Issue #001 — June 4, 2026

Canada has entered into a “technical recession” whatever the hell that means. Liberals want to suppress free speech, youth unemployment is up, and homeowners are missing mortgage payments at a rate not seen in over a decade

Here’s the brief.

Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, amends the Criminal Code to create new criminal offences around hate speech and protecting access to places of worship, but buried inside it are two provisions that should concern every Canadian.

First, it strips the long-standing religious speech defense from hate speech law. Priests, pastors, imams — anyone preaching traditional doctrine now faces potential criminal exposure for beliefs that were explicitly protected under Canadian law for decades. A priest or imam preaching that homosexuality is a sin? Under Bill C-9, that's potentially prosecutable as hate speech. The courts will decide what crosses the line but that's exactly the point. The government doesn't need to win every case. They just need to open the door, and the threat of prosecution is enough to make people self-censor.

Second, and this is the part the government doesn't want you focused on: a Senate committee wanted to expand the bill to create a brand new criminal offence called "residential school denialism." Under the amendment, anyone who condones, denies, downplays or justifies the residential school system could face up to 2 years in prison.

Here's the actual language they want to add to Bill-C9:

"Everyone who, by communicating statements other than in private conversation, willfully promotes hatred against Indigenous peoples by condoning, denying, downplaying or justifying the Indian residential school system in Canada or by misrepresenting facts relating to it..."

Two years in prison. For speech.

Now ask yourself, why are they trying to add this clause? The Liberal government alongside the Kamloops band announced 215 "child graves" in 2021. The BC government handed over $12 million to the Kamloops Indian band to excavate and verify. Nearly five years later and not a single body was exhumed. The band's own February 2026 statement quietly walked back the original claims. Researchers have documented a century-old septic field with thousands of feet of buried tile running directly under the site. The ground penetrating radar operator herself said from day one that excavation would be required to confirm anything.

Canadians have every right to ask what happened to that money and demand answers about what's actually in the ground. The residential school system was real, the suffering was real, and deaths from disease were real and documented. Nobody serious disputes that.

What people are questioning is the specific mass murder narrative and now the government wants to make that question a criminal act.

That's not reconciliation. That's a government using criminal law to protect a narrative it can no longer defend on the facts.

Bill C-9 now sits before the Senate. Watch this one closely, it will reshape free speech laws in Canada forever.

George Orwell is doing backflips in his grave right now.

UPDATE: As of writing this The Senate voted down the residential school denialism amendment 41 to 32. It failed but barely. A nine-vote margin is not a victory, it's a warning. They will try this again.

TL:DR: Bill C-9 removes the religious speech defense from hate speech law and there is an attempt at creating a new criminal offence for questioning the residential school narrative — up to 2 years in prison. The government can't defend the Kamloops claims on the facts, so they're making it illegal to ask the questions. Free speech in Canada is on the line.

Pretty loaded title eh? I wish it was just clickbait but it’s the ugly truth.

Canada is the only G7 country in a recession right now. Every other nation faces the same Trump tariffs we do yet Germany grew, Japan grew, and Mexico grew. This recession is made in Canada.

GDP has been negative 3 of the last 4 quarters. Business investment in Canada is down for the fifth consecutive quarter. Carney called it a "settling in" period.

Canada is the only G7 country whose economy is shrinking while every other one grows.

Settling in to what? A depression?

Youth aren't feeling it — they're leading it. Unemployment for Canadians aged 15-24 hit 14.3% in April, more than double the national average and the highest outside a recession since 1997. Nearly 500,000 young Canadians are looking for work and can't find it. The entry-level job market has effectively collapsed.

This is the result of failed Liberal immigration policies.

Temporary foreign workers were designed for seasonal agricultural labour — not to staff Tim Hortons and Amazon warehouses. The program got hijacked to flood the labour market with cheap workers, thus suppressing wages for Canadian born citizens. Young people aren't only competing with a bad economy. They're competing with a policy designed to undercut them.

What does mainstream media suggest young Canadians do about it? Try harder.

Ontario mortgage delinquencies jumped 52% year-over-year. In British Columbia, mortgage delinquencies surged by 36% year-over-year. Consumer insolvencies hit their highest level since 2009, up 19% in a single year.

Total consumer debt sits at $2.66 trillion. People weren't buying homes based on what they could afford, they were buying based on prices going up forever. This is what happens when you build an economy on speculative real estate instead of the resources Canada actually has in abundance. We sat on some of the most resource-rich land on the planet and decided to get rich flipping houses instead.

Three crises. One economy. No real plan.

TL:DR: Canada is the only G7 country in recession, youth unemployment is at a near-30-year high, and mortgage delinquencies are surging across the country.

Immigration Reality Check: A federal government poll conducted last November found 47% of Canadians believe too many immigrants are coming to Canada, but the report sat with the government for 4 months before being quietly posted to a public portal last month. The government commissioned the poll, didn't like what it found, and quietly released it months later.

Bill C-22 — Surveillance State Update: The federal government's lawful access bill would force companies like Signal to collect and store your metadata: who you contacted, when you contacted them, and your location when you did all this— for up to a year. Signal says it would rather pull out of Canada entirely than build what it calls "the very surveillance apparatus we have refused to construct."

“As security experts have warned for over 30 years, there is no back door that only the good guys can walk through.”

This section is all about you. What everyday Canadians are actually thinking and feeling. Every week I'll feature one reader letter, comment, or question in The Leaf Brief — maybe more depending on how many responses come in.

To kick things off, here's what a viewer wrote on our latest TikTok:

"Nobody is talking about how bad it actually is out here. Young people can't find work, can't afford rent, can't afford to live. Do young Canadians even see a future here?"

— Stephanie, 23, Montreal

That's exactly why this newsletter exists. For the people, by the people.

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