Something strange has been happening lately.
I haven’t travelled for a while, but I still communicate with friends across the country (most of whom live in cities like Toronto, Montreal, or Calgary), and there’s a noticeable polarity shift going on. Everyone is thinking and saying the same thing: something along the lines of “things cannot continue.”
Before I start making grandiose claims, I want to say this is highly anecdotal, and cannot be absolute. There are still plenty of left-leaning urbanites, and right-leaning ruralites, but I’m highlighting an observation.
Canada, as you all know, receives somewhere between 1.2 to potentially 4 million foreigners a year through its various programs. In 2022 and 2023, immigration was responsible for 95% of all population growth. The government doesn’t know how many are coming and has admitted they lost count.
Now, I’m a city boy, from an old lower-middle-class blue-collar family with some history of military service in the Montreal area. We go back 17 generations, approximately 441 years. We’ve lived in the city for the last four generations. I’m one of those guys who LOVES the HUSTLE and BUSTLE of the BIG CITY. I’m not intimidated by seeing more than four people in a grocery store, I don’t mind self-checkouts, and I’m glad to not have to drive 45 minutes to an hour to go to work. I don’t have a heart attack when I hear ambulance or police sirens—matter of fact, they put me to sleep. I’ve always enjoyed dive bars, taking the metro, and I find comfort in the sight and sound of the red and green stoplights shimmering off the soft pools of water on the concrete ground.
There is something going on, though. This environment is not what it used to be. Something many hadn’t anticipated, myself included. No matter what I say (much of which used to be considered extremely controversial) to people about foreigners, no matter how outlandish it is, it seems to be affecting city folk less and less. This includes all of the old heresies of dismissing our national mythology; that “diversity is our strength,” “we are a cultural mosaic,” and “Canada is a post-national state.” When you question or oppose these things, many say nothing now, or they’re curious to learn more.
More and more ethnic Canadians (I mean Anglo and French) will not push back when I say, “There are too many foreigners.” Three to five years ago, this was sacred. Fifteen years ago, it was utterly untouchable. I’ve thought this way since before political consciousness, but I was alone for a long time, and in a fringe. My upbringing was unique. When I talk to Canadians and say, “They’re taking our jobs,” I see their ears perk up. A look of sadness, but recognition. No South Park reference to mock the destitute, old worker whose family was wiped out when the company outsourced. No laughing and jeering about losing a Walmart, Tim’s, or security job to a foreigner with more hours and less pay. If I say something to the effect of “They have to go back” in a dry and funny way, just to test the attitude, I see them silently nodding their heads.
It’s not just them; even recent immigrants don’t want more immigrants in Canada, as this has been affecting the quality of life of those who arrived even a short two or three years ago. I asked one Indian colleague I trained why he didn’t want to move to Toronto. It was a bigger city after all. Much greater opportunity. He looked at me and said, “Too many Indians, Saar.” I couldn’t believe it. This shift is happening because it’s true. It’s observable and traceable. Particularly in Canadian cities, where it is hitting everyone the hardest. The wage suppression, the inability of Generation Z to get entry-level unskilled labour jobs in retail, fast food, etc. The cost of living, the average home cost being $703,000. Now it’s affecting even the lower-middle-class professions like accounting, communications, middle management, the lower end of the IT sector or other jobs that require associate degrees. The trades, once a bastion of ethnic Canadians, dominated by Anglo-French or indigenous men, increasingly have foreign labourers and civic engineers never seen before. Usually from Central or South America, the Arabian Peninsula, or India. This cohort is new to Canada.
As socioeconomic opportunities decline, resources begin to dwindle, mortgages on the edge of forfeiture, and nothing good is fiscally predicted for the next few decades, there is a fire under Canadians' collective ass. They are being squeezed and displaced. Forced to compete with newcomers. Many Canadians are openly hostile now in their major cities. The leaves are beginning to hate. They view the foreigners as obstructing their path to social mobility. While this is only partly true, it’s the immediately visible reason. When I speak of re-migration, the reaction from fellow city folk is a “yes.” They don’t care how it’s done, as long as it’s quiet and bloodless, and nobody makes a fuss about it. That the international students, temporary foreign workers, illegal migrants who’ve entered Canada by Roxham Road, or who overstay their visas, must return home so that their young adult children may prosper. Something is going on out there, across Canadian cities. People are tired, they sense something is wrong, and many lack the tools to put those feelings into words.
