Dear Friend,

A month after the vote I wish to share with you some reflections on the state of Canadian politics following the October election. But first I want to express my heartfelt thanks for your generous contribution to our campaign, and for the friendship extended to me in person. I will remain ever grateful.

Now that the dust of the election season is settled, we can see more clearly and analyze more confidently what the results in electing the 43rd parliament in Ottawa mean for our country.

As a candidate for the PPC in London North Centre, I was disappointed with the final results as were members of the People’s Party across the country and those who voted for the party. We expected receiving more than the final count of somewhere close to two per cent of the total votes cast in the election, and we did not expect to see our leader, Maxime Bernier, lose his seat in Beauce, Quebec, which he had held for more than a decade.

But the circumstances and the context in which the PPC contested the 2019 election were heavily weighted against it. The PPC was barely a year in the making, and the five weeks campaign offered a very small window within which to deliver widely its message and platform to the electorate. Moreover, the mainstream media corrupted by the Liberal orchestrated hand out of some $600 million of taxpayer money meant, as it turned out to be, that the intent to insulate the Prime Minister and the Liberal party in power from media-led public scrutiny while bludgeoning the opposition with hearsay and “fake” news worked in the months leading up to the election and during the election campaign.

The mainstream pro-Liberal and pro-left media was stacked against the PPC. The media made no effort to mask the smear campaign they fabricated branding Maxime Bernier as a leader of a party consisting of “alt-right” white bigots hostile to immigrants, to Muslims and Jews, to multiculturalism and the progressive consensus of the Establishment elite in politics, business, academia, and the media. We now know that Andrew Scheer’s Conservative party hired Warren Kinsella, the notorious Liberal party fixer, to malign the PPC and the leader by planting illicit “fake” news in the media. And they succeeded in spreading falsehood which hurt us in the polls.

Yet if we put in perspective the effort behind the 2019 campaign and the 300,000  Canadians who voted for the party, it can be said that Maxime Bernier and the activists he brought together have planted the seeds for PPC’s growth right across the country. It is the only party that places Canada’s national interest and the well-being of Canadians as key tests to assess merits of any policy initiative, domestic and foreign, by Ottawa. The PPC is, unlike the origin of the regional-based Reform party in 1988, a Pan-Canadian party with a Pan-Canadian nationalist-populist vision to help Canadians from coast to coast take back their country from the Establishment elite-driven drift towards Globalism.

Indeed, during this election campaign the PPC platform listed the most pertinent issues that Canadians need to seriously and urgently think about if the problems confronting Canada are to be effectively addressed. We talked about: the economy and jobs; the urgency to balance the budget and eliminate the spiral of deficit spending; fairness and equity on the subject of equalization payment; federal-provincial relations; the perils of growing western alienation; building the pipeline; removing barriers on inter-provincial trade; protecting our national sovereignty; rejecting the Paris Accord, while the provinces decide on carbon tax; restoring and respecting the rights of the first nations within our constitution; repealing multiculturalism and Motion-103 on “Islamophobia” that restricts our freedom of speech; withdrawing from the UN Global Compact on Migration; and sustainable immigration policy with numbers provided to begin a meaningful national conversation.

Immigration and migration from the global south to the global north have become over the past decade the most compelling issue in western democracies. A growing majority of voters in the West wants less immigration. In a recent YouGov/The Sunday Times opinion poll in the U.K., for instance, done ahead of the December 12 election, 54 per cent of voters indicated the existing level of immigration was too high, while 7 per cent indicated the level was too low. In Canada, a polling done by Leger in June 2019, indicated that 63 per cent of respondents held the opinion that the government should be placing a limit on immigration as the numbers were too high and unsustainable, while 37 per cent of respondents wanted the government to raise the numbers.

As the numbers show, Canada is not an exception among western democracies when it comes to the general electorate’s apprehension on matters of immigration and migration. But the Establishment elites and their four parties in the parliament (Liberals, Conservatives, New Democrats and Green) refuse to publicly engage in any discussion on immigration, given the potential to unravel the elite consensus that Canada has been built by immigrants and existing immigration levels approaching  annually 1 per cent of the population is an asset.

