Not at all surprising. In my five years as Immigration Minister, we consistently found that all of our challenging reforms* were supported by immigrants more than people born in Canada. * Reforms like: - Eliminating a backlog of 700,000 PR applications - raising the bar for selection under the points grid, including for English / French language proficiency - overhauling the asylum system that reduced new claims by 80% - imposing visas on major source countries for asylum claims; - imposing a waiting period before foreign sponsored spouses could obtain PR to crack down on marriage fraud - raising the bar to obtain citizenship with much more robust language and knowledge tests based on our Discover Canada citizenship guide, and adding a year to the residency requirement; - revoking citizenship from thousands of people who had obtained it fraudulently; - stopping applications for the parents & grandparents sponsorship program; - ending the live in caregiver program; - ending the widely abused Investor Immigrant Program; - overhauling the Temporary Foreign Worker Program that reduced intake of low skilled TFWs by 85%; - removing federal health benefits from rejected asylum claimants; - increasing resources for CBSA to increase & accelerate deportations, etc.. - reforming the Multiculturalism Program to focus on integration & civic literacy rather than divisive critical race theory; Many of these reforms elicited the usual charges of racism from the left, and many were opposed by the business community as being too restrictive. But consistently we saw super majority support amongst new Canadians for these and other tough measures.

Virtually all of the slopulist right "influencers" in Canada were on Team One BC, which won 1% of the vote. They set their hair on fire when the BC Conservatives decided to stabilize themselves as a mainstream centre-right party at the beginning of the campaign. As with the Alberta referendum, this is yet more evidence that these so-called influencers have no influence, and should be broadly ignored by sensible, principled Canadian conservatives.

Last night I had the pleasure of attending Calgary Opera's magnificent production of Tosca. The performance was interrupted by a Hamas supporter screaming hate messages from the audience. Evil hates beauty. Supporters of a violent death cult committed to the mass murder of Jews, and the imposition of an Islamist theocracy, are of course blind to the beauty of Puccini's music. Why would they have any regard for the hundreds of brilliant musicians and others who spent thousands of hours preparing to stage such a sublime expression of one of the highest forms of art? Of course, they have no compunction about disrupting a crowd of 2400 people who have gathered to be inspired by that beauty. For the Hamas supporters, and their fellow travellers on the far left, their wicked end justifies any means. In a movement where mass rape, killing and kidnapping of innocent civilians is glorified, they don't think twice about marring or destroying great cultural achievements. Think of the violent mobs in France last week, vandalizing and burning to the ground beautiful symbols of French culture and history, while waving their Palestinian flags as a symbol of destructive violence. There is not an Islamist society on Earth that would permit Tosca to be staged. Most of the greatest achievements and art forms of western culture are considered haram by the dark doctrine of Hamas. So it's perversely fitting that they would disrupt such a performance. We should take them seriously when they show us who they are. And we should remember the aphorism attributed to Prince Myshkin in Doestoevsky's The Idiot: "the world will be saved by beauty."

Huge respect to a man who stepped into the breach while his party was melting down, on Day One of an election. He brought order and calmness out of chaos, and led his party to one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history.