It’s that time of year to bring back one of The Hub’s favourite traditions: giving our readers a head’s up on what they can expect in the year to come. As for how well our contributor’s crystal balls work, well, check out last year’s predictions and judge for yourself. Looking ahead, here are some can’t-miss predictions for 2025.
Border smuggling will be booming business, Hollywood will continue its decline, and nuclear war is coming
By Harrison Lowman, The Hub’s managing editor
1. As soon as he takes office, President Trump will try to keep his promise of deporting some 11 million illegal migrants from the United States. His efforts will result in a mad rush of thousands attempting to escape across their northern border, creating new Canadian jobs, but in the worst way. We will witness the emergence of the loathsome “Canadian coyote.”
In Mexico, “coyotes” are miscreants paid by desperate migrants to smuggle them across the border. It’s “a name which describes the scavengers that prowl the borders.” And business is booming. Coyotes and their cartel overlords now bring in some $19 billion a year. Currently, it costs anywhere from $17,000 to $20,000 to be smuggled across the Mexican border.
In Quebec, which has borne the brunt of irregular border crossings, a growing number of French Canadian smugglers will be known as “les coyotes” and will have close linkages to the Hells Angels and the Mafia.
2. Hollywood will continue to lose its relevance as it continues to only pump out unimaginative sequels, superhero multiverses, and progressive social commentary not-so-stealthily-packaged as entertainment, for audiences that just wants to switch off their brains and recline in a Cineplex chair, popcorn in hand.
New players will continue to enter the prestige movie-making business. One of a growing number of independent conservative production companies (like the Daily Wire) will come out with a flick that is a real Oscar contender, directed by a 94-year-old Clint Eastwood.
3. 2025 will mark the 80th anniversary of the first and only time strategic nuclear weapons have been used in war—exploding above Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.
Tactical nuclear weapons or small nuclear warheads meant for precise strikes, have never been used in the history of man. But they could be used this year in a counter-strike by an Israeli state responding to an Iranian regime lashing out having lost its “Axis of Resistance” (its Assad, Hezbollah, and Hamas proxies) and to an “international community” it feels is out to get them and has no right making the rules.
You’re going to have to start paying to use an airplane toilet
By Kirk LaPointe, The Hub‘s B.C. correspondent
1. Airlines will introduce in-flight, user-pay bathrooms, booked only online in advance on a paywalled website requiring registration, user ID document scanning, two-factor verification, and letters of recommendation from three sources cleared by federal authorities.
2. New federal legislation, the Distracted Pedestrian Act, will make it illegal to walk while viewing your smartphone.
3. Another federal measure, the 15 percent administrative surcharge on taxes it collects, will borrow a term from a similar process in the concert business and be termed a “convenience fee.”
4. Schools will restore their core curriculum by requiring children to recite the alphabet at the start of the day and, empathetic about the toll such learning takes on the classroom, only the first 10 numbers at the end of the day.
5. The Canadian economy will pursue its drive to be the world’s least productive by instilling a national maximum workday in winter that starts one hour after sunrise and ends one hour before sundown, and four hours after and before in summer.
