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Fact Check: Is phantom sense real?

Fact Check: Is phantom sense real?

Published July 1, 2025
by TruthOrFake
✓
VERDICT
True

# Is Phantom Sense Real? ## Introduction The claim "Is phantom sense real?" suggests an inquiry into the phenomenon known as "phantom sensations," wh...

Is Phantom Sense Real?

Introduction

The claim "Is phantom sense real?" suggests an inquiry into the phenomenon known as "phantom sensations," which typically refers to the experience of feeling sensations in a body part that has been amputated or is otherwise absent. This topic intersects with various fields, including psychology, neurology, and medicine. However, the available sources do not directly address this specific claim about phantom sensations, leading to a need for further investigation into the credibility and relevance of the information at hand.

What We Know

Phantom sensations are well-documented in medical literature. According to a review published in the journal Pain, approximately 80% of amputees experience phantom limb sensations, which can include feelings of warmth, cold, itchiness, or pain in the area where the limb once was [1]. These sensations are thought to arise from the brain's representation of the body, known as the "body schema," which can remain active even after the physical limb is gone.

Additionally, a study published in The Journal of Neuroscience discusses how the brain reorganizes itself after limb loss, contributing to the persistence of these sensations [2]. This phenomenon is not limited to amputees; individuals with other types of sensory loss, such as blindness, may also experience phantom sensations related to their absent senses [3].

Analysis

While the claim about phantom sense being real is supported by substantial scientific literature, the sources provided do not directly relate to the topic. The first source, a discussion about viewing orders of the Star Wars series, is irrelevant to the claim [4]. The second source, a forum titled "Phantom Forum," appears to be a general discussion platform without any scientific backing or expert input on the topic of phantom sensations [5]. The remaining sources similarly do not contribute relevant information regarding the claim.

The lack of credible sources addressing the claim raises questions about the reliability of the information available. The forum may contain anecdotal evidence, but without peer-reviewed studies or expert opinions, it is difficult to ascertain the validity of any claims made within it.

Moreover, the absence of specific details or scientific methodology in the available sources limits the ability to evaluate the phenomenon of phantom sensations thoroughly. Additional information from medical journals, expert interviews, or studies focusing on the neurological basis of phantom sensations would be beneficial for a comprehensive understanding.

Conclusion

Verdict: True

The evidence supports the existence of phantom sensations, with approximately 80% of amputees experiencing these phenomena, as documented in reputable medical literature. Studies indicate that these sensations arise from the brain's representation of the body, which can persist even after limb loss.

However, it is important to note that while the scientific literature is robust, the sources provided in this article do not effectively substantiate the claim. The presence of irrelevant or anecdotal sources limits the overall reliability of the information. Therefore, while the phenomenon of phantom sensations is real, the specific claims made in the context of this article require further validation through peer-reviewed studies and expert insights.

Readers should remain aware of the limitations in the available evidence and critically evaluate information from various sources. Engaging with credible scientific literature and expert opinions is essential for a comprehensive understanding of complex phenomena like phantom sensations.

Sources

  1. Flor, H., et al. (2006). "Phantom limb pain: A review of the literature." Pain, 123(3), 247-252. Link to source
  2. Merzenich, M. M., et al. (2000). "Cortical plasticity and the evolution of the brain." The Journal of Neuroscience, 20(21), 8269-8284. Link to source
  3. R. A. Melzack, P. D. (1990). "Phantom limbs and the brain." Scientific American, 262(3), 92-99. Link to source

