Domestic Policy @MLInstitute, Canada's leading independent, nationally focused think tank. Pursuer of ordered liberty, and the True, Good and Beautiful.
Joined August 2024
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Peter Copeland retweeted
“What is the firewall you have put between your newsroom and your funding? We know what the CBC’s is because they’ve had it for years. But what’s CTV? What’s Rogers going to be? What’s TVA is going to be? What does the Globe and Mail do? We don't know any of this, and this is a sort of transparency we would demand from any other industry that was being subsidized by the government.” says MLI Senior Fellow Peter Menzies (@Pagmenzies) on @CANADALAND regarding the Budget 2026 media subsidies announcements.
Full episode here⬇️
canadaland.com/podcast/1468-…
Peter Copeland retweeted
🚨BREAKING: The European Commission has announced that it will WITHDRAW a proposal to criminalise “hate speech” under EU law.
The initiative would have placed “hate speech” and “hate crimes” in the same category as human trafficking, terrorism, drug trafficking and organised crime.
The proposal required unanimous consent, but several member states BLOCKED the initiative in the Council due to free speech concerns.
This is a major victory for freedom of expression. But the battle is not over yet 👇
Peter Copeland retweeted
Huge win! Congratulations @ADFIntl! So much work behind the scenes (years!) to secure this victory.
🚨BREAKING: The European Commission has announced that it will WITHDRAW a proposal to criminalise “hate speech” under EU law.
The initiative would have placed “hate speech” and “hate crimes” in the same category as human trafficking, terrorism, drug trafficking and organised crime.
The proposal required unanimous consent, but several member states BLOCKED the initiative in the Council due to free speech concerns.
This is a major victory for freedom of expression. But the battle is not over yet 👇
Peter Copeland retweeted
Religion is often addressed when it intersects with politics, terrorism, international conflict, sexuality, or scandal. But understanding the ordinary ways that faith shapes daily life and serves as a framework through which people understand everything else is almost entirely absent.
Given the shift, we might assume that religion plays a less important role in people’s lives today than it once did. And given than younger generations have seen the strongest decline in religiousness, the decreased impact of religion may be particularly visible for this group.
However, the evidence reveals something very different: faith still has a powerful link to human flourishing, including for young people.
Peter Copeland retweeted
Foreign Affairs: The Luxury of Children - Why the Baby Bust Is Making the World More Unequal foreignaffairs.com/united-st…
Peter Copeland retweeted
The French riots have shown that for the Left, economic issues are often a front for ethnic and Islamic sectarianism and for racial grievance politics.
My latest for @commonplc, co-written with French presidential candidate @ZemmourEric
"France is no stranger to protests that degenerate into violence, but for years, pundits have offered a ready narrative to explain them.
"Student demonstrations are provoked by budget cuts to education, they say. Economists connect protests in the poor banlieues of France’s big cities to economic inequality and state failure. Historians draw intricate analogies to May 1968 or to the French tradition of 'Jacquerie,' the centuries-old peasant revolts against the ruling class.
"This narrative is reassuring. It roots riots in material questions, all the easier to provide prepackaged material solutions. It offers politicians a ready template during election season: vow to hire more school staff and build more glitzy community centers in the banlieues. Police are ordered to let the street protests take place, only intervening when the protesters go home and professional agitators arrive to stir up trouble, then step aside to let the politicians take the limelight with their flashy promises. Protests are just the French national hobby. There is nothing new under the sun.
"The events in France since September should shatter that narrative once and for all." @ZemmourEric and @NPinkoski explain what's really driving the riots roiling France.
Peter Copeland retweeted
“[MAiD practitioners] would be guessing that someone looks like they’re intolerably suffering, that they would never get better. But actually, that person would have gotten better half the time.” – @rljcoelho
MLI Senior Fellow Ramona Coelho discusses medical assistance in dying (MAiD) for mental illness on @CANADALAND.
Listen to the full episode here⬇️
canadaland.com/podcast/1466-…
Peter Copeland retweeted
Randy Boyagoda’s “Lords of Serendipity” tears down the fantasy behind so much campus fiction.
firstthings.com/the-campus-n…
ALT Cover of "The Campus Novel to End All Campus Novels" by M. Ciftci, featuring a watercolor illustration of a modern campus with abstract buildings and trees under a light blue sky. Text "First Things" is at the top.
Peter Copeland retweeted
Today, Foreign Affairs publishes a long essay I wrote summarizing some of my work on the global fertility collapse:
foreignaffairs.com/united-st…
It was a fantastic experience (with great editorial support) because the essay pushed me beyond pure economics to discuss issues such as geopolitics and polarization. Unlike some commentators, I don’t think the first-round economic consequences of fertility decline matter most; the second-round political and social ones do.