I used to work with somebody. A non-binary they/them. Overweight with pink hair. They confided to me that they wanted “them” all sent back, and whispered about “the Zionist lobby” controlling everything in the United States. I was taken aback. I don’t talk politics at work. I keep it strictly professional. My job at the time was to be professionally intimidating. I’ll leave it at that. You don’t discuss religion or politics, period. Especially if you’re the modern iconoclast in a profoundly heterodox society with a strict civic cult, but here they were. No doubt they woul be canceled if they echoed these sentiments back to some of their friends — but not all of them. The culture of the cities is changing due to direct exposure, and direct experience with a massive quantity of foreigners whose cultures are totally alien. “They smell”, “they’re creepy”, “we just don’t like them”, “their food is gross”, “they don’t shower or wear deoderant”, are among the many complaints. It turns out the national mythology was a lie — diversity is not a strength. It causes chaos and discord. Things are changing.
Some of the more radical elements have taken so social media. Instagram comments are loaded with thousands of generally apoltical people with aggressive anti-immigration sentiments. X threads and spaces turn into warzones with Canadians and foreigners making their claims, engaging in discourse, debating and defending the place and purposes for their people in this country. But it stops at the cities.
Enter the Hicklib
In a strange twist, I find myself consistently butting heads with ruralites these days, not city folk. Many self-identify as liberal or leftist. More identify as conservative, but they share much in common. Most people in Canada are some variant of liberal: either left-liberal or right-liberal. Both groups share basic liberal first principles, like “all men are created equal.” The left-liberal may deviate in that they believe in equity above equality, but the right-liberal believes in racial colourblindness and will aggressively defend this position even in the face of overwhelming opposition or threat to his life and limb. They choose to ignore the behaviours of groups as collectives and ignore statistical trends of every demographic. In belief of liberal principles they can’t name, they will assert they have no problem with immigration or diversity at all. They’ll say those Canadians who are struggling are weak, that they should suck it up, and that they’re mad because they can’t compete.
Hicklibs are usually associated with ruralites who fly progress pride flags. They join groups like “Redneck Revolt” in the American South. Physiologically, they look identical to leftists in cities, but instead of boho earth tones and round-framed Korean-style glasses, they wear camo jackets and high vis. Many of their groups are dedicated to opposing the derogatory stereotypes they’ve internalized that leftists have ironically made for them. Emotionally, they identify with these in some kind of humiliation ritual. They feel the need to redeem themselves from being a racist, white redneck. It’s self-sabotage.
The hicklib doesn’t have much in common with the typical conservative ruralite, but they do share something the city folk are starting not to—a fundamental belief in egalitarianism. The city folk have an emerging in-group identity, and are rejecting diversity. It’s not all urbanites, and certainly there’s a gradient between nativists, patriots, and ethnic nationalists, but there is an emerging split there. “Conservatives” (who are liberals from 25 years ago, whose ideal society is just living in 2003 socially libertarian, lily-white Canada with a few Indian gas station clerks, and one Chinese buffet in town, whose sensibilities and humour are summed up by Ted, Adam Sandler, and American Pie), fundamentally agree with them more than they do the “New” Right.
Memory Lane
You can speculate as to why this is, but then I had a thought. I once dated a girl from a deeply rural area. She was beautiful and intelligent, but practical. She was a survivor, like me. Although she was a survivor in her rural environment and I was a survivor in my urban environment. I am from Montréal, and she was from the Rockies. If you can believe it, I was the more conservative one, although I was not as right-wing as I am now. Her idea of a big city was a meagre 130,000 people. It was uncomfortable to her. She yearned to be by mountains, nature, and water. Yet, I was far more conservative than she was politically. I disliked foreigners on principle, believing they should be few in number, and, for the few that were present, more Canadian in attitude than Canadians. I believed Canada should be for Canadians, defined as Anglo-French people in ethnicity. I was proud of our constitutional monarchy, whereas she was a Republican, although she didn’t know what that meant at the time.
