Friends,
When I started covering Conservative Party events in April 2025, I made a quiet commitment, both to myself and the readers of this publication: I would attend these events in person, because too few journalists do. I would report what I saw honestly, because too much political coverage leans on second-hand narratives. And I would do it without surrendering to easy contempt, the kind that makes people on all sides stop listening before the first paragraph is finished.
That last commitment is the hardest one to keep, and the Canada Christian College event tested it to the breaking point.
If you read the original piece, you'll know I didn't pass my own test. I wrote it in a state of genuine anger—anger at watching an MP nod along while a constituent mistook a Korean War memorial tank for proof of a UN invasion, and a deeper anger at a political culture that increasingly treats facts as optional scenery. That anger was real, and so was much of what I reported.
But the tone I chose to report it in was, by my own standards, a failure. Sarcasm is not analysis. Contempt is not journalism. Calling someone Captain Sanctimony makes the writer feel better for about ten minutes. It makes everyone else less inclined to engage with the substance of the criticism—and the substance is the only part that actually matters.
So I have rewritten the piece. The new version is what I should have published the first time around: critical, direct, and willing to let the events speak for themselves without the narrator's fury becoming the headline.
I am not making this change quietly because I believe in showing the work. The original piece ran in a heated moment. The revision is an acknowledgment that holding power to account depends on the credibility that snark steadily erodes.
If you want to read the piece as it should have been written, it is here.
Thank you, as always, for your readership and for your patience with the process.
My very best,
— Will Adams
Editor, The Provincial Times