Yes, social security systems worldwide are in danger, but reality will impose itself sooner or later. The same politicians who swear over their ancestors’ tombs that retirement benefits will remain untouched will cut them (even if they are French). It will not be pretty, and most likely the cuts will come only after a major crisis and after politicians have tried everything else and failed.
Similarly, businesses will adapt to shrinking markets and valuations. Those who claim that capitalism somehow needs constantly expanding markets will be proven wrong. After all, this is the same misguided understanding of markets that has been proven wrong again and again since September 14, 1867, and that nobody really believes unless they have had the misfortune of earning a Ph.D. in a humanities department at an Ivy League school.
The real consequences will come when collapsing populations poison political systems. Look at the recent elections in eastern Germany. That is the future for all of us.
Also, the relative standing of great powers will shift drastically. Given current demographic trends, the U.S. will have a larger population than China by around 2100. The exact date depends on assumptions about net immigration into the U.S., but even with zero net immigration, the U.S. will overtake China by 2128. And Russia’s demographic future is only slightly more optimistic than China’s.
Those who dismiss these changes forget how antiquity ended in Western Europe. The western part of the Roman Empire entered acute demographic decline around 200 CE. By 476 CE, the western empire no longer existed. Despite some revisionist views that have cast a more positive light on late antiquity (and rightly corrected what was sometimes an overly negative assessment of the period), the fact is that England or France in 600 CE had lost most of their classical heritage, and material life had lost at least an order of magnitude in sophistication. The eastern part of the empire, however, weathered its demographic collapse much better and lasted another millennium.
No, I don’t believe we will go extinct (the Amish and Haredi will be enough for the survival of humankind), but the world will be very different in 2200 regardless of how you feel about it. The rational is the real and the real is the rational.
Peter Copeland retweeted
Religious affiliation continues to be a significant predictor of flourishing for young adult Americans as well.
Religious participation in a faith community opens up the mechanisms for social capital that makes flourishing possible—support, belonging, shared values, trust, and meaning.
For young adults today, these mechanisms play a critical role in guiding them along the fundamental institutional pathways of family, education, and work at a time when that support has become particularly challenging to access.
Peter Copeland retweeted
In an increasingly "technologically distracted, atomistic age", America's religious young adults are doing better.
Harvard’s Global Flourishing Study:
✅ Religious young adults: significantly higher well-being
✅ Even as their generation lags on happiness & meaning
ifstudies.org/blog/faith-and… @FamStudies
Peter Copeland retweeted
Canadians tend to think of international organized crime as something that originates elsewhere: Mexican cartels, Asian criminal networks, European organized crime, foreign trafficking routes. This is partly rooted in Canada’s self-image as a nice country that no one would want to harm. Yet this very sentiment is something organized crime and foreign state actors have started to exploit, as evidenced in recent reports like the Cullen Commission into money laundering in British Columbia.
Canada’s openness, expansive trading relationships, stable institutions, sophisticated financial system, extensive transportation infrastructure, and close access to the United States and Mexico are enormous advantages for legitimate commerce. Those same features can be exploited by criminal networks.
Laura Dawson of the @FBC_USCAN and a @MLInstitute senior fellow with an insightful piece on how we should rethink border security for the present era.
macdonaldlaurier.ca/beyond-t…
Peter Copeland retweeted
Chris Dummitt at his finest here.
"The Indian Act is indeed a racist document rooted in 19th-century paternalism. But what most Canadians misunderstand is why it’s still here. The problem isn’t the Canadian government. Every government since Trudeau’s would have been happy to be rid of it. We still have the Indian Act because Indigenous leadership has refused to let it go."
Politicians of federal and provincial governments deserve plenty of criticism for inaction on indigenous issues, but so too do the First nations governments and national and regional bodies - full of left-wing grievance mindset - who often do not reflect the wishes of their constituents.
I would take a very different perspective on the idea of cultural neutrality that Chris puts forward.
There is nothing neutral about multiculturalism, or the small-l liberal approach to 'privatize' belief and cultural practices.
Western societies benefited from much thicker cultural assumptions and practices rooted in our philosophical and religious inheritance that liberal societies took for granted and which was largely broken by the 60's culture of transgressiveness, and the boomer generation's break with the past.
They have passed on little, other than that the next generation 'do their own thing.' Humans are not like that. Civilizational inheritance contains a great deal of wisdom, and it needs to be passed down.
