'Is the future ours to own, or are we still someone else’s renter?'
On the next ten years starting a whole lot like the last.
Much has already been made of this week’s anti-triumph of a status quo cabinet shuffle, and of the pervasive doom and gloom that has permeated conservative and younger working Canadian circles since election day.
Such breakdowns, from those on the inside and in-the-know, are of course of value, and speak to matters of electoral dynamics and policy, and that impossible to quantify ‘momentum,’ which flipped so violently the instant President Trump turned his flippant remarks north, and the Liberals saw a chance to rewrite history, raise the flag for the first time in years, and hold mawkish and sentimental days-gone-by bingo-hall pep-rallies, that only served to underscore the insult of not letting a country identify as itself for years on end.
The maple leaf may again be welcome in the Farm Boy parking lot, but we know this moment won’t last. If much of what’s transpired over these past few months can be attributed to a kind of mass psychosis, the decision to scare the heck out of some seniors, and overall ‘vibe,’ there are those like this writer, a third-party campaign director, who are of the belief that no amount of ‘policy wonk-ing,’ even until we’re blue in the face, can account for matters of the heart that decide elections – nor the darkness and resentments that now lie within the hearts of millions in Canada’s missing middle.
It's within those ‘vibes,’ mainly bad -- if you’re under-45 and not a member of a dual-income family of lawyers, or those who pay their mortgage through the Bank of Mom and Dad -- where we should be seeking real Canadian stories to bring to the (mostly old) faces who risk continuing the ruination of the last few years, before redoubling our resolve to ensure this cannot continue.
I think of Sean Fraser, now, inexplicably, dragging his scythe over to justice, and I think of the average middle-class adult’s day to day; or that of the young failure to launch who finally just had his first chance to vote for his future back, only to be met at the one-yard line by the Brantford Boomer, who has since, already, put his elbows back down.
They were promised a version of what their parents had, only to receive a sliver. They studied hard, worked hard, only to witness wage suppression or near-replacement under mass immigration and the TFW, diploma-mill boom. At the end of the day, they arrive home to their 500-square-ft dog-crate rental, where they hold no hope of starting a family, that costs them in the neighbourhood of $2000-3000 for the mere right to sit amongst scenes of squalor and decay on public transit, within an hour’s commute of their job.
As a reward for those hard years, for the naivete of expecting better from a country increasingly giving them less and less, Gregor Robertson, the architect of Vancouver’s original housing crisis, who oversaw the foundations of the ‘Vancouver model’ of foreign investment fraud, was just selected to supposedly help unlock their housing future — under a plan that looks a whole lot like Brookfield-owned Khruschevkas.
I think of Lena Metlege Diab, now Canada’s Immigration Minister, who has millions of undercounted temporary visitors she’s supposed to send home, and who is tasked with wrestling back down to earth charts pointed upwards to the heavens; and then I think of the young couple, with no path to a family doctor under resources stretched beyond the breaking point, waiting eight hours at a walk-in, hoping to be triaged before closing, who may soon be punted to an emergency room filled with not-Canadians, that may or may not be closing overnight under staffing shortages.
What, now, is one expected do with some of the anger and resentment that comes with feeling stuck along with them, as well as that eternal, gnawing sense of knowing we once had something better, and lost it, and just before getting more of it back in some familiar form, a kind of collective unconsciousness took it all away?