Inside Policy Talks

“A government that wants to spend will always find a crisis or a reason to spend beyond its means,” says former parliamentary budget officer Yves Giroux. The former federal budget watchdog offered his reflections in the lead-up to Budget 2026, which is widely expected to layer further onto Canada’s ever-growing national debt. In 2025, the public accounts of Canada put the accumulated national debt...

“A good chunk of the population” in France is opposed to what the French culture and way of life represents, and “that’s a huge, huge problem,” says an international security expert. Zineb Riboua, a research fellow with the Hudson Institute’s Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East, said this is “a fundamental weakness” at a time when Europe faces not only great internal strife, but also...

A climate of self-censorship in which students fear being “ostracized or shamed by the larger group” is the dominant force shutting down learning on Canadian university campuses, says the vice-dean at one of the country’s major research institutes. Jacqueline Leighton, an education psychologist who is the University of Alberta’s vice-dean of faculty development and faculty affairs, knows first-han...

Canada’s bureaucracy is very good at “self-diagnosis of its problems” but “what it's very bad at is treating those symptoms,” says a retired veteran public servant who spent years working at the centre of government. Jean-Guy Forgeron, who served as chief of staff to the clerk of the privacy council, and held key roles in other ministries like Fisheries and Oceans, says this means that when it com...

Allowing male prisoners into what used to be female-only spaces has fundamentally “changed the landscape of women's prisons,” says Heather Mason, a former federal inmate turned advocate for women’s sex-based rights. Mason’s time in correctional institutions has given her first-hand knowledge of a jarring reality: that biological males in Canada are allowed to self-identify as women and then serve...

Canada has been “using subsidies as a substitute to help solve our competitiveness problem,” says economist Jerome Gessaroli. He called this approach “wrong,” “inefficient,” and “expensive.” Gessaroli offered his observations as he reflected on the state of investment in Canada, in the wake of the recent high-profile investment summit the federal government hosted in Toronto. He said the summit wa...

In 1985, a Supreme Court of Canada decision ( B.C. Motor Vehicles ) about driving with a suspended licence helped transform Section 7 of Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms into a powerful tool of judicial review. But did the Court decision go too far? Section 7 protects life, liberty, and security of the person, but says these rights may only be limited in accordance with the “principles of f...

Western societies face a growing crisis with a gradual waning of trust, social cohesion, and shared norms. But is something deeper happening to the cultural foundations that make free societies possible? As these norms weaken, individual desires are increasingly placed above social obligations while common identities are deconstructed and traditional sources of authority are treated as oppressive....

Critics of DEI have long warned that demographic-based hiring requirements can come at the expense of merit and academic excellence. In a recent MLI paper, The equity excellence trade-off: A study of EDI in the Canada Research Chairs Program , senior fellow Eric Kaufmann, alongside coauthors Leif Rasmussen and Jonah Davids, examines the publication records, citation measures, and other indicators...

Canada's dairy industry is one of the most protected sectors of the Canadian economy. But is that protection holding the industry back? While Canada's dairy sector has long benefited from policies designed to protect farmers and maintain stable prices, critics argue that these measures are limiting competition, innovation, and opportunities for growth. As dairy industries in other countries become...

Latvia is home to Canada's largest overseas military deployment, with more than 2,000 members of the Canadian Armed Forces serving on NATO's eastern flank. Why are Canadians there? Why should Canadians care? As Russia's war against Ukraine continues into another year the world has become more dangerous, more divided, and less predictable.  In response, Canada has made one of its most significant i...

Special episode: Peter Copeland, acting director of domestic policy at MLI, sat down last month with eminent Canadian political scientists Rainer Knopff and Ted Morton. 25 years ago Morton and Knopff's seminal book, The Charter Revolution and the Court Party, offered an important counterpoint to the otherwise prevailing view that the Charter was an unmitigated good for Canadian society. The discus...

