'It's morning in Canada'

On "p*ss poor" Liberal comms, going "Canadian viral," and the importance of speaking normally to normal people.

There’s petrified human shit on my morning run again.

As I traverse south down Shaw Street at a 5:40 /KM clip, making mental notes for the latest column, I nearly finish off the hamstring strain I’ve been managing while changing course at the last minute to avoid the refuse.

Passing through Christie Pits Park, with a view of Toronto’s CN Tower in the background, two ‘tranq’d out’ government injection success stories lean against a swingset shrieking incoherently. Two mothers shepherd their children away, to parts temporarily less insane.

On the 3K leg back north I pass boarded-up businesses, dodge the requisite throngs of South Asian PRs (and non-PRS…) on E-bikes paid for with gig economy slave wages, and keep a keen eye out for future obstacles of progressive-made decay, as if human excrement and bile are Mario Kart’s banana peels for the ‘woke’ generation.

I get home, take the heart medication I now need after the combined intellects of Justin Trudeau and Doug Ford made life untenable for unvaccinated, Covid-recovered Canadians, and open up Twitter/X.

The first thing I see are Liberal comms — and piss-poor comms at that.

A Valentine’s post claims Pierre is in love with Justin for saying his name too often. (You can best believe if the shoe were on the other foot, the Conservatives would be accused of being homophobic.)

And Mark Gerretsen had shared his latest World Index graph claiming Canadians have never had it better.

Exhausted by the performative disconnect of it all, and feeling like the mother from The Babadook, at her wit’s end, wondering why her possessed child “can’t just be normal,” I fired off a Twitter thread of my own.

Nearly 300,000 views, and hundreds of angry ‘Tru-Anon’ comments later, the battery on my phone stopped overheating, and I could turn my notifications back on.

The post, in full:

It’s morning in Canada.

A mother steps on a government needle at her child’s playground.

15 Conestoga 'students' in a dimly lit Brampton basement wait their turn to use a single bathroom.

A little old lady on a fixed pension in the sticks opens the mail to a $300 carbon levy for heating her home.

A young man on a subway spots a violent schizophrenic hassling disassociated commuters. There are no police to be found. He wonders if he steps in, will he be shamed? Will he go viral?

A commuting family of four, on a debilitating variable rate mortgage for their 900 sq. foot semi that cost $950,000, wakes up to another car stolen.

A janitor at a Hebrew school scrubs "from the river to the sea" off the front windows for the third time this semester.

Mark Gerretsen hits send on a tweet that totally owns Pierre for using a similar adjective as Donald Trump. His constituents don’t see it, because they’re living real lives. A few of them wait 16 hours in the hospital for supposedly urgent care.

The rest of the Liberals, and many 'Red Tory’s,' continue to respond with the same old 2015 playbook, failing to realize the tipping point has already happened. There’s no going back to luxury beliefs when it’s this bad.

It’s actually broken.

Destroy them accordingly. Take back what you can.

For communications to be effective — for campaigns to be effective — one of the age-old adages one is supposed to follow is to “meet people where they are.” It’s what I try to do here at the newsletter, in the friendships I’ve formed in this community, and in my work with non-profit organizations, or on campaigns.

Talking about one’s own Twitter post that went ‘Canadian viral’ is a bit like boring someone to death with the details of your fantasy football team, or recapping your round of golf for your spouse, but the broader reasons for why this less-than-Sunny-Ways twist on Ronald Reagan’s famous “It’s morning again in America” campaign ad hit home are proof that lessons continue to be missed from that aforementioned age-old adage.

As with the slow deterioration of the Canadian lockdown and mandate consensus, or the quiet groundswell of ordinary folks who found themselves looking around during seasons of discontent — but mainly malcontent — and wondering if this all went too far, millions weren’t feeling heard.

And now, that same group is particularly tired of being spoken to like they’re in kindergarten, when they’re being offered assisted suicide over timely care, or they’re lamenting the fact that they can’t raise their children in a safer and more affordable town south of the border, or they have questions like, “what’s going to happen to the communities we’ve watched deteriorate before our very eyes, thanks to politics and policies of cowardice and indifference?”

It’s no wonder Poilievre’s team, the best in Canada, is resonating at near-historic numbers. They aren’t just tapping into that disenfranchisement, they share in it. It’s why I’ve been able to carve out a little place for myself here, and in the odd non-terrible newspaper. It’s why you’re here too, instead of digesting the latest comms slop from a supposed ‘dream team’ of Liberal fixers.

These folks truly can’t get out of their own way. In place of speaking normally, to normal people, they’re choosing to keep the delusion alive ‘til the bitter end. The belief in the divine right to rule has grown so great, their patterns of speech and thought so restricted by years of circle-jerking seminars, land acknowledgments, and DEI struggle sessions, there’s no more plain language to be found.

They can’t just say: “We’re sorry it’s hard. We’ll try to do better, and get out of your way more often.”

No, from here on out, it’s the dumbest newspaper columns imaginable, crumbling Care-Bear economics, the lazy, Trump-ian branding of the Leader of the Official Opposition, half-baked modern-day McCarthyism, and performative displays of outrage from a well-stocked bench of state-subsidized professionally aggrieved.