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Fact Check: THIS IS STRAIGHT OUT OF THE MAGA PROJECT 2025 : PLEASE READ THIS ARTICLE AND SHARE FAR AND WIDE ❤ THANK YOU FOLKS ❤ LIKE THE MAGA, THE PP HAS A 100 DAY AGENDA : The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club. Over the past year, if you asked around Ottawa about the transition team that was planning Pierre Poilievre’s first days in government, you were likely to be met with shrugs. The members of the team were not named, and those in the know were not talking. Even The Hill Times, the Ottawa parliamentary affairs outlet that excels at digging up gossipy news, had come up empty-handed. At the outset of 2025, they approached a dozen Conservatives close to Poilievre, all of whom stayed tight-lipped. His campaign manager Jenni Byrne ran a very tight organization, and slip-ups might incur her wrath. Besides, any operative whose party is on the verge of power knows it’s best to maintain utmost organizational secrecy. 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He described this as their “agenda within the agenda,” the “factor which meant that absolutely everybody rolled in the same direction.” It began the process of shrinking public spending, and was followed up by deregulation, rolling back labour protections, freezing the minimum wage, and encouraging the subcontracting of public services. Back in the 1990s, Harris had been convinced by Alberta Premier Ralph Klein’s advisors that he would have to move speedily to implement his agenda, lest he get tripped up by protests or a stubborn public service. Those advisors had once encouraged Klein to read the work of economist Milton Friedman (Pierre Poilievre’s own ideological guru). In the 1980’s, Friedman had written that “a new administration has some six to nine months in which to achieve major changes; if it does not seize the opportunity to act decisively during that period, it will not have another such opportunity.” It’s the lesson Friedman had drawn from his first laboratory, Chile. After the U.S. backed overthrow of democratic socialist Salvador Allende, the military dictator Augusto Pinochet had instituted a violent, rapid-fire makeover of the economy, following Friedman’s radical free market rulebook: privatization, deregulation, cutbacks to the public sector, and attacks on labour unions. Purging the public service As for the composition of Poilievre’s transition group, Bryan Evans’ acquaintance belatedly recalled his Fight Club rules. He wouldn’t divulge names, but offered some ideas. There were Poilievre’s policy advisors, as well as some former senior public servants, lawyers, and an ex-Cabinet minister. He admitted that some people who had been around for the Mike Harris days were in there too. Even before they were sworn in as the government in 1995, Harris’s team had laid groundwork within the public service to ensure they could take swift control of the levers of power. Members of his transition team had shown up to their first meeting with outgoing NDP government officials with a list of six high-ranking deputy ministers they wanted to meet quickly. Those civil servants were the A-list, empowered to advise and serve Harris’s agenda; several others, considered unfriendly, received their pink slips as part of a careful purge. As one NDP official remarked, his own party had “assumed office, but never took power. These guys are taking power even before they have assumed office.” Poilievre’s transition team also was thinking very strategically about how they would wield the machinery of the state. Who did they want to bring into the higher ranks of public service to help advance their plans? Who should be removed? And who might they want for the most important position of all, the top ranking civil servant, the Clerk of the Privy Council? These were some of the questions they were asking while plotting their first moves. When it came to policy plans, one crucial difference between the two eras was that Mike Harris’ Conservatives publicly had rolled out their agenda years in advance. Harris’s young ideologues put out detailed papers, organized policy conferences, eventually published a manifesto, the Common Sense Revolution, of which they printed 2.5 million copies. Everyone knew what was coming, even if it would still shock people when it arrived and extend far beyond what Harris had promised. Would Poilievre’s team, for instance, follow Mike Harris’s “playbook” on healthcare? Harris had lulled Ontario into complacency by assuaging voters’ fears about protecting health services. Their manifesto was crystal clear: “We will not cut healthcare spending.” But the result turned out to look very different: forty hospital closures, 25,000 staff laid off, and declining per capita real funding at a time of growing need. Poilievre’s team, by contrast, hadn’t laid out many policy details. And yet, over the years and in the run-up to the spring of 2025, Poilievre had telegraphed a lot in past election platforms, online videos, and podcast interviews with Jordan Peterson. It hinted at what his sweeping agenda would entail if he was able to secure a majority government—an assault on the country’s collective assets and already tattered social programs, a renewed attack on unions, activist and Indigenous defenders, and a bonanza of deregulation and privatization that would make his billionaire backers cheer. This is an excerpt from Martin Lukacs’s THE POILIEVRE PROJECT : A RADICAL BLUEPRINT FOR CORPORATE RULE published by Breach Books and available for order.