By almost every material measure life has become safer, richer, and more convenient... so why do many people seem more anxious, lonely, and unhappy? We often explain this malaise in economic or psychological terms but Carl Trueman argues that its deepest cause is spiritual: Western societies have rejected the belief that human beings have a given nature that dictates what is good for us. Our under...

For years Canada seemed to be the more peaceful part of North America. But that narrative is changing. Recently a Toronto police officer was shot while investigating a series of shootings in the city, including one that took place at the city’s US Consulate. The death of Constable Marc Pinizzotto is a tragedy. But it is also a warning. The lines between organized crime, foreign interference, terro...

For young men, there used to be “a ton of societal pressure on you to make something of yourself.” That’s one of many positive culture norms that we’ve now lost, says author Rob Henderson. Today, “some guys are going to be ambitious and hardworking regardless of what people tell them,” Henderson says. But for many others, “if there's no judgment, no norm, no expectation,” they will sink into a sta...

Canada’s judges have become “completely divorced from reality” in the reasoning they use to bat down mandatory minimum sentences for serious crimes, says Christine Van Geyn, interim executive director of the Canadian Constitution Foundation. Tension around this issue reached a breaking point in October 2025 when the Supreme Court of Canada issued its ruling in the Senneville case. The court struck...

Some of the boldest predictions about Artificial Intelligence have forecast that white-collar workers are soon to become obsolete. This comes as rapidly advancing AI appears more and more in our day-to-day lives — reshaping classrooms, the workplace, and how we interact with each other. But we’ve seen these transformations before. As with major past major technological upheavals—like the Industria...

Liberalism is clearly on the ropes.   To many, the threats originate from what they consider the outside: populism, authoritarianism, misinformation, and polarization.   But to others, the wounds appear self-inflicted: arising from tensions within liberalism itself.   For decades, liberal societies promised a host of goods: most notably, individual freedom. But many now look around and see lonelin...

We are in a moment of heightened focus on Canadian national identity. Ever since Donald Trump threatened to annex Canada, many Canadians have responded with the assertion that Canadian identity is unique from the United States. But this national mood comes only a few years after a campaign of tearing down statues of Canada’s seminal historic figures, and then-prime minister Justin Trudeau calling...

This week, we present a special bonus episode: a live conversation between author Rob Henderson, who famously coined the term luxury beliefs, and MLI Managing Director Brian Lee Crowley. The event was recorded in April 2026 before a live audience in Vancouver, as part of MLI's Voices That Inspire speaker series. In their conversation, Crowley and Henderson discuss the formative childhood experienc...

The West offers the “ideal environment” for an organization like the Muslim Brotherhood to carry out its operations “because we are extremely tolerant,” says Lorenzo Vidino, an expert on the Islamist organization. The Muslim Brotherhood has inspired or spawned some of the world's most dangerous terrorist organizations. Yet its goals, strategy, structure, and financing remain poorly understood – ev...

Courts have become central players in some of Canada’s biggest political and moral debates – especially since the advent of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms . That’s raised hard questions about their role, what accountability mechanisms exist, and how Canadians understand the place of the judicial branch within their system of government. Like any other institution, courts depend on public trust...

Our culture tells parents that “you can do it all” – but that's “a very dangerous narrative” and “a narcissistic trope,” says social worker and parenting coach Erica Komisar. Is it time for our culture to grapple with a hard truth: life requires setting priorities and making trade-offs between items like career and family, rather than trying to have it all at once? Modern societies invest a great...

Sports betting, online gambling, and now prediction markets are becoming harder to avoid. What was once confined to casinos or occasional wagers is now built into our phones, advertised on sports broadcasts, and increasingly our wider digital economy. This raises bigger questions about the impact of markets. Should markets always follow demand, even when it involves a social harm, letting choice p...

“The whole of the West views Islam … through a Western cultural prism,” and that’s a problem, says British author and commentator Melanie Phillips. With terrorism, extremism, and antisemitism surging throughout the West, people are looking for answers. They’re trying to understand why our leaders and institutions are failing to stand up to this threat. Phillips, one of the clearest voices sounding...