Tory Redux

Tag: Canadian politics

  • The Torch Is Ours Now

    They’re disappearing

    Canada’s firsthand witnesses to one of the greatest conflicts that shaped the world are slowly passing away. Our remaining veterans of the Second World War and the Korean War are down to just above 4,000. Every year, that number gets smaller. Every year, fewer people remain who can tell us, in their own words, what it cost.

    One man’s voice

    Bill Wilson was one of them. The Manitoba-born sailor served aboard HMCS Ottawa and took part in the D-Day landings. He died this year at 101. Looking back on that day, he didn’t hesitate:

    “I think D-Day was the best day of the war for the world. We did free all of Europe, and Canada was there. For a little nation like ours, it still amazes me. Would I do it again? In spades.

    What they never got

    Generations of young men never came home. They never fell in love, started families or had the chance to grow old.

    From Vimy Ridge to Juno Beach to Kandahar, our history is one of service and sacrifice.

    It wasn’t just Canadians who felt this

    One of Scotland’s last surviving D-Day veterans, who died this year at 100, put it plainly:

    “I’ve had another 82 years. I came home, fell in love, got married, had children, and watched my family grow. Thousands of young men never had the opportunity to experience any of those things, and that is tragic.”

    He continued: “I will never forget the men who didn’t come home. All I ask is that, when we are no longer here to tell you ourselves, you don’t forget them either.”

    We’re forgetting

    Fewer and fewer people take the small amount of time each year to wear a poppy in recognition of that sacrifice. It’s become a worrying trend.

    Another reason remembrance is losing its personal connection is that fewer people have a veteran or someone who served in a conflict in their lives. The further we get from the firsthand experience of war and its cost, the easier it becomes for remembrance to feel like an obligation rather than something that genuinely moves us.

    Why it’s happening

    Alongside the decline in poppy-wearing, there’s a deeper problem: younger generations simply don’t know enough about their own history.

    It isn’t helped by the fact that most students take only one mandatory history course before graduating high school. History is important, but it has to be reinforced every year, with practical examples, not left to a single class.

    Remembrance Day ceremonies need to be meaningful opportunities for students to understand our history and honour those who served, not just another obligation to sit through.

    Our turn

    Now it’s our turn to hold the torch high.

    John McCrae captured it in In Flanders Fields: the dead speak to us still — short days ago, they lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow. Now they ask only that we remember.

    Lest we forget.

  • Rediscovering Diefenbaker’s One Canada

    Conservatives are rediscovering John Diefenbaker.

    Not his policies. Not every idea from the ’50s and ’60s fits today’s Canada. What they’re rediscovering is his vision.

    Diefenbaker called it “One Canada.” A country where your last name, your postal code, or your family’s social standing didn’t decide your future. Where any Canadian, from any corner of the map, could rise as far as hard work would take them.

    That idea still hits home. Because a lot of Canadians feel like it’s missing right now. We don’t feel like one country anymore. We feel like a collection of regions, identity groups, and grievances that happen to share a passport.

    Diefenbaker wasn’t from the club. He didn’t come from Bay Street or the old Montreal establishment. In an era obsessed with pedigree and background, his own life proved Canada could be bigger than that. His nationalism wasn’t about where you were from. It was about the fact that you were Canadian, full stop.

    Here’s the other reason his name keeps coming up.

    The Liberals ran the twentieth century. For long stretches, they simply owned Ottawa. Conservatives got a handful of chances to break through, and Diefenbaker was one of the ones who did. When your side doesn’t win often, the wins that happened mean more. He’s remembered not just for beating the Liberals, but for giving people something to believe in while he did it.

    Some people online call it “Diefenbaker Summer” now, half-joking. The name might not stick. The instinct behind it will.

    Because at a time when we’re divided by region, language, identity, and politics, “One Canada” still sounds like something worth wanting back.


