‘Here at the age of 39 I began to be old. I felt stiff and weary in the evenings and reluctant to go out of camp; I developed proprietary claims to certain chairs and newspapers; I regularly drank three glasses of gin before dinner, never more or less, and went to bed immediately after the nine o’clock news. I was always awake and fretful an hour before reveille. Here my last love died.’
OTTAWA — For The Bureau’s 2025 Holiday Special, I sat down once again with Jason James for a long-form, two-hour conversation—our second holiday edition—to answer his questions about the elite networks surrounding Prime Minister Mark Carney and the China connections that have quietly defined his ascent.
“Most of the men I interviewed started out as liberals. Some still are. But to feel the weight of society’s disfavor can be disorienting.”—Jacob Savage
It can also be clarifying.
The fur is flying after the publication of Jacob Savage’s “The Lost Generation,” which Matt Walsh called a permission piece, a signal that cultural leaders can or must now admit, within carefully circumscribed limits and without accountability, of course, what the rest of us have known most of our lives: that discrimination against white men has been rampant in North America, with the result that at least one generation of such men were prevented from contributing their talents to key fields such as law, medicine, science, policing, popular culture, media, academia, reporting, Big Tech, business, and many more.
Just for a moment, the vicar became the embodiment of that most useful of recently coined words: enshittification. This normally excellent woman, who runs her numerous parishes with passion and aplomb, had donned a squishy poo emoji hat. She stood within the nave of her 800 year-old church, next to the Advent candle, with a brown coiled fake turd on her head. The enshittified vicar explained to the congregation that the message of Christmas is that God visits us in our “poo-ey lives”. Like the Christ child in the “poo-ey stable”, God becomes manifest in our stinking world. The congregation looked ahead glassily. Perhaps somewhere deep in the recesses of the collective unconsciousness, they knew that sermons, the church, Christianity, vicars, hadn’t always been this way, that there had once been a reverent majesty to a Christmas carol service. Thankfully the sermon ended, she took off her scat hat, and everyone sang the remainder of the carols with gusto.
The House of Commons sat for just 72 days in 2025; the least that Canada has used its Parliament in more than 80 years.
The year’s tally was lower even than in 2021, when the House of Commons saw its sitting calendar obliterated by COVID-19 lockdowns. In the end, however, that year still managed 95 sitting days.
Can’t be all bad.
ROME — Christmas is becoming a new front line in Europe’s culture wars.
Far-right parties are claiming the festive season as their own, recasting Christmas as a marker of Christian civilization that is under threat and positioning themselves as its last line of defense against a supposedly hostile, secular left.
The trope echoes a familiar refrain across the Atlantic that was first propagated by Fox News, where hosts have inveighed against a purported “War on Christmas” for years. U.S. President Donald Trump claims to have “brought back” the phrase “Merry Christmas” in the United States, framing it as defiance against political correctness. Now, European far-right parties more usually focused on immigration or law-and-order concerns have adopted similar language, recasting Christmas as the latest battleground in a broader struggle over culture.
I hope they choke on a Season’s Greeting …
Christians in Lebanon have declined from a demographic majority to a minority.
Lebanon was majority-Christian starting from the first century (when Christianity was introduced by figures such as St. Peter and St. Paul) until the mid-20th century. Mount Lebanon, which remains the Christian heartland of the country, is frequently mentioned in the Bible.
Lebanon was conquered by the Arab Islamic Rashidun Caliphate in 636 AD following the defeat of the Christian Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire at the Battle of Yarmouk. The Ottoman Empire later occupied Mount Lebanon from its conquest in 1516 until the end of World War I in 1918. Lebanon gained independence from French rule in 1943.
During Canada’s first century, Christianity had a significant place in Canadian society and government. There were several explicitly Christian laws and policies, including prayer and Bible reading in many public schools.
Christianity’s role in Canadian public life is now essentially gone. The main reason for this change was the adoption of Pierre Trudeau’s Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982.
The Ontario PC government recently announced public funding will be used at four private health clinics for hip and knee replacements. There will be $125 million set aside over two years to pay for an estimated 20,000 orthopedic surgeries at Academic Orthopedic Surgical Associates of Ottawa, Richmond Hill’s Schroeder Ambulatory Centre, Toronto’s OV Surgical Centre and Windsor Orthopedic Surgical Centre.
In these dilapidated French villages and towns you also notice the number of A Vendre (For sale) signs. As I previously noted about the Islamisation of German towns and cities, you get a distinctly uncomfortable sense of something slowly dying – though compared to northeastern France, rural Germany looks like one of those merry medieval scenes by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
Michel Houellebecq, the famed novelist and bête noire of the French Left, wasn’t lying about the state of rural France. I have walked through a sizeable chunk of the country’s north-east thinking: this is what the slow version of civilisational collapse must look like.
The region suffered from being on the front line of two World Wars. But as Houellebecq describes in Serotonin, Submission and Atomised, it’s also been let down by political elites in Paris and Brussels who have laid waste to local farming with policies favouring globalist trade and foreign markets. Hence the posters on village billboards showing a bare-breasted Marianne once again leading the storming of the Bastille, this time beneath the title “FREXIT”.
Declan Bigras of Aylmer, Que., joined air cadets when he was 13 because he dreamt of flying fighter jets. While he got onto wait-lists, he wasn’t selected for that highly competitive program. But he did rise to second in command of the 211 Squadron in Ottawa.
It was the best five years of his life, Bigras said.
Now, at 19, he’s intent on joining the Canadian Armed Forces. But it’s taking some time. With the permission of his parents, he tried to sign up two years ago when he was 17.
I bet they fast track cross dressers though.
OTTAWA – Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand is affirming Greenland’s sovereignty as Washington again says it wants to annex the self-governing territory of Denmark.
Anand spoke Tuesday with her Danish counterpart Lars Lokke Rasmussen and says she conveyed “Canada’s support for the fundamental importance of respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
NOW – Trump: "We need Greenland for national security… We have to have it!" pic.twitter.com/obsImNZwfk
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) December 22, 2025