The differences didn’t end there. Our childhoods differed too.
High school for me was deeply tribalistic. Although our English teachers and librarians would read out quotes by Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr., force us to celebrate Kwanzaa, and perform Jewish dances in the gym for Hanukkah, all the White and Indigenous kids hung out to smoke at one bus stop, while the Afro-Caribbean Black kids hung out across the street. In the cafeteria, every ethnic group self-segregated. In the presence of other, whole racial groups, those distinct East-Asian, South-Asian, Black, and White ethnicities formed blocs of races. Suddenly Anglo and French were one. Vietnamese and Chinese were one. Caribbeans, Trinidadians, and Haitians were one. Indians, Punjabis, and Pakistanis were one. The Blacks would pick on the South Asians and the gay kids with impunity. When disciplined, they’d scream “racist,” and get away with everything, who’d then yell racial slurs. The Indigenous would say nothing to the Blacks, but no Black kid dared enter Kahnawake for fear of their lives. Outside of school, as an Anglo-Québécois, a primarily English-speaking Quebecer of Anglo-French ancestry, I would get heckled by Quebecois for being bilingual. Hearing “Calisse les anglophones, retourner à l’Ontario” was odd because I wouldn’t visit Ontario for the first time until I was fifteen or sixteen, and my ancestors were from Southern Quebec going back some 441 years. On a macro scale, all those kids and demographics at that school, for all our differences, were simply summed up by the Quebecois as “Anglophones.” Across our borough, mixed groups of English-speakers and French-speakers would have snowball fights in winter and in summertime fight on the blazing hot concrete. Urban environments over the last thirty years proved to be deeply identity-based, often tense, and occasionally violent. As urbanites, we had innumerable experiences with, and profound impressions made on us by, exposure and access to many different cultures and races. Enough to know who we were, where we came from, and what defined us.
This is a story not unique to Montréal. In other East Coast cities with strong assimilationist policies or not (such as Boston and New York City), you still have historical ethnic enclaves. Borders wax and wane. New rivalries and hatreds arise. So do new alliances and marriages. A lot of weird mixes come out of environments like this. The only people from cities who aren’t like this are leftists, usually wealthy, white-collar professionals and their families with minimal or selective exposure to the foreigners and clashes of all the identities. They only meet and hang out with the wealthy ones. We shared that cosmopolitanism with them, but we were far more socially conservative and identity-conscious. There were far more of us than there were of them. Despite that, it would be their top-down, managerial regime ideology and budding civic cult that dictated the values of the age, punishing all dissent. The Mosaic was a lie. It was a lie when we were in school, and it would only become more obvious as the years went on. All occurring in the late aughts and early 2010s.
A Different Life
Mountain girl, grew up in secluded, mountainous villages with beautiful nature and pristine water. The freshest air, the smell of pine—one of the greatest smells in the world. In her small school, there were only one or two Black kids. They were bullied and picked on ruthlessly. People would call them “nigger” and grab their hair. There were no Indians in her towns, and no Chinese. Her family never had to lock their doors. They said “thank you” while driving in their cars without licences, occasionally with beer bottles in hand as people let them pass. She knew her neighbours, and her neighbours knew her family. All the cops lived there too, despite being RCMP. She could work at the small-town restaurant as a server and flirt with the cute old men who would give sweet compliments and provide huge tips. Her environments were not hotbeds of identities or ethnic conflict. This experience is not unique to her. It is distinct to the vast majority of ruralites, who never have to ask questions like “who are we” and “what makes us different.” Ruralites are good-natured and trusting. They will give food, shelter, and the shirt off their back for people in need. Similar to city slickers, they work hard and are rowdy. In those days, not that long ago, tradesmen lived and worked in the cities. They didn’t just commute from the rural areas. Thousands of industrial and factory jobs were available. The urban centres had their own tough guys and gang cultures. You’d see this in various mafias and the bikers. Though tough, white urban Canadian culture would disappear as the lower-classed ethnic Canadians were displaced in their neighbourhoods by foreigners whose adoption of the worst elements of Basketball-American culture would be their new identity, and the white boys became wiggers.
