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Advertisement 1 This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. The party has mastered the art of capturing institutions — something the Conservatives would do well to learn Published Apr 19, 2026 Last updated 6 hours ago 7 minute read Article content As Conservatives wonder if they'll ever win again, Liberals capture institutions. And that's how they have a second majority government today, intact even after a change in leadership and a decade in power. THIS CONTENT IS RESERVED FOR SUBSCRIBERS Enjoy the latest local, national and international news. SUBSCRIBE FOR MORE ARTICLES Enjoy the latest local, national and international news. REGISTER / SIGN IN TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. THIS ARTICLE IS FREE TO READ REGISTER TO UNLOCK. Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. or Article content Provincial or federal, private or public, it doesn't matter. The Liberal Party of Canada probably has at least one tendril in it, because that's what it's evolved to do. This has proven to be the most effective strategy around: when the whole landscape is friendly to you and hostile to your biggest opponent, you don't actually have to do much at all. You can coast on vibes and mediocre performance, and you can even poach some of the other side's policies and foot soldiers. Article content Article content
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Article content Take the universities: the people pipelines that spit out new fledgling citizens and fresh professionals each year. No amount of "boots not suits" sloganeering will kill the fact that higher education is the easiest gateway to an elite life for most people. Not only that, universities are sense-making institutions, stables for full-time thinkers and analysts whose work ends up forming the basis for policy down the line. Article content By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. Article content Their views form the bulk of the expert consensus, which, in recent years, includes ideas like free drugs for street people, diversity quotas at the expense of quality, and a concept of Aboriginal rights so powerful that it undermines private property. Most rules and norms for any profession or trade come down to the views of the practitioners, and if most practitioners adopt a bad idea, you're going to look like an uneducated rube for resisting it. Article content We apologize, but this video has failed to load. Article content Cynics will shrug this off as the natural state of academia, but the polarization in the academy today is an anomaly brought about by years of dedicated pressure by the Liberals. Research funding and eligibility rules for contracting with the feds are increasingly subject to Liberal requirements ranging from racial quotas to the promotion of DEI in research. Provinces — even conservative-governed ones — rarely reject the intrusion, even though it subverts largely provincially funded institutions to Liberal goals. Article content
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Article content From there, it spreads outward. Medicine, for example. Medical research reflects the Liberal preoccupation with DEI, evidence is then generated supporting more DEI, expert consensus says DEI is needed in medicine, and so on. Papers finding some disparity between old-stock and new are published by credible authorities, and circulated without scrutiny in friendly media, with the happy side effect of giving Liberals more ammunition to justify even more funding for more ideologically skewed research. Article content For example: the Canadian Medical Journal of Health recently published a paper called "Disparities in cost-related prescription nonadherence between Black and White adults in Canada," which was funded by an Alberta Crown corporation and a federal grant for "Black and Racialized Peoples' Health" via the diversity quota-bound Canada Research Chairs program. The authors who will grow in prestige from that study will make great future research funding agency appointments, advisory board members, House of Commons witnesses, and even senators for the Liberals. Advertisement 1 This advertisement has not loaded yet. Advertisement 2 This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Article content Rinse and repeat for every vanguard social issue the party takes on: reconciliation, immigration, etc. Any profession that comes through the university can serve the cause. Social work, nursing, education — evenengineering, and especially law. Article content The surrender of law schools to the left has been a cornerstone of perpetual conservative loss. You can turn nearly an entire profession against mandatory minimum sentences if most of the people teaching future lawyers are enthusiastically opposed to them, and this is, of course, what happened. Faculty politics will crowd dissenters out. In time, you get a legal system that automatically institutes race-based laws, removes the state's ability to imprison mass murderers for life, forces the state to provide citizen benefits to anyone with a pulse who illegally enters the country, and so on. It doesn't matter that it's wrong or that these ideas in practice can bankrupt the country; what's important is that most judges agree with them. Article content It's not just the schools, of course. It's the organizations that claim to advocate for their profession, the regulatory bodies, the legal advocacy groups, the think tanks, the government advisory boards. Every open seat that's federally appointable, the Liberals can find an ally to fill it. The guarantee of a reward is conducive to attracting more allies, who can in turn be tasked with manning whatever post. Article content