It was simpler and more effective for the Establishment elite to smear the PPC as racist and anti-immigrant than in respecting the public to engage in a civil discussion on the subject that will not go away. Since PM Justin Trudeau signed the UN Global Compact on Migration and Canada is one of the choice destinations of the movement of population from the global south to the global north, immigration and migration as numbers increase will become increasingly a disruptive factor in Canadian politics not unlike the situation in Europe and the United States. Consequently, the PPC will not be deterred from addressing the subject at present and in the future.

The subject of immigration and migration is intimately bound with the question about what sort of Canada is in the making. This is the question the Establishment elites seek to avoid. Multiculturalism is based on the specious premise that all cultures are equal which, in effect, has hollowed out the culture of “old” Canada based on Judeo-Christian traditions and classical liberal values of individual rights and freedoms, while immigration and migration from the global south is rapidly altering the demographic profile of the country.

Douglas Murray in his bestselling book, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (2017), discussed at length how multiculturalism and increasing levels of immigration have “contributed to a continent in the grips of its own demise.” In my book,Delectable Lie: a liberal repudiation of multiculturalism (2011), I discussed how multiculturalism and immigration joined together paradoxically work to dilute the foundational principles of a liberal-democracy such as ours.

The West finds itself in the quarter century since the end of the Cold War enmeshed in a culture war. The speed with which secularization has proceeded under the influence of leftwing forces and cultural Marxists has effectively denuded the West of its Judeo-Christian inheritance. One major effect of this culture war is the western elites have increasingly traded their past political loyalty to their nation-states in exchange for the “one borderless world” idea under the rubric of the United Nations promoted by Globalists. It was not a slip of tongue when Justin Trudeau, in his November 2015 well publicized interview with Guy Lawson of the New York Times, indicated, “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada” and that this make of us “the first postnational state.”

Culture is upstream; politics, economics, business and how we think and live, are downstream. Multiculturalism and immigration in the period since Canada celebrated the centenary year in 1967 have greatly, almost irrevocably, changed the country. The effects of these changes are most pronounced in the major urban centres – Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver – and election results provide dramatic proof of how these changes are culturally and politically shaping Canada of the 21st century.

Let me share with you a snapshot of the 2019 election and what it signifies.

Ontario with 121 seats is where federal elections are won and lost. In 2015 the Liberals took 80 seats to oust the Harper government in Ottawa. In 2019 the Liberals won 79 seats and held on to power forming a minority government. The Liberals took all of the 25 seats in Toronto and 23 of the 31 seats in the surrounding electoral districts of the GTA. The Muslim members of the Liberal caucus from Toronto and the GTA, most if not all of them Islamist sympathizers and supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood organization, such as Iqra Khalid who moved Motion-103 in the previous parliament, were re-elected. In Milton the Deputy Leader of the Conservative party, Lisa Raitt, lost her seat to a Liberal. The town of Milton borders on the western edge of the GTA, and Lisa Raitt’s electoral defeat in 2019 tells the story of the steady “browning” of urban Canada. This “browning” is most pronounced in Toronto and the GTA with immigrants from South Asia and the Middle East.

Between Ontario/Manitoba border and Alberta/British Columbia border, the Liberal party won only 4 seats. But when it came to winning the election, it did not matter how poorly the Liberals performed across the prairie provinces. In effect, the Liberal party is now pretty much the party of “new” immigrants, – of a steadily “browning” Canada – while multiculturalism and immigration are the effective policy tools for the Liberals and the Establishment elites to secure and maintain power in Ottawa.

Moreover, Canada as a country spread across five time zones is difficult to govern at best of times. These times are not the best of times. 

The constitutional framework of our parliamentary system of government is fashioned after Britain’s Westminster system. This system originated and evolved in Britain, which is a unitary state. Canada is a federation of provinces and territories and our constitutional arrangement, while borrowed from Britain where it has worked well for the mother country, is quite broken to adequately serve the present needs of our federation. Canada cannot function harmoniously as a unitary state, which it is not. And, therefore, our constitutional arrangement needs to be reset for a more harmonious and balanced relationship between Ottawa and the provinces. This will only occur when Ottawa recognizes the provinces as equal partners in the Canadian federation. 

