We want to revive democratic decision-making, expand democratic participation, and protect personal freedom. Our patriotism is civic. It is loyalty to shared laws, shared values, and to one another as citizens, and it is open to all who share that commitment, whatever their origin. The principle is simple: a citizen is judged by their conduct. On that basis we reject every form of bigotry that ranks people by what they are rather than what they do — racism, sexism, contempt for one’s faith — and we reject political violence, not as a slogan, but as a contradiction of everything we stand for. At the same time, cancel culture, pressure to conform, and the narrowing of the spectrum of acceptable opinion are incompatible with the principles of a free society.

The same applies to the new political authoritarianism that presumes to educate people and to regulate their lifestyles and their language. A government that tells its citizens what they may say, how they must pay, and where they may go has forgotten its place. This is not an abstraction. When the federal government invoked the Emergencies Act against the 2022 protests, Canada’s courts found it had acted unlawfully and violated Charter rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly — and that freezing protesters’ and donors’ bank accounts amounted to unreasonable search and seizure, intruding on people’s privacy “based on potentially unfounded, subjective beliefs”. A government that can freeze your money over your peaceful dissent has already forgotten that it serves you. We will entrench protections so that no future government can repeat it.

We will defend the right to speak freely, even to offend, short of any direct incitement to violence. We are therefore deeply wary of expansive state power over lawful expression online. Ottawa’s earlier Online Harms Bill (C-63) drew criticism for provisions that would have imposed heavy penalties on individuals for hateful speech, and its newer Safe Social Media Act (Bill C-34) would, in the name of protecting children, hand Cabinet the power to decide which platforms are covered and require age-verification systems that critics warn depend on social media companies “continuously collecting sensitive data about both minors and all Canadians”. Protecting children is a genuine duty — but it must not become a pretext for surveilling everyone. We will support measures that are narrow, transparent, and tested against the right to free expression, never broad powers that sweep up the lawful speech of millions.

We will protect the right to use cash — preserving anonymity and resilience — and the right to live without a mandatory digital identity, which prevents total surveillance and exclusion. The drift away from cash is real: the share of sales made in cash fell from 53% in 2009 to 20% in 2024. Experts caution against Canada “sleepwalking” into a cashless society and urge laws to explicitly protect the right of Canadians to pay for their necessities in cash. The freedom to hold and spend your own money without permission is a check on power, not a relic, and we will defend it in law.

We will protect the right of every citizen to be judged by accountable human beings rather than by opaque algorithms, ensuring fairness and recourse. We condemn the spread of surveillance disguised as convenience and control disguised as safety. The danger is concrete: Canada’s privacy commissioners found the RCMP’s use of Clearview AI unlawful, warning that facial recognition “can provide racially biased results” and has “the potential to erode privacy and undermine freedoms and human rights such as free expression and peaceful assembly”. Police forces have moved to test AI facial-recognition bodycams even before clearing privacy review. We will require that intrusive surveillance technologies face independent authorization and meaningful oversight before they are ever turned on the public, because no citizen should be tracked, scored, or silenced, and no one should be denied their livelihood for their lawful beliefs or peaceful dissent.

On the deepest questions of morality, faith, and private belief — matters on which sincere Canadians have always disagreed in good faith — neither the state nor any political party has the authority to dictate the right answer. We therefore take no collective position on such questions of conscience. They belong to citizens, their families, their beliefs, and the representatives they freely elect, not to a party platform. Our representatives are free to follow their own conscience and that of their constituents, within the equal protection of the law, and we will impose no party line upon them. Privacy is a prerequisite for freedom, and this authoritarianism reaches its limit at the door of personal conscience.

Immigration and the coexistence of different cultures can be enriching. But this is only true as long as immigration remains limited to a level that does not overwhelm our country and its infrastructure, and provided that integration is actively promoted and succeeds. We know that the price of increased competition over affordable housing and low-wage jobs, and of failed integration, is paid first by those who are economically disadvantaged. The strain is measurable: record population growth was widely credited with pushing up housing costs and pressuring public services, and the government itself has now cut permanent-resident targets from a planned 500,000 to 395,000 in 2025, 380,000 in 2026, and 365,000 in 2027, explicitly to ease pressure on housing, health care, and infrastructure and to support successful integration. We will tie immigration levels to our real capacity to house and care for people. Anyone who is genuinely persecuted in their home country has a right to asylum. But migration is not the solution to the problem of poverty in our world; instead, we need fair global economic relations and policies that create more opportunity in people’s countries of origin. A shared identity, grounded in common laws, common languages, and common values, is not the enemy of diversity — it is the very foundation of the trust and solidarity that a free society requires.

Technology must serve people, not the other way around. A free society is one in which the citizen is a rights-bearing individual, not a data point to be managed.

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For years, inequality has been growing in our country. Millions of people work hard to provide a good life for themselves and their families. It is they who keep our society running and pay the vast majority of taxes.

Our country deserves a confident policy that prioritizes the wellbeing of its own citizens and is built on a clear understanding that the interests of our larger neighbour is not always the same as ours. Our goal is an independent Canada in a multipolar world — not a junior partner whose resources, data, and decisions are dictated from abroad.

What are the policy positions of the new party? How can I support the Common Good Party? How can I become a supporter or sponsor? You probably have many questions.