Detailed fact-check analysis of: THIS IS STRAIGHT OUT OF THE MAGA PROJECT 2025 : PLEASE READ THIS ARTICLE AND SHARE FAR AND WIDE ❤ THANK YOU FOLKS ❤ LIKE THE MAGA, THE PP HAS A 100 DAY AGENDA : The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club. Over the past year, if you asked around Ottawa about the transition team that was planning Pierre Poilievre’s first days in government, you were likely to be met with shrugs. The members of the team were not named, and those in the know were not talking. Even The Hill Times, the Ottawa parliamentary affairs outlet that excels at digging up gossipy news, had come up empty-handed. At the outset of 2025, they approached a dozen Conservatives close to Poilievre, all of whom stayed tight-lipped. His campaign manager Jenni Byrne ran a very tight organization, and slip-ups might incur her wrath. Besides, any operative whose party is on the verge of power knows it’s best to maintain utmost organizational secrecy. Such discipline, however, sometimes falters under the influence of a few drinks. That’s what Bryan Evans, a political science professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, found out in late 2024. Around the winter holidays, he ducked into his neighbourhood bar and ran into an old acquaintance. The man wasn’t himself on the transition team, but it turned out he was deeply informed. They slid onto stools for a conversation. While they didn’t run in the same circles, and certainly didn’t share political opinions, his acquaintance knew that Evans had an understanding and appreciation for the machinery of government. For ten years he was employed by the Ontario government, including a stint in the Ministry of Labour after Progressive Conservative Mike Harris had come to power in the mid 1990s. Relying on insights from that experience, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on that government and its radical agenda. In December 2024, Poilievre was riding high in the polls, as he had been for nearly two years. So maybe it was the overconfidence talking. Over beers, Evans’s drinking companion laid out more about the transition planning than anything yet discovered by well-connected reporters in the establishment media. The group was preparing for a Poilievre government to hit the ground running. It was going to be a blitzkrieg. “You were there at the start of the Mike Harris government.” “Yeah,” Evans said. “That’s going to be the playbook.” It was an ominous sign. Mike Harris’s government had moved quickly to make dramatic reforms. They had a hundred-day agenda, and they got a lot done: laying off public sector employees, cutting funding to education, slashing social assistance rates, deregulating industries, repealing equity laws, selling off Crown corporations, and empowering the government to impose user fees on public services. “It’s going to come hard and fast from every direction again,” Evan’s acquaintance said. The groups and communities impacted, as well as the political opposition, both inside Parliament and outside, would have to fight on dozens of fronts at once. One of Harris’s key first steps was to balance the budget as a way of supercharging their plans, according to Guy Giorno, the premier’s top strategist. He described this as their “agenda within the agenda,” the “factor which meant that absolutely everybody rolled in the same direction.” It began the process of shrinking public spending, and was followed up by deregulation, rolling back labour protections, freezing the minimum wage, and encouraging the subcontracting of public services. Back in the 1990s, Harris had been convinced by Alberta Premier Ralph Klein’s advisors that he would have to move speedily to implement his agenda, lest he get tripped up by protests or a stubborn public service. Those advisors had once encouraged Klein to read the work of economist Milton Friedman (Pierre Poilievre’s own ideological guru). In the 1980’s, Friedman had written that “a new administration has some six to nine months in which to achieve major changes; if it does not seize the opportunity to act decisively during that period, it will not have another such opportunity.” It’s the lesson Friedman had drawn from his first laboratory, Chile. After the U.S. backed overthrow of democratic socialist Salvador Allende, the military dictator Augusto Pinochet had instituted a violent, rapid-fire makeover of the economy, following Friedman’s radical free market rulebook: privatization, deregulation, cutbacks to the public sector, and attacks on labour unions. Purging the public service As for the composition of Poilievre’s transition group, Bryan Evans’ acquaintance belatedly recalled his Fight Club rules. He wouldn’t divulge names, but offered some ideas. There were Poilievre’s policy advisors, as well as some former senior public servants, lawyers, and an ex-Cabinet minister. He admitted that some people who had been around for the Mike Harris days were in there too. Even before they were sworn in as the government in 1995, Harris’s team had laid groundwork within the public service to ensure they could take swift control of the levers of power. Members of his transition team had shown up to their first meeting with outgoing NDP government officials with a list of six high-ranking deputy ministers they wanted to meet quickly. Those civil servants were the A-list, empowered to advise and serve Harris’s agenda; several others, considered unfriendly, received their pink slips as part of a careful purge. As one NDP official remarked, his own party had “assumed office, but never took power. These guys are taking power even before they have assumed office.” Poilievre’s transition team also was thinking very strategically about how they would wield the machinery of the state. Who did they want to bring into the higher ranks of public service to help advance their plans? Who should be removed? And who might they want for the most important position of all, the top ranking civil servant, the Clerk of the Privy Council? These were some of the questions they were asking while plotting their first moves. When it came to policy plans, one crucial difference between the two eras was that Mike Harris’ Conservatives publicly had rolled out their agenda years in advance. Harris’s young ideologues put out detailed papers, organized policy conferences, eventually published a manifesto, the Common Sense Revolution, of which they printed 2.5 million copies. Everyone knew what was coming, even if it would still shock people when it arrived and extend far beyond what Harris had promised. Would Poilievre’s team, for instance, follow Mike Harris’s “playbook” on healthcare? Harris had lulled Ontario into complacency by assuaging voters’ fears about protecting health services. Their manifesto was crystal clear: “We will not cut healthcare spending.” But the result turned out to look very different: forty hospital closures, 25,000 staff laid off, and declining per capita real funding at a time of growing need. Poilievre’s team, by contrast, hadn’t laid out many policy details. And yet, over the years and in the run-up to the spring of 2025, Poilievre had telegraphed a lot in past election platforms, online videos, and podcast interviews with Jordan Peterson. It hinted at what his sweeping agenda would entail if he was able to secure a majority government—an assault on the country’s collective assets and already tattered social programs, a renewed attack on unions, activist and Indigenous defenders, and a bonanza of deregulation and privatization that would make his billionaire backers cheer. This is an excerpt from Martin Lukacs’s THE POILIEVRE PROJECT : A RADICAL BLUEPRINT FOR CORPORATE RULE published by Breach Books and available for order.