The Establishment elites and their political parties are wedded to the idea of running Canada as a unitary state. Their embrace of the Globalist led UN global agenda has meant imposing Ottawa’s policy preferences, as with the Paris Accord and the Compact on Migration, on the provinces. The PPC is the only party firmly opposed to this trend of asymmetrical federalism in which the provinces are viewed and treated as unequal partners of the federal government. We, in the PPC, believe that the disharmony in our federation and the increasing alienation in western provinces, especially in resource rich provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, can only be remedied by resetting our federal-provincial relations on an equitable basis and our constitutional arrangement harmonized to the needs of Canada as a federation.  

We also know, however, that none of the above will occur unless there is substantive reform of the manners in which Ottawa is run. The present arrangement is the result over past several decades of the centralization of power and decision-making with the Prime Minister and in the PMO at the expense of the cabinet, of the parliamentary caucus of the governing party and of parliament itself. There is no inclination in the leadership of the Liberal party, or the Conservative party, to undo this arrangement and restore the rule of parliamentary government in which the people’s representatives function as they were meant to in conducting the nation’s business. Democracy is not simply periodic elections to fill seats in a parliament; and when, in effect, democracy becomes simply a routine of elections, then it becomes reduced to merely being a disguise for rule by an elite. How far Canada has gone down this road of elite rule might be a matter of some dispute, but it is undeniable that our constitutional arrangement is broken and needs urgent repairs.

During this 2019 election PPC was the only party that framed the challenges facing Canada in terms of Globalism and Islamism, the twin forces at work undermining our cultural and political inheritance via multiculturalism and unsustainable immigration. We pointed out that Globalism and Islamism joined together are the two elephants in the room, which the Establishment elites and the media are committed in denying how their presence and influence is turning Canada into a laboratory for Globalism. The PPC was also the only party, in the context of the on-going culture war, to speak about defending freedom of speech, freedom of religion and of conscience, and the protection of the unborn. We pointed out that a culture that does not take sanctity of life as an axiom is a culture that invariably is one of expediency, of where ends justifies the means.

Trudeau’s wish to have Canada seated in the Security Council during his time in office seems obsessive, yet consistent with his UN-driven agenda. He has re-doubled his effort to win the required votes of the member-states, and this was in full display when soon after the election Canada voted for the UN resolution moved by North Korea in support of Palestinian self-determination and against Israel. Throwing Israel and the Canadian Jewish community under the Liberal bus is also aligning Canada with the Islamist agenda in the UN, and expecting in return votes of the Organization of Islamic Co-operation (OIC) members who together form the largest single voting bloc in the General Assembly.

Though Canada formally is a multiparty parliamentary democracy, in reality it has increasingly become a one-party dominant government of, by, and for the Establishment elites. The 2019 election re-confirmed this reality, and why. Conservative party’s offer in this recent election was a plate of turkey without any salt leftover from the thanksgiving dinner. It was a dish that neither “new” Canadians in the urban centres would touch, nor “old” stock Canadians would relish. But the Conservative party is incapable of offering any dish that Canadians would find attractive, since structurally and policy-wise it has been for a long time now the Establishment elites’ “tweedle-dum” to their Liberal “tweedle-dee.”

The life of the 43rd parliament with a minority Liberal government elected in October 2019 should not, given past history, last a full term. We might once again enter a cycle of minority governments, as we did with the 2004 election. The more attentive and informed public will awaken, I believe, as the difficulties confronting our country deepen to realize that the remedy cannot be provided by the Establishment parties responsible for them in the first place. Canadians will then seek the remedy on offer from the only alternative to both the “tweedle-dee” and the “tweedle-dum” of the Establishment elites.

As a member of, and recent candidate for, the People’s Party of Canada under the leadership of Maxime Bernier, I expect that our party will contest for seats whenever the election is called. I invite you to become a member of the PPC, if you are not already one, and support our effort in protecting Canada’s sovereignty, defending our freedoms, and repairing our broken federation.  

Cordially,

Sallim