On FB very well said…..

I had a conversation in person recently that pretty much sums up the Canadian political divide right now. Not the cartoon version from the news... the quiet, everyday one we've all had with friends, or family.

It started predictably of course. The usual labels tossed out like confetti (xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic, bigot, Maple Maga). Because apparently if you question a policy, you must secretly hate the group it’s supposed to help.

And this little exchange laid it out for me.

For a lot of modern liberals, politics seems to be less about what actually happens and more about looking compassionate. Slap the right moral sticker on a policy "help the marginalized! Expand programs! Signal virtue!" and you're golden.

Ask whether it works in practice? Ahhh... suddenly you’re the bad guy with a heart of stone.

Their world is simple... you’re either “for people” or “against people.” Intentions are everything and results are optional.

In that framework, a policy doesn’t have to work. It just has to feel virtuous.

The rest of us tend to look at it a bit differently. We’re not grading on effort, we’re grading on outcomes. Systems, incentives, trade offs, numbers.

Housing, for example. You can be genuinely pro-immigration and still notice that importing people faster than you build homes, hospitals, or roads tends to make everything more expensive. That’s not xenophobia. It’s grade 9 economics.

You can care about vulnerable people and still wonder why piling billions into bureaucracies and programs hasn’t fixed addiction, poverty, or waitlists. But to Liberals this is cruelty. Even if it’s just asking if the money is actually landing where it’s supposed to.

So one side sees moral narratives and feels attacked when you poke at them. The other side sees a country quietly buckling under debt, housing shortages, food bank lines, and policy after policy that sounds nice on paper but doesn’t survive contact with reality.

And the funniest part is that a whole lot of people now labeled “conservative” didn’t suddenly become monsters. They still believe in opportunity, safety nets, immigration that works, helping those who need it. Nothing changed in their values.

What changed is the political class moved the goalposts toward ideology, bureaucracy, and endless symbolism while ordinary Canadians stayed roughly in the same spot.

Now they’re the problem for pointing out the house is on fire while everyone else is arguing about the colour of the smoke.

When someone can’t tolerate the question “is this working?”, it’s usually because everyone already knows the answer.