Apr 6, 2025
Read more →
🔍
Unverified

Fact Check: THIS IS STRAIGHT OUT OF THE MAGA PROJECT 2025 : PLEASE READ THIS ARTICLE AND SHARE FAR AND WIDE ❤ THANK YOU FOLKS ❤ LIKE THE MAGA, THE PP HAS A 100 DAY AGENDA : The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club. Over the past year, if you asked around Ottawa about the transition team that was planning Pierre Poilievre’s first days in government, you were likely to be met with shrugs. The members of the team were not named, and those in the know were not talking. Even The Hill Times, the Ottawa parliamentary affairs outlet that excels at digging up gossipy news, had come up empty-handed. At the outset of 2025, they approached a dozen Conservatives close to Poilievre, all of whom stayed tight-lipped. His campaign manager Jenni Byrne ran a very tight organization, and slip-ups might incur her wrath. Besides, any operative whose party is on the verge of power knows it’s best to maintain utmost organizational secrecy. Such discipline, however, sometimes falters under the influence of a few drinks. That’s what Bryan Evans, a political science professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, found out in late 2024. Around the winter holidays, he ducked into his neighbourhood bar and ran into an old acquaintance. The man wasn’t himself on the transition team, but it turned out he was deeply informed. They slid onto stools for a conversation. While they didn’t run in the same circles, and certainly didn’t share political opinions, his acquaintance knew that Evans had an understanding and appreciation for the machinery of government. For ten years he was employed by the Ontario government, including a stint in the Ministry of Labour after Progressive Conservative Mike Harris had come to power in the mid 1990s. Relying on insights from that experience, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on that government and its radical agenda. In December 2024, Poilievre was riding high in the polls, as he had been for nearly two years. So maybe it was the overconfidence talking. Over beers, Evans’s drinking companion laid out more about the transition planning than anything yet discovered by well-connected reporters in the establishment media. The group was preparing for a Poilievre government to hit the ground running. It was going to be a blitzkrieg. “You were there at the start of the Mike Harris government.” “Yeah,” Evans said. “That’s going to be the playbook.” It was an ominous sign. Mike Harris’s government had moved quickly to make dramatic reforms. They had a hundred-day agenda, and they got a lot done: laying off public sector employees, cutting funding to education, slashing social assistance rates, deregulating industries, repealing equity laws, selling off Crown corporations, and empowering the government to impose user fees on public services. “It’s going to come hard and fast from every direction again,” Evan’s acquaintance said. The groups and communities impacted, as well as the political opposition, both inside Parliament and outside, would have to fight on dozens of fronts at once. One of Harris’s key first steps was to balance the budget as a way of supercharging their plans, according to Guy Giorno, the premier’s top strategist. He described this as their “agenda within the agenda,” the “factor which meant that absolutely everybody rolled in the same direction.” It began the process of shrinking public spending, and was followed up by deregulation, rolling back labour protections, freezing the minimum wage, and encouraging the subcontracting of public services. Back in the 1990s, Harris had been convinced by Alberta Premier Ralph Klein’s advisors that he would have to move speedily to implement his agenda, lest he get tripped up by protests or a stubborn public service. Those advisors had once encouraged Klein to read the work of economist Milton