    Nostalgia lies to you. It sands off the rough edges and hands you back a postcard. It’s easy to romanticize a decade you never lived through. That’s exactly what’s happening with this Diefenbaker revival among younger conservatives.

    The 1960s aren’t a blueprint for 2026. That decade ran on a different world, different threats, different problems, built by a Canada that doesn’t exist anymore. Borrow the vision. Leave the decade where it is.

  • The National Dream: Real History, Not AI Slop

    Most AI-generated history content is garbage.

    Wrong clothing. Invented scenes. Men who never met, standing side by side like old friends.

    The National Dream is a three-act short film about the founding of Canada and, just as important, about connecting the country coast to coast, symbolized by the Canadian Pacific Railway.

    It’s built to test what AI can actually do when someone tries to get it right, instead of just getting it done first.

    To be clear: I’m not claiming 100% accuracy, and I’m not a professional filmmaker. This is a first project meant to prove the concept. What I’m striving for isn’t perfection — it’s the ability to tell the story clearly and get the big things right.

    The Cabinet

    Take the Confederation cabinet. Macdonald gets all the credit in most retellings, but George-Étienne Cartier ran the country alongside him. Historians widely consider the two men co-governors in practice, not just Prime Minister and junior partner. Alexander Galt, the first Minister of Finance, rounds out the cabinet in those early scenes.

    Macdonald, Cartier, Galt. That’s the cabinet trio, and getting it right meant checking the record before a single frame was built.

    Each man needed his own dedicated character reference, so he’d appear consistently, scene after scene. You can’t just write a prompt and hope the AI gets it right.

    Building Macdonald

    Macdonald himself looked different at every stage of his life, so each era got its own separate character reference: young Macdonald, the Confederation-era Macdonald, the aging Prime Minister.

    It wasn’t enough to know what he did. Understanding how he spoke, how he moved, how he carried himself that’s the difference between a name in a textbook and a real person standing in front of you.

    Iconic moments got the same treatment. The Last Spike at the Canadian Pacific Railway got its own dedicated reference image, built to match the moment as closely as possible.

    The Research

    None of this comes from guesswork. The character references for Macdonald and the rest of the cabinet were built using publicly available photos from sources such as Library and Archives Canada and Wikimedia Commons.

    Macdonald’s age at each stage was cross-referenced with historical texts. Those speeches did double duty: they helped fill out the scripts and dialogue for the Confederation debate scenes, so the words on screen are grounded in what the man actually said.

    One example: Macdonald’s 1891 speech, “A Question of Loyalty,” given near the end of his life when he was an old and veteran politician. That speech shaped how the aging Macdonald is written and portrayed in the later parts of the film.

    The Tools

    Sourcing photos and speeches is one thing. Making sense of them is another.

    I used Google’s NotebookLM to help with that part. It’s a research tool built to take a pile of source material — speeches, archival texts, whatever you feed it and help you actually work with it, rather than just storing it in a folder you never open again.

    For a project like this, that mattered. Confederation-era material is scattered. Speeches run long. Cross-referencing Macdonald’s age against a specific text, or tracking down which speech had the tone I needed for a given scene, isn’t a five-minute job when you’re doing it by hand.

    NotebookLM didn’t write the script for me. What it did was help me organize the research so the ideas were actually usable — pulling threads out of long documents, keeping sources straight, and giving me a clearer path from “pile of history” to “scene I can build.” That’s the unglamorous part of a project like this, and it’s the part that determines whether the finished film feels grounded or feels like guesswork.

    The Principle

    The goal is accuracy, not perfection. Some choices in this series are dramatized — that’s what makes it a story and not a lecture. But the foundation is real research, real records, real people. No lazy shortcuts, no invented history dressed up as fact.

    This isn’t another generic AI video. It’s history that informs, educates, and sparks curiosity Canada’s past, made real for a new generation.

    The first full trailer for The National Dream is coming out soon. Keep an eye out.