Younger Canadians understand this very well, and won't take the same neutral approach to cultural policy going forward. @MLInstitute
“The post–White Paper vision of Indigenous rights has always had this unresolved tension at its core. Are we eliminating discrimination, or building separate forms of citizenship? Some people are fine with separate status. They tend to be idealistic progressives who gain a kind of cultural status from their own self-sacrifice, virtue signalling what good people they are. That this makes for a lasting, peaceable country is far more doubtful,” writes MLI Senior Fellow Christopher Dummitt in the National Post (@nationalpost).
Read here⬇️
macdonaldlaurier.ca/wab-kine…
Peter Copeland retweeted
Mark Carney cranks up immigration again, while pretending not to theglobeandmail.com/opinion/…
Peter Copeland retweeted
"I don’t think that there is much evidence to suggest that when regulations on vices were repealed—as was the case when state governments legalized no-fault divorce and abortion in the early 1970s or when restrictions on obscenity were removed through the courts—individual moral behavior improved"
mereorthodoxy.com/fusionism-…
Chris Dummitt at his finest here.
"The Indian Act is indeed a racist document rooted in 19th-century paternalism. But what most Canadians misunderstand is why it’s still here. The problem isn’t the Canadian government. Every government since Trudeau’s would have been happy to be rid of it. We still have the Indian Act because Indigenous leadership has refused to let it go."
Politicians of federal and provincial governments deserve plenty of criticism for inaction on indigenous issues, but so too do the First nations governments and national and regional bodies - full of left-wing grievance mindset - who often do not reflect the wishes of their constituents.
I would take a very different perspective on the idea of cultural neutrality that Chris puts forward.
There is nothing neutral about multiculturalism, or the small-l liberal approach to 'privatize' belief and cultural practices.
Western societies benefited from much thicker cultural assumptions and practices rooted in our philosophical and religious inheritance that liberal societies took for granted and which was largely broken by the 60's culture of transgressiveness, and the boomer generation's break with the past.
They have passed on little, other than that the next generation 'do their own thing.' Humans are not like that. Civilizational inheritance contains a great deal of wisdom, and it needs to be passed down.
Younger Canadians understand this very well, and won't take the same neutral approach to cultural policy going forward. @MLInstitute
“The post–White Paper vision of Indigenous rights has always had this unresolved tension at its core. Are we eliminating discrimination, or building separate forms of citizenship? Some people are fine with separate status. They tend to be idealistic progressives who gain a kind of cultural status from their own self-sacrifice, virtue signalling what good people they are. That this makes for a lasting, peaceable country is far more doubtful,” writes MLI Senior Fellow Christopher Dummitt in the National Post (@nationalpost).
Read here⬇️
macdonaldlaurier.ca/wab-kine…
Peter Copeland retweeted
“Whether governed under the Indian Act, modern treaty, or self-government agreement, First Nations governments should be taking advantage of this generational moment and seeking out every economic opportunity possible to revitalize their local economies. It’s time that we move ourselves from a handout to a handshake, in business and in governance,” writes Karen Restoule (@karenrestoule), director of indigenous affairs at MLI in @TheHubCanada.
Read here⬇️
macdonaldlaurier.ca/carney-c…
Canadians tend to think of international organized crime as something that originates elsewhere: Mexican cartels, Asian criminal networks, European organized crime, foreign trafficking routes. This is partly rooted in Canada’s self-image as a nice country that no one would want to harm. Yet this very sentiment is something organized crime and foreign state actors have started to exploit, as evidenced in recent reports like the Cullen Commission into money laundering in British Columbia.
Canada’s openness, expansive trading relationships, stable institutions, sophisticated financial system, extensive transportation infrastructure, and close access to the United States and Mexico are enormous advantages for legitimate commerce. Those same features can be exploited by criminal networks.
Laura Dawson of the @FBC_USCAN and a @MLInstitute senior fellow with an insightful piece on how we should rethink border security for the present era.
macdonaldlaurier.ca/beyond-t…
Peter Copeland retweeted
🤝"It’s time that we move ourselves from a handout to a handshake, in business and in governance.”
Not possible, you say? It's already being done by 100 First Nations across Canada💥
My essay for @TheHubCanada on what comes after the Indian Act👇
thehub.ca/2026/11/09/carney-…
Peter Copeland retweeted
“The post–White Paper vision of Indigenous rights has always had this unresolved tension at its core. Are we eliminating discrimination, or building separate forms of citizenship? Some people are fine with separate status. They tend to be idealistic progressives who gain a kind of cultural status from their own self-sacrifice, virtue signalling what good people they are. That this makes for a lasting, peaceable country is far more doubtful,” writes MLI Senior Fellow Christopher Dummitt in the National Post (@nationalpost).
Read here⬇️
macdonaldlaurier.ca/wab-kine…