Spreading Out from the Managerial Core
To this day, I would never call her a Hicklib—her instincts were profoundly natural and conservative. She wanted to get married and have a family. Despite being spiritual and not religious, and not liking Christianity, I would call her superstitious—she would call it intuition. But her views, her politics, were much more relaxed than mine. Much more indicative of her environment, shared by the majority of her peers, and I see this libertarian tendency in ruralites today, who we now call conservatives—clinging to the old ideology and first principles of the Managerial Regime from the 1960s. During that time, Canada underwent one of the most sinister cultural transformations in human history, which could only be considered a Maoist-style cultural revolution. The values of which were the first to begin breaking down in the cities after decades, as they were the power centres, affecting the middle classes and below first. Although not an exact allegory, you see this in some American cities as well. Wherever there was a particularly strong, top-down DEI cult aspiring to build a managerial state, the middle class and below white Americans were the first to fight when the consequences of those values finally broke the system.
To me, this is reminiscent of the Late Roman Empire. Christianity was officially the new hype religion, and new values appeared to break out of the mould of the old, but the “paganus,” now “pagans,” or “rural dwellers,” stuck to the Hellenic old ways and values. It was the power centres that changed first and spread outward, where the ruralites clung to their traditions. I believe we’re seeing this process unfurl again. Canadians are re-tribalizing first and most intensely in the urban power centres, as they cling to the suburbs or migrate to the city limits, but not to the rural areas, especially among the remnants of the middle class and below. This process started becoming most noticeable two and a half decades ago. Many ruralites today are clinging to the Old Regime’s ideas, originally propagated outward from the cities in the 1960s, although their vision of it is the more recent transitory period of the late 1990s and 2000s. They cling to the Maple Leaf Flag, which was ironically made to dispossess them and erase the symbols associated with their distinct heritage, ethnicities, and Crown. They cling to an only partially implemented, low-experienced, unlearned version of multiculturalism that has yet to become in their towns and villages what it has in the cities. They are ardent defenders of the totally annihilated healthcare system and are the biggest supporters of Pierre Poilievre. This is not absolute—you will find plenty of lower-middle-class libtards in the cities, and surely, you’ll find some racist rednecks in the boonies, but it’s beginning to look a lot like conservatives in Canada are merging with the Hicklibs to stop the emergent further-right populists. A noticeable pattern on X Spaces with semi-popular Conservative Party-supporting ruralites is they’re the only ones on the right remaining defending multiculturalism, diversity, and “standing against racism,” while they have no experience or live anywhere close to these foreigners they claim to support.
I don’t know how much longer this will be the case, but it will be interesting to see.
"I’m one of those guys who LOVES the HUSTLE and BUSTLE of the BIG CITY. I’m not intimidated by seeing more than four people in a grocery store, I don’t mind self-checkouts, and I’m glad to not have to drive 45 minutes to an hour to go to work."
Man, completely unrelated. But I see this from urban guys in cities like Montreal or Boston. You think you know big city, and you know, but what they are planning for us is not Montreal, it is Jakarta, Lagos, Mexico City. And this is a completely different game.
Environment largely dictates culture and, to some extent, technology. Mountain Girl's environment will change, the tide will come in, and she will think more as you do. Your environment is changing and your culture changes in response.
It is astonishing to me we see little violence against this invasion. It is as though everyone in the USA and Canada have given up. We are just rolling over, letting the psychopath class foment a non-military invasion of our countries.
This must change. The psychopath class must be destroyed. They will not stop, cannot stop. Like moose suffering brain parasites, they have gone mad and are stomping everything in the meadow. It is a mercy to put down creatures suffering so badly.
The psychopath's legions of invader-savages must likewise be driven off by any means necessary.
If we do not fight for what is ours, it will not long be ours.