Armies of government managers have been hired, while policing, resources and basic services wither, and private-sector employment plummets

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Many Canadian conservatives speak of Edmund Burke as they would their first love. Their tributes are fond and wistful.

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From Reagan-esque paeans to talk of common sense and gradual change, our intellectual and political right still speaks like it lives in a cohesive, recognizable country that treasures inherited norms and trusted institutions.

In practice, Burkean conservatism in Canada is mostly an illusion and an aspiration, not a serious program. The Canada that Burkeans describe, in which institutions broadly respect the past, simply does not exist.

Howard Anglin has argued that liberalism “dissolved most of the familiar pre-liberal bonds of stigma and prejudice that had bound society together below the level of the state, it left our social order hanging by a few thin procedural threads.” In short, Liberalism has “swallowed its tail.”

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Activist courts have enthusiastically expanded their own powers with the lever granted them by the Charter, all in the name of “social justice” and special pleading. The basics of a society of ordered liberty have been bent to the will of progressive goals.

The regime around it has followed suit, as ever-expanding, invented rights demand a greater bureaucracy to enforce them. Canada’s federal public service has grown by nearly 40 per cent since 2015, now costing about