A few words for the firing squad
If we truly think we’re being invaded, if we really are serious about a Liberal new world order, we couldn’t have a worse approach to recruitment and attrition if we tried.
It was a perfectly fine Davos speech, delivered by a Davos man, that continues to ignore our own record on hanging signs in place of handling meaningful business.
And how fitting that, in the same week the federal government lost again in pleading its case that its invocation of the Emergencies Act crackdown on the Freedom Convoy didn’t violate the Charter, Canada’s pollsters with burst capillaries, and its most vicious media defenders of a failed and failing status quo, are back to ‘push’-polling and wedging Canadian against Canadian, not to create unity, but to sow deliberate disharmony for their own gain.
The last time this stunt was truly attempted, such establishment hacks launched a Covid election on the faulty data and failed presuppositions that only backwoods, anti-vax yokels would fail to reward Justin Trudeau with a majority. They were wrong then, just as they were wrong about the efficacy of mandates, just as they are wrong now to plumb the depths of depravity to wedge the independent-minded against the status quo, or young against old.
Ekos’ latest, concocted to go out of its way to again define conservatives as disloyal, monster-truck-driving bigots, finds that a more robust percentage of those sampled who identify as Conservative would prefer not to engage in outright war with the United States, and would be more reluctant to hypothetically fight to the death in a still-very-much-imagined conflict. The headline there is the point. And words like “traitor” and “quisling” have flown around X, and surely BlueSky, as intended.
Missing in both that analysis and unthinking salvo is, of course, who votes for what party, and why. For that, we turn to better data from Abacus.
For all of Trump’s increasingly disordered global tactics, and all the frustrations of an approach now brashly picking on Greenland, this should not be a moment where we give ourselves over to absolutes. Neither a maximalist nor minimalist approach to understanding Canada’s present dynamic serves real truth. These are times not of black and white, but grey, and there are those of us, thankfully, who appear capable of holding conflicting thoughts and truths in our heads at once.
Black-bagging Maduro can be good, just as Canada sticking up for its canola farmers can be good. Further bending a knee to China, giggling while we do so, and working to expand a shared partnership in media and security, when the PRC and its proxies already lean on our elections, threaten our citizens, commit rampant real estate fraud, and operate foreign police forces on our soil, that too can be bad, even if we need to diversify our global trading partners.
Fattening ourselves up for QIA, one of the world’s largest state sponsors of terror, who sources tell this writer have been eyeing our decline for some time in the hopes of buying the dip, that can be equal parts passably pragmatic and deeply worrying.
In response to evolving threats, even our own eerie quotes of “new world orders,” and the groundwork clearly being laid for an “elbows up” 2.0 election, Conservatives do indeed need to define their foreign policy, and carve out more space to meet the wholly Trump-obsessed where they are. They also cannot join the Liberals in pure fantasy. If they are to lose for telling the truth, that we have no realistic replacement for our economic and social relationship with the U.S., and that our young and working-aged can’t keep getting hosed and need to be a priority, so be it. It’s better to lose with honour than to die without dignity. If Trump is going to continue to sabotage aspects of the globe’s populist conservative moment, you do your best to get your house in order, and you accept that the next three years may not be yours to own federally.
And make no mistake, our house is not in order. It’s even split right down the middle. Conversations tend to have a familiar rhythm these days, if you find yourself in the weeds with the average “break us so he can own us” believer.
“Did you see what Trump just did?”
“Yes, it’s concerning. I am similarly concerned that I can’t afford a home, adolescence is being extended, we threw open our borders to anyone with a pulse, we’re woefully short on First World healthcare delivery, we legalized crime, we don’t deport, we tore down our flag and our monuments, and we harmed our own economy and set our future generations up for failure far worse than any American president ever could.”
“…Did you see what Trump just did?”
Can you find the “quisling” in that response? Neither can I. Yet carving out the necessary space for a myriad of domestic crises, and not losing sight of the fact that those being set up as disloyal are anything but, continues to be met with threat and hostility. To exist in our media sphere these days means a harem of ‘Tru-anon’ characters threaten to put you up against the wall for crimes against the state, each and every day.
But let’s not stand on imagined ceremony, and the wishes of that firing squad. Canada has live-action role-played (LARPed) every American social justice trend in the modern era.
We LARPed fiery but mostly peaceful summers.
We LARPed our pandemic response, with Ford, Legault, and Trudeau running a Wuhan-esque, authoritarian issues-management model which has failed every audit of every evidence-free abuse.
And now we appear to be rhetorically LARPing invasion, as we aren’t preparing in any meaningful way, the over-60s in Ekos polls aren’t joining the reserves, we’re already failing on defence spending promises, and we continue to seize guns from law-abiding, salt-of-the-earth Canadians under threat of kicking down their doors.