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Article content Indeed, the result is a surplus of onside people who need new places to be stabled. The Liberals see this and capitalize on the opportunity, giving "capacity-building" grants to onside non-profits and "social enterprise" businesses while doling out endless low-stakes contracts to advocacy groups. Sometimes, they simply make another federal agency or commission to raise profiles and develop careers: there's another advantage to reviving the Law Commission of Canada and nurturing the Court Challenges Program, both partisan in function. Article content Hence the bucketloads of funding to the gender lawfare group Egale Canada and the migration accelerationists at the Institute for Canadian Citizenship. When the Canadian Anti-Hate Network was paid to create a guide for schoolteachers (who are mostly in provincial jurisdiction) that demonized European history and linked Canada's old flag, the Red Ensign, to white nationalism, this had the helpful side effects of keeping the organization's budget healthy and bolstering its legitimacy. The network's founder, Bernie Farber, was recently made an advisor to the federal government on online safety. These groups provide stakeholder input when the government needs to justify new heights of nonsense, and they spam the courts with "public interest" arguments whenever a provincial government tries to tap the brakes. Article content
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Article content Industry isn't much different. With decades of Liberal rule and hard top-down diversity mandates, banks are comfortable adopting anti-meritocratic approaches to staffing and even business funding. Years of aggressive push for concessions on the climate and Indigenous reconciliation fronts have brought the oil and gas industry to heel (yes, it's bad for business, no, we're not going to publicly object to it). Article content Even the toxic Cowichan decision out of the B.C. courts, which has thrown the validity of mortgages into question after the federal government sabotaged its own arguments to assist the interests of Indigenous people over colonist-descended Canadians, wouldn't be commented on by the various lenders I contacted to get a sense of the damage. They directed me to ask the Canadian Bankers Association for its thoughts, which said only that it was monitoring the matter. Article content Everyone who operates in the federal government's jurisdiction knows about its aggressive social agenda, and so when that agenda interferes with the basic workings of an entire sector, no one wants to get in the way. Everyone outside of federal jurisdiction has still somehow become a client of the feds, through funding, contracts, or indirectly through professional consensus propped up by the feds.
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Article content So, instead of vocal industry groups explaining the very real effects of these disaster court rulings, we get silence. And that does make sense based on the incentives: Liberals punish non-adherents and reward allies; Conservatives typically don't. Indeed, Conservatives punish their own: the Harper government, for example, spitefully refused to appoint allies to the Senate in its dying days, gifting those empty seats to Justin Trudeau. Article content And this is how the Liberal state always wins. The institutions critical to victory favour the Liberals. These in turn create more Liberals. They create so many Liberals that new institutions have to be made to fit them all. And to outsiders, potential voters, they create the appearance of consensus and thus legitimacy. Article content It can be overcome, but that starts close to home, with provincial governments actively taking back what is rightfully theirs and installing onside allies — not thoughtless centrist donors who fear alienation from their Liberal-voting friends more than they want to win. It takes a careful and concerted effort to take back professional schools, not by defunding them, but by funding academic chairs to break the monoculture, provide role models to onside students, and provide alternative experts to lean on during contentious policy debates. The federal party can't do much of this, but it can certainly build relationships with onside provinces to make it happen — or hammer them for failing to live up to their responsibility. Article content
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Article content It means firing every activist and replacing every Liberal appointee at the top of any public department, every member of a public board, and abolishing those that exist only to prop up Liberal ideology. That means abandoning gender and anti-racism initiatives, something that even Alberta and Ontario struggle to do. Article content At this point, defund-everything libertarianism is a gambling strategy: it puts all the movement's eggs into the basket that is the party's election platform, and takes a crisis in the Liberal party to have any viability at all. In the off-chance it does result in victory, it is incapable of perpetuating itself. Article content Aimless tax and budget cuts don't build movements or develop the careers of up-and-comers; they actually impede your future performance by depriving you of the necessary pipeline of manpower required to run complex institutions for years to come. "Just go to the private sector" doesn't work, by the way, when the major corporations and companies have some kind of Liberal dependency, which is true for all the major consulting firms, law firms, pipeline companies and banks. Article content The wisdom that institutional control is the easy path to victory was internalized by the Liberals long ago. It's time Conservatives started thinking the same way. It won't deliver overnight, but that's what it's going to take to build a machine that can win in the absence of a catastrophic Liberal mistake. Anything less is just rolling the dice. Article content National Post Article content
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