Fault Lines: Confronting Canada’s widening rifts

Failure to cast judgement will lead to a Canada where new standards will be enforced by the most malign actors. As Hub contributor David Frum wrote in 2019, if liberals don’t enforce borders, fascists will. The same principle extends beyond borders, and holds true for values, norms and all of society’s guardrails the moral relativists want to hand-wave away. Fault Lines will examine the fractures Canada prefers not to discuss, and to do so before they deepen into something more corrosive. This will require the courage to look directly at uncomfortable realities and speak about them plainly. We believe The Hub’s readers have the wisdom and courage to engage constructively in these conversations with us, because the country badly needs it. Canadians are fluent in declarations and vague about consequences. We’ve become expert at signalling our virtues, but have forgotten how to uphold our values. We declare that certain hatreds have no place in our society, and then do nothing to bring that declaration to life. When principles are reduced to slogans, they stop guiding behaviour and start decorating failure. Canada is fracturing. Not everywhere, not all at once, but unmistakably. Trust in institutions is thinning. Civic confidence is eroding. Communities are building solid walls between each other. The shared assumptions that once allowed disagreement without hostility are weakening, even as our public discourse insists that nothing fundamental is wrong. We will also have a perspective We believe Canada’s immigration system is broken and must be fixed.  We believe that ancient enmities must be left at the door when we welcome new Canadians home, and that some ideas must not be welcome here at all.  We believe we are failing to police our adversaries as they make this country a playground.  We believe Canadians are losing confidence in our institutions, but that far too often this is the fault of the institutions themselves, which have lost their way.  We believe economic stagnation is creating a sense of betrayal in younger Canadians, and permitting a cauldron of bad ideas to bubble over.  These are not abstractions. They are lived realities, intensified by our reluctance to speak honestly about them. For years, Canadians were told that cohesion was automatic. That diversity was both the means and the ends we sought, the alpha and omega, and that on its own would yield shared values. That social trust could be assumed rather than taught, fought for, or defended. History does not work that way. It is never determined; it merely waits. We believe Fault Lines is an act of civic realism. It begins from the belief that human agency still matters, and that decline only becomes destiny when agency is surrendered. This work will not always be comfortable. Exposing real divisions invites disagreement on awkward terrain. Naming trade-offs forces choices. Shining light on fault lines means abandoning the illusion that all tensions can be wished away. Argument is not the objective of this project, but it is an inevitable consequence of honesty. Fault Lines will examine where Canada’s civic fabric is thinning and why. The hope animating this project is that Canada can recover the habits that made pluralism possible in the first place: confidence in shared norms, respect for institutions that function, and the moral clarity to say that some things are incompatible with a free and ordered society. Fault Lines is an invitation to the most profound form of patriotism: to confront uncomfortable reality before it hardens into resentment, to expose division before it turns destructive, and to undertake the hard, sober work of fixing what is broken. That will require civic courage, and we invite you all to join us on the journey.