The collapsing birth rate becomes front-page news, and a long-foretold financial crash? The Hub predicts 2026 

Polish off your crystal balls, consult the stars, call up the scryer in your life—2025 is creeping to a close, and it’s time to turn our attention to what’s to come in 2026. But if the future still feels fuzzy, don’t panic: The Hub has you covered. Once again, our best prognosticators are here to provide some foolproof predictions for the headlines and happenings ahead. Is a 90-year-old prophecy about to come true?  By Howard Anglin, a doctoral student at Oxford University After the dismal record of my prognostications for 2025, this year I am cheating and stealing my prediction from an unusual source that came to my attention this month. Those familiar with the esoteric history of British Columbia will know the strange saga of Edward Arthur Wilson, better known as Brother XII. What they may not know, because to my knowledge it has not been publicised in almost 90 years, is that sometime in 1927 or 1928, Wilson made a series of cryptic “prophecies,” which were faithfully recorded by one of his followers, Mary Connally of North Carolina. I happened upon the “prophecies” in a self-published monograph dated 1936 by P.H. Elliott, titled “The Nostradamus of De Courcy Island: The Apocalyptic Prophecies of Brother XII,” which I found wedged between two larger books of local history in Sidney’s Haunted Bookshop. The frontispiece has a bookplate with the curious motto “Rack and Ruin” above the address of Craigdarroch Castle, which was then the site of Victoria College, where (a quick internet search reveals) a Percy Harris Elliott was principal from 1927-1943. The slim volume provides a history of Wilson’s time in British Columbia, mostly drawn from archival newspaper accounts, as well as a biographical sketch of Mary Connally, from whose daughter Elliott received the diary containing the prophecies written in what Connally’s daughter confirmed is her mother’s hand. About the prophecies themselves, to quote the introduction, “it is possible neither fully to credit nor entirely to ignore these strange vaticanations, which evince both the thunder of madness and the lightning bolt of truth.” If anything, this understates quite how bizarre—and eerily prescient—some of them are.1Although Mrs Connally does not mention the date of the predictions, Elliott suggests that they must have been made before the summer of 1928. He bases his conclusion on the fact that one of Wilson’s predictions is that James T. Heflin, then the junior senator from Alabama, would become president of the United States that year.* The New York Times reported on July 11, 1928, that Heflin’s candidacy had been formally rejected by the Prohibition Party in Chicago the day before, so even accounting for the time for the news to reach British Columbia, Elliott reasons that the authorship of that prophecy, at least, can be no later than early July 1928.  * “Cotton Tom” Heflin, an outspoken racist (he boasted of shooting a black man on a Washington, DC streetcar because he was drinking near a white lady), anti-Catholic bigot, and congressional sponsor of the Mother’s Day holiday, may be the most repulsive man ever to bid for the presidency. In the end, Heflin was so offended by his party’s nomination of the Catholic Al Smith that he supported the Republican Herbert Hoover, popularising the term “yellow dog Democrat” as an epithet for his party colleagues who stuck with Smith. Needless to say, Wilson got this one prediction wildly wrong. Adjusting for an idiosyncratic dating system, which counts years from the birth of Madam Blavatsky,2Elliott did the annual conversions up to 1936, which made my work dating the post-1936 prophecies much easier by my calculation Wilson predicted the “fall of Babylon” in 2003. That was the year that Hillah, the modern site of the ancient city, was taken by American troops during a particularly bloody battle en route to the conquest of Baghdad. And for 1969, Wilson predicted that “a trainor treds [sic] the cold grey moon.” “Trainor,” of course, is the Anglicised version of the Gaelic surname “Thréinfhir,” which means “strong-arm.” You may say that’s a stretch, but is it really? Though by habit a skeptic, I’m not so sure. There is also a prediction for 2026. It is a long and inscrutable passage, but one phrase stands out: a reference in the first line, and again in the last line, to a “darksome cataclysm of wealth.” The phrase stands out because in his monograph Elliott draws attention to the same phrase in a similarly obscure entry for the year 1929—the year of the Wall Street Crash. On a hunch, I flipped ahead and, sure enough, with an uneasy prickling in my chest I read the same exact words in the entry for 2008—the year of the Global Financial Crisis. I should add here that most of Wilson’s predictions have proved to be nonsense, so make of it what you will. But don’t be surprised either. The fertility crisis, “Elbows Up,” and who will win the NBA Finals By Luke Smith, The Hub’s deputy editor 1. The world’s plummeting fertility rate will dominate headlines We’ve been blithely ignoring the cliff’s edge ahead of us for a while now. Fertility is plummeting the world over, and nobody seems able to offer a sufficient explanation as to why.3This year, Canada reached “ultra-low” fertility status, with just 1.25 children per woman. Whether it’s smartphones, the sexual revolution, escalating cost of living crises, or all of the above, all we know for sure is that from Canada to Japan, Finland to Singapore, babies are becoming an increasingly rare breed the world over.4The OECD reports that member countries have seen their birth rates halve on average in the past six decades, dropping from 3.3 children per woman in 1960 to just 1.5 today. Beyond the depressing social implications, the material consequences of population collapse are catastrophic. If that strikes you as hyperbolic, just read up on the virtual disappearance of Korea, whose population is projected to dissipate by 85 percent in the next hundred years. Or, if you’re a visual learner, give Children of Men a watch before it moves to the documentary section of the streaming services.5But even better yet, read the superior P.D. James novel it’s based on. 2. Build-a-baby eugenics will be big business  Relatedly, this kind of thing will continue to take off in 2026. Only a select few will even bother to question the moral hazards. 3. We’ll get an answer on the Alberta sovereignty question Danielle Smith is on a roll. That momentum will continue in 2026, and, whether through a referendum or not, some sort of resolution on the sovereignty question will be reached, with Team Canada coming out decisively on top. 4. The “Elbows Up” movement will finally fade “Elbows Up” finally falls out of fashion as a rallying cry to the cringiest cohort in the country as the gap between rhetoric and reality finally sets in, right around the time CUSMA renegotiations start to go south (in more ways than one), and—ah, who am I kidding? We’ll have to pry this tacky Canadiana™ torch from the cold, ever-undead hands of Laurentian Boomer officialdom. 5. The Oklahoma City Thunder will win the NBA Finals For the first time since the Golden State Warriors won back-to-back in 2017 and 2018, the NBA will have a repeat champion as the Oklahoma City Thunder successfully defend their crown. Canadian superstar Shai Gilgeous-Alexander will, again, win both the regular season MVP and the Finals MVP, cementing himself in the pantheon of all-time great guards at only 27 years old.6The terrifying spectre of Nikola Jokic playing spoiler looms large over the entirety of this prediction, but with Jokic now sidelined for an indefinite period and underappreciated do-it-all lynchpin Aaron Gordon out with a tweaked hamstring, the prospect of the injury gods meddling with Denver’s much-smaller-than-OKC’s margin of error scares me off of fully backing the mile-high club, even if that would be the gutsier call. Bonus: Summer 2026 will see the end of Nova Scotia In an act of unfathomable selfishness, a hiker will venture out for a walk in the Nova Scotia woods to stretch his legs and clear his thick, unthinking head. Sunlight will glint off his watch, reflect through a discarded plastic water bottle, bounce off a passing dog’s dangling collar and up into the sky where a shiny bauble being carried in a crow’s beak will deflect the beam back down to light upon a dry patch of grass, where it will start a small, smouldering fire—before you can blink the entire tinderbox province will be burnt to the ground. There will be no survivors.