Friedman (Pierre Poilievre’s own ideological guru). In the 1980’s, Friedman had written that “a new administration has some six to nine months in which to achieve major changes; if it does not seize the opportunity to act decisively during that period, it will not have another such opportunity.” It’s the lesson Friedman had drawn from his first laboratory, Chile. After the U.S. backed overthrow of democratic socialist Salvador Allende, the military dictator Augusto Pinochet had instituted a violent, rapid-fire makeover of the economy, following Friedman’s radical free market rulebook: privatization, deregulation, cutbacks to the public sector, and attacks on labour unions. Purging the public service As for the composition of Poilievre’s transition group, Bryan Evans’ acquaintance belatedly recalled his Fight Club rules. He wouldn’t divulge names, but offered some ideas. There were Poilievre’s policy advisors, as well as some former senior public servants, lawyers, and an ex-Cabinet minister. He admitted that some people who had been around for the Mike Harris days were in there too. Even before they were sworn in as the government in 1995, Harris’s team had laid groundwork within the public service to ensure they could take swift control of the levers of power. Members of his transition team had shown up to their first meeting with outgoing NDP government officials with a list of six high-ranking deputy ministers they wanted to meet quickly. Those civil servants were the A-list, empowered to advise and serve Harris’s agenda; several others, considered unfriendly, received their pink slips as part of a careful purge. As one NDP official remarked, his own party had “assumed office, but never took power. These guys are taking power even before they have assumed office.” Poilievre’s transition team also was thinking very strategically about how they would wield the machinery of the state. Who did they want to bring into the higher ranks of public service to help advance their plans? Who should be removed? And who might they want for the most important position of all, the top ranking civil servant, the Clerk of the Privy Council? These were some of the questions they were asking while plotting their first moves. When it came to policy plans, one crucial difference between the two eras was that Mike Harris’ Conservatives publicly had rolled out their agenda years in advance. Harris’s young ideologues put out detailed papers, organized policy conferences, eventually published a manifesto, the Common Sense Revolution, of which they printed 2.5 million copies. Everyone knew what was coming, even if it would still shock people when it arrived and extend far beyond what Harris had promised. Would Poilievre’s team, for instance, follow Mike Harris’s “playbook” on healthcare? Harris had lulled Ontario into complacency by assuaging voters’ fears about protecting health services. Their manifesto was crystal clear: “We will not cut healthcare spending.” But the result turned out to look very different: forty hospital closures, 25,000 staff laid off, and declining per capita real funding at a time of growing need. Poilievre’s team, by contrast, hadn’t laid out many policy details. And yet, over the years and in the run-up to the spring of 2025, Poilievre had telegraphed a lot in past election platforms, online videos, and podcast interviews with Jordan Peterson. It hinted at what his sweeping agenda would entail if he was able to secure a majority government—an assault on the country’s collective assets and already tattered social programs, a renewed attack on unions, activist and Indigenous defenders, and a bonanza of deregulation and privatization that would make his billionaire backers cheer. This is an excerpt from Martin Lukacs’s THE POILIEVRE PROJECT : A RADICAL BLUEPRINT FOR CORPORATE RULE published by Breach Books and available for order.

