Attack of the 50 foot Globe Opinion columnist

On newspapers not fit to line the bird cage, and those, such as yourselves, who are worthy of far greater respect and admiration.

Saturday morning. 17 and sunny. Shorts weather along South Granville’s False Creek.

This writer is a few kilometres into the weekend constitutional when he spots a pop-up stand on the boardwalk. A squalid character is hawking his wares to the Taleeb Noormohamed, house-flipper in a housing-crisis set.

Men and women stop. They leaf through keffiyehs, every symbol but the maple leaf, radical de-growth, anti-oil and gas critical ‘literature,’ and tap on the little white card reader.

They don’t seem to know or care that, as the “elbows up!” crowd, they just visited with the ghost of Canada’s pretend-nationalistic future.

In months, mere weeks perhaps, those Canadian flags will be right back down, stepped on, or torn. What will remain is any flag but our own.

Until, of course, the TV and the newspaper again permits them to love their country.

(Editor’s note: That very same day, the same crowd elected an ardent communist to Vancouver City Hall. Oh, ‘Team Canada.’)

This is indeed the first true Canadian election where the media have a financial stake in its outcome, and it shows. (Read a good piece from Peter Menzies, who knows a thing or two as a former CRTC commissioner and National Newspaper Award-winner.)

This is the first election in which media have a direct financial stake in the outcome: does it show?

Every day in effete Toronto, Ottawa circles you have PMO speed-dialed opinion pieces not fit to line the bird cage. In the case of the Globe and Mail, the self-proclaimed Canadian paper of record, each dawn is met with opportunity anew to pull up the ladder and throw down a grenade.

Take a perusal through those haunted Rosedale manor halls and you’ll find little more than Trump catastrophizing, finger-wagging at the yobs for being allowed to pay a little bit less on gas for what may be a brief shining moment, and what Conservative advice on offer amounts to: “Be more like our pal Mark. But still lose.”

In the perpetual case of the paper’s worst offender (and a paper that sponsors the Carney-linked ‘Century Initiative,’ may we not forget), Andrew Coyne, a man with four flags in his bio that aren’t Canadian, has decided there can be no down-ballot priorities for the over-worked and under-paid drowning in housing hell, problems of far too many people, far too little country, and far too little rule of law.

“Worrying about what Trump will do to the country, starting with its economy, is a ‘luxury belief’? Okaaay….” the spawn of a former governor of the Bank of Canada scoffs, choosing to deliberately misinterpret.

“If Conservatives would like to persuade themselves, on the brink of a Trump-induced recession (Editor’s note: Canada has been in a recession for over a year, ask someone with a real job), that this is all in people’s heads, or something only wealthy boomers worry about, they are entitled all the electoral rewards accruing thereto.”

Counterpoint: a normal response, from a self-respecting adult.

The discourse and lack of decorum was, as usual, in response to word that some Canadians have the gall to not rank a man who spends three days a week in Washington and four days in Palm Beach as their utmost priority when they’ve already been made to sit in a pot of boiling water for going on ten years.

It’s not all in people’s heads. They’re not wrong for refusing to let media-consumption-induced TDS rewire the survival circuits they require to also barely pay for groceries and heat their homes.

Unlike *redacts joke at press time so he doesn’t get sued*, guys like me actually hear from the war room. They haven’t had to “pivot” hard to Trump because they’ve been on it, stronger than the Liberals, from the get-go. They just haven’t shamefully rigged their entire identity around it.

Pollsters and spinsters can plant any fugazi they like in the papers of a nation, only one party has been consistently strong on tariff bluster, foreign interference, and every down-ballot issue that has Rosedale and Tsawwassen opinion writers kvetching on Boca Raton and Palm Springs’ shuffleboard courts.

What’s wrong with this guy. Didn’t he watch Power & Politics?

In so many ways, it’s the same in-group, out-group insanity we witnessed during 2.5 years of Canadian shutdowns and mandate hostilities.

How dare you want your kid to go to school have a home with a bedroom, didn’t you see the case numbers Howard Lutnick interview???

It should be little wonder that Mark Carney felt at home in the Globe Opinion section, where he wrote the most dangerously retarded Canadian column of the 2020s, asking for a full-scale crackdown against Convoy “sedition.” (He was said to have heavily leaned on the scales of justice from behind the scenes, according to multiple sources.)

(Editor’s note: And not to disappoint the caretaker prime minister so thoroughly dining out on an opportunity for a reset, but convoy charges of “mischief” are no “sedition.” Just imagine the U.K. speech-policing, send-you-to-jail-for-three-years-for-posting-a-meme powers Carney might yearn for.)

So what’s really going on inside the war room, and what are adults worthy of respect and capable of nuance working on, and how are they feeling?

“It’s going to be a dogfight 'til the very end — but we won’t leave one bullet unspent,” says a high-ranking source.

“I think there’s so much volatility. How many non-voters come out? For some of the scared boomers we’re seeing parking with Carney and who make up the majority of his rallies, how soft is that vote come election day? The Trump factor weighs in to varying degrees, but it’s far from the only thing we hear on the trail and in our data. Carney is such a terrible politician. In any other time and any other ordinary election, he would be polling where the NDP is by this point.

“One thing I guarantee you, if we ever have to face the prospect of a loss, we won’t do it by compromising our principles.”

Those principles may be a four-letter word to some of the aforementioned, but they should be immensely encouraging to others. Locked in a dead-heat, knee-deep in black-swan goose poop and a potential generational screw-job, the rescuing of Canada’s ample have-nots could find itself delayed by years many won’t feel like they have left to waste.

But with victory still a possibility, millions in a missing middle still up for grabs, and unprecedented working-class scenes sweeping the campaign trail, better to keep your head when all about you others are losing theirs and blaming it on you; to “be a man, my son!” (Thanks, Kipling.)

And if we lose that nerve? Lose those principles?

At least there’s an opinion section for that. Submissions are open.

Alexander Brown is a writer, non-profit director, and part-time politico. Acceptable Views is a Substack best-seller and was recently listed as a Top-100 publication under World Politics.

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PROGRAMMING NOTES: I’ll be in Ottawa this week for Canada Strong and Free. If you find yourself in attendance or around town, do say hi.

My Sunday election column in the Western Standard, for those interested.

And I’m pretty sure I’m the only third-party making ads on both ends of the voter demographic spectrum. I thought this one turned out nicely. Hopefully it helps.

And check out the new radio spot now playing in Battleground Ontario, on 680 News.

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