Go west, young newsletter

Acceptable Views returns from a brief sabbatical.

The new hamster wheel comes with significantly more inspiring views from the writing desk.

“Are you depressed, or just in the wrong part of Ontario?”
-Ancient Chinese proverb

On the Canadian political calendar, there would have perhaps been more opportune moments to move across the country.

Awash in escalating foreign interference, outright treason, Liberal ministers like Mark Holland rhetorically soiling themselves in the House, capital gains class warfare, and the Liberals now scraping 21% (!) in the latest Angus Reid poll, the missus and I packed up after 14 years as working adults in Toronto, and headed west as the great settlers and wagon trains before us. Only, in place of a deed to a parcel of land for the ten pieces of silver in our pockets, we secured air rights on a month-to-month basis to but a sliver of sky in B.C.’s Lower Mainland.

And yet, we’re happy with the decision to take the leap — and, in many ways, being forced to build the parachute on the way down — as, like many others, I often perform best without a safety net.

Yours truly certainly started to feel the pull to parts more beautiful and less spiritually constrained during that seemingly interminable three years where Canada’s pretend centre of the universe, effete Ontario, cosplayed as China’s Hubei province to meet the whims and delusions of a media, activist, and political class with an inordinate amount of sway over chickenshit mayors and premiers, who all but abdicated leadership for as long as they were allowed to get away with it.

It’s one thing to feel like you’ve outgrown your home. It’s another thing to feel it abandon you entirely. I’m keenly aware that’s now part and parcel to the West Coast Canadian experience — the everywhere Canadian experience in an era of allowed crime, one million newcomers for every 100,000-or-so new homes, and demand in all basic services being made to dramatically outpace supply — but I’m still welcoming of the challenge, the opportunity to succeed or fail elsewhere, and the hope that this one day ends in a log cabin at the top of a secluded mountain road, where one’s failing social credit score will matter less than a life rightly returned to more essential and organic priorities and experiences.

In the interim, the hope is to harness this inertia, and this rejection of the comfort zone — where nothing grows — to the benefit of you, the reader, and the thousands of wonderful supporters here.

Identifying as some beleaguered Ontarian had once started as a tongue-in-cheek gimmick, but as the last few years mounted, it had become more of an identity — a defence mechanism — than I had ever anticipated, and there are better ways to fill the tedium of long winter nights than resigning yourself to urine-dotted streets, where the air carries a faint whiff of burnt plastic.

But that’s not to say the once-great towns and cities of our youth are past the point of saving. ‘Downtown Canada’ may indeed be broken. Yet, even the most rudimentary of forced tweaks to a failing status quo proposition would produce results seen within days measured in the hundreds, not in decades.

We have roughly sixteen months to ensure that happens: to bundle as many normal and non-degenerative no-brainers as possible into a neatly fitted navy blue package.

Perhaps it really is the beleaguered Ontarian leaving my body, because consider me optimistic.

Alexander Brown is a writer, comms director, and part-time politico. He now lives three kilometres from where the prime minister of Canada once donned blackface for his students as a fully-grown adult.

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