Canada’s decline is going to outlast Trump himself…and that’s when some serious questions might finally start to be asked. In other words, Canada in 2030 is going to be much worse in many different metrics than it is today. Who will Elbows Up! Canadians blame then?

This is all self-inflicted far-left, Woke policy, but what about other developments? Notably the big three hallmarks of modernity.

The rise of A.I. is a serious and real game changer. Canada is mostly made up of service jobs…many of which are at risk of being replaced with AI. (28% of total jobs according to the Conference Board of Canada to be precise). This is happening sooner rather than later. The gains in end results will be great for people, but the collateral damage in the meantime will be significant. It will be a rough transition and there will be winners and losers. Canada, however, is not well positioned to be a winner in this field. It will destroy more than build in a country like ours. 

The other relentless factor is our declining fertility rate, leading to both the disappearance of “Old Stock” Canadians and an increasingly geriatric population with high needs and high demands and the willingness to vote for both. 

Canadian leaders have been preparing for this inevitability for decades. Brian Mulroney was the first Prime Minister to address the decline when he raised immigration rates to 250,000 people a year every year back in 1990. This worked for a decade or two, but didn’t correct the underlying problem. Then the Century Initiative decided that Canada should have 100 million people by the year 2100 and the Liberals cranked immigration up to over 1 million a year for a handful of years, only slightly reducing in 2025.

We’ve seen the problems compounding with doing this. Blank-slate liberals think human material is all the same, but we’ve discovered the hard way what happens with replacement level immigration. Social tension and declining quality of life for everyone. Progressives don’t learn though… they double down. Get ready for more troubles ahead.

Thirdly, there is a cohort of Canadians that understand all too well exactly what is happening to our country. We are overwhelmed by the Elbows Up! crowd, but we are still a significant minority and many of us are found in Quebec and Alberta.

The PQ is gaining momentum and with the recent by-election win they look set to win the upcoming general election. Get ready to hear endlessly about separation again. This time, however, the people of Quebec have had 40 years of results with which to measure the success of Canada, and those results aren’t great for them.

The demographics of Quebec are more brutal than the rest of Canada and issues regarding language and culture and history are going to loom much larger than they did in 1980 or 1995. Preservation of peoples is now top of mind for many (especially younger) citizens in Canada. When the next referendum comes Canada will be a declining, Woke, expensive and failing country. Waving maple leaf flags in the streets of Montreal isn’t going to work twice.

And then there’s Alberta. The separatist movement in Alberta is two-tiered. On the one hand you’ve got intelligent people that see the great history of it all and view building an independent nation as something grand and ambitious and beneficial, even if the costs are high. The second tier is the hicks from the sticks that are filled with poorly thought out but vividly felt grievances and don’t give a toss about the criticism hurled against them.

Neither of these groups is large enough to make independence successful. The impact, however, is going to be bad for Canada on both accounts. Multiple referendums taking place in different parts of the country advocating separation tells you what you need to know about a country. 

We’re not united. We’re not strong. We’re not happy.

Both situations are going to lead to bad branding and a diminishing amount of foreign investment. Trump recognizes the weakness of Canada and he’s the first one to openly and mockingly acknowledge what has been the case for decades. Canada today is like late-era Soviet Union…scoleric…rotten…on the precipice of massive change, but at a glance from the outside everything seems the same. Multiple referendums on separation will only reveal the truth even harder.

Anyway, in the meantime, keep on working… keep on living. Nations come and go, and have throughout history. Smart people adapt and thrive regardless of the circumstances. There is a ton of opportunity within all this chaos. Keep at it and always be prepared.

Elbows Up!