The beginning of the end of equity and the ticking immigration time bomb: Roundup

For centuries, democratic and pluralistic societies moved haltingly toward a simple moral standard. That people should be judged as individuals. The law should be blind to race, religion, and background. Citizens should rise or fall based on the content of their character rather than the circumstances of their birth. Equity inverted that standard. Under equity, individuals were reclassified as representatives of groups. Moral judgment shifted from conduct to identity. Group grievance replaced personal responsibility. Group blame replaced individual guilt. The very idea of a shared civic identity gave way to a system of competing moral claims, mediated by mobs of activists, and increasingly, by the state. The Islamophobia file crystallized this inversion. One form of prejudice was elevated into a bespoke federal portfolio, while others were absorbed into broader categories or left to existing law. The distinction was never coherently justified. Its effect was to teach Canadians that equality before the law was no longer the governing principle.1This was not confined to government. Equity metastasized through major corporations, universities, professional associations, and cultural institutions. Hiring, promotion, funding, and speech were reorganized around identity categories. Moral status was assigned collectively. Dissent was treated as heresy. The removal of the Islamophobia envoy matters because it signals a retreat from that model, and the elimination of one of the most prominent and corrosive examples of moral relativism of the Trudeau era. The new Advisory Council on Rights, Equality and Inclusion may disappoint. It may produce vague language, cautious recommendations, or even foster more division. But the symbolic shift away from equity, and away from offices designed to institutionalize group grievance, still matters. DIE is ending because it reversed the moral logic of liberal democracy and, in so doing, exhausted its credibility. Bad ideas rarely die the public death they deserve. They simply stop being defended, then stop being funded, then stop being mentioned. That, for now, is progress. Dominic Cummings and the gap governments pretend not to see The U.K.’s Dominic Cummings is a polarizing political figure, and he has earned that reputation. He is abrasive, dismissive of institutions, and largely uninterested in being liked. He is also one of the most electorally successful political strategists in the English-speaking world. He helped architect the Vote Leave campaign and later designed the strategy that delivered Boris Johnson a landslide victory and a parliamentary supermajority. Whatever one thinks of his politics or temperament, Cummings understands how modern electorates behave when institutions lose credibility. That is what makes his recent long essay and market research on “Regime Change” worth paying attention to. The work is focused on the U.K. The findings, however, describe a problem that feels familiar. Cummings set out to test a core assumption that dominates elite thinking on a range of issues, including the economy, cost of living, crime, and immigration. There is an elite perception that public frustration around these issues, and immigration in particular, is driven by exaggeration. That voters have been misled into believing immigration is far larger than it really is. That concern would ease if people were better informed. His research finds the opposite. Across repeated exercises, Cummings shows that mainstream voters dramatically underestimate the scale of immigration. Not by small margins, but by orders of magnitude. When asked to estimate immigration since January 2021, voters routinely guessed figures such as 50,000, 100,000, or 300,000. The real numbers were in the millions. Cummings reports underestimation by a factor of five to 30 times. When voters were shown the actual figures visually, they were almost universally shocked. This matters because immigration already ranks as one of the top one or two issues for voters across the West. Concern exists even in ignorance. And it persists despite the public having little sense of how large the phenomenon actually is. Cummings summarizes the dynamic bluntly. Voters are angrier and more fearful than ever, while remaining largely unaware of the true scale of immigration and of extreme cases involving serious criminals. As awareness spreads, opinion will harden further. That finding aligns closely with a theory I have held for some time about crime and immigration in Canada. Canadians are frustrated by out-of-control immigration, by rising crime, and by visible disorder. But they do not fully grasp the scale of immigration over the past several years, nor do they understand how close to universal bail has become for repeat and violent offenders. The numbers are rarely presented plainly. The mechanics of the justice system are rarely described honestly. The result is a quiet inversion. Canadian frustration is not being driven by misinformation—it is being constrained by it. Cummings does not offer a governing blueprint. He offers a warning. Canada would be wise to absorb it before the gap between perception and reality collapses, and the full scale of failure becomes impossible to ignore. The inversion of justice One of the core principles of the rule of law is equal treatment under the law. Justice does not change based on who you are, where you come from, or what consequences a sentence might create for you personally. The law applies the same way to everyone, or it loses its legitimacy. That principle is now being quietly perverted in Canada, and among the beneficiaries are violent, dangerous non-citizens. Following a 2013 decision by the Supreme Court of Canada, violent non-citizens now routinely receive lighter sentences so they can remain in the country. This is not a loophole or a rare judicial quirk. It is a pattern embedded in sentencing decisions and almost entirely absent from public awareness. The recent push by the Conservative Party of Canada to address criminal non-citizens matters because it exposes this inversion. Once Canadians understand how the system actually operates, defending it will become difficult. Temporary residency in Canada is supposed to be conditional. Common sense dictates that if you commit serious crimes, especially violent ones, you lose the privilege of staying. Yet judges increasingly treat immigration consequences as a reason for leniency, reducing sentences or eschewing jail time altogether. Deportation is framed as an excessive hardship—on violent non-Canadian criminals! The offender’s status becomes a mitigating factor, while the victim’s experience fades into the background. Most Canadians assume the opposite is happening. They believe non-citizens who commit serious crimes are removed as a matter of course. That belief survives because the mechanics of sentencing and bail rarely surface in public debate. Bail, in particular, has become close to automatic, even for repeat and violent offenders. This reflects legislative change, judicial culture, and a system that increasingly treats detention as exceptional rather than protective. The Conservative proposals are corrective, not radical. They seek to restore assumptions most Canadians already hold: victims’ rights matter, and violent crime should carry real and serious consequences, with equal treatment under the law. What will prevail: the rights of innocent Canadians, or violent non-citizens?