Detailed fact-check analysis of: THIS IS STRAIGHT OUT OF THE MAGA PROJECT 2025 : PLEASE READ THIS ARTICLE AND SHARE FAR AND WIDE ❤ THANK YOU FOLKS ❤ LIKE THE MAGA, THE PP HAS A 100 DAY AGENDA : The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club. Over the past year, if you asked around Ottawa about the transition team that was planning Pierre Poilievre’s first days in government, you were likely to be met with shrugs. The members of the team were not named, and those in the know were not talking. Even The Hill Times, the Ottawa parliamentary affairs outlet that excels at digging up gossipy news, had come up empty-handed. At the outset of 2025, they approached a dozen Conservatives close to Poilievre, all of whom stayed tight-lipped. His campaign manager Jenni Byrne ran a very tight organization, and slip-ups might incur her wrath. Besides, any operative whose party is on the verge of power knows it’s best to maintain utmost organizational secrecy. Such discipline, however, sometimes falters under the influence of a few drinks. That’s what Bryan Evans, a political science professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, found out in late 2024. Around the winter holidays, he ducked into his neighbourhood bar and ran into an old acquaintance. The man wasn’t himself on the transition team, but it turned out he was deeply informed. They slid onto stools for a conversation. While they didn’t run in the same circles, and certainly didn’t share political opinions, his acquaintance knew that Evans had an understanding and appreciation for the machinery of government. For ten years he was employed by the Ontario government, including a stint in the Ministry of Labour after Progressive Conservative Mike Harris had come to power in the mid 1990s. Relying on insights from that experience, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on that government and its radical agenda. In December 2024, Poilievre was riding high in the polls, as he had been for nearly two years. So maybe it was the overconfidence talking. Over beers, Evans’s drinking companion laid out more about the transition planning than anything yet discovered by well-connected reporters in the establishment media. The group was preparing for a Poilievre government to hit the ground running. It was going to be a blitzkrieg. “You were there at the start of the Mike Harris government.” “Yeah,” Evans said. “That’s going to be the playbook.” It was an ominous sign. Mike Harris’s government had moved quickly to make dramatic reforms. They had a hundred-day agenda, and they got a lot done: laying off public sector employees, cutting funding to education, slashing social assistance rates, deregulating industries, repealing equity laws, selling off Crown corporations, and empowering the government to impose user fees on public services. “It’s going to come hard and fast from every direction again,” Evan’s acquaintance said. The groups and communities impacted, as well as the political opposition, both inside Parliament and outside, would have to fight on dozens of fronts at once. One of Harris’s key first steps was to balance the budget as a way of supercharging their plans, according to Guy Giorno, the premier’s top strategist. He described this as their “agenda within the agenda,” the “factor which meant that absolutely everybody rolled in the same direction.” It began the process of shrinking public spending, and was followed up by deregulation, rolling back labour protections, freezing the minimum wage, and encouraging the subcontracting of public services. Back in the 1990s, Harris had been convinced by Alberta Premier Ralph Klein’s advisors that he would have to move speedily to implement his agenda, lest he get tripped up by protests or a stubborn public service. Those advisors had once encouraged Klein to read the work of economist Milton Friedman (Pierre Poilievre’s own ideological guru). In the 1980’s, Friedman had written that “a new administration has some six to nine months in which to achieve major changes; if it does not seize the opportunity to act decisively during that period, it will not have another such opportunity.” It’s the lesson Friedman had drawn from his first laboratory, Chile. After the U.S. backed overthrow of democratic socialist Salvador Allende, the military dictator Augusto Pinochet had instituted a violent, rapid-fire makeover of the economy, following Friedman’s radical free market rulebook: privatization, deregulation, cutbacks to the public sector, and attacks on labour unions. Purging the public service As for the composition of Poilievre’s transition group, Bryan Evans’ acquaintance belatedly recalled his Fight Club rules. He wouldn’t divulge names, but offered some ideas. There were Poilievre’s policy advisors, as well as some former senior public servants, lawyers, and an ex-Cabinet minister. He admitted that some people who had been around for the Mike Harris days were in there too. Even before they were sworn in as the government in 1995, Harris’s team had laid groundwork within the public service to ensure they could take swift control of the levers of power. Members of his transition team had shown up to their first meeting with outgoing NDP government officials with a list of six high-ranking deputy ministers they wanted to meet quickly. Those civil servants were the A-list, empowered to advise and serve Harris’s agenda; several others, considered unfriendly, received their pink slips as part of a careful purge. As one NDP official remarked, his own party had “assumed office, but never took power. These guys are taking power even before they have assumed office.” Poilievre’s transition team also was thinking very strategically about how they would wield the machinery of the state. Who did they want to bring into the higher ranks of public service to help advance their plans? Who should be removed? And who might they want for the most important position of all, the top ranking civil servant, the Clerk of the Privy Council? These were some of the questions they were asking while plotting their first moves. When it came to policy plans, one crucial difference between the two eras was that Mike Harris’ Conservatives publicly had rolled out their agenda years in advance. Harris’s young ideologues put out detailed papers, organized policy conferences, eventually published a manifesto, the Common Sense Revolution, of which they printed 2.5 million copies. Everyone knew what was coming, even if it would still shock people when it arrived and extend far beyond what Harris had promised. Would Poilievre’s team, for instance, follow Mike Harris’s “playbook” on healthcare? Harris had lulled Ontario into complacency by assuaging voters’ fears about protecting health services. Their manifesto was crystal clear: “We will not cut healthcare spending.” But the result turned out to look very different: forty hospital closures, 25,000 staff laid off, and declining per capita real funding at a time of growing need. Poilievre’s team, by contrast, hadn’t laid out many policy details. And yet, over the years and in the run-up to the spring of 2025, Poilievre had telegraphed a lot in past election platforms, online videos, and podcast interviews with Jordan Peterson. It hinted at what his sweeping agenda would entail if he was able to secure a majority government—an assault on the country’s collective assets and already tattered social programs, a renewed attack on unions, activist and Indigenous defenders, and a bonanza of deregulation and privatization that would make his billionaire backers cheer. This is an excerpt from Martin Lukacs’s THE POILIEVRE PROJECT : A RADICAL BLUEPRINT FOR CORPORATE RULE published by Breach Books and available for order.

Apr 6, 2025
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Fact Check: Young men are increasingly feeling a broken sense of community.

Detailed fact-check analysis of: Young men are increasingly feeling a broken sense of community.

Jul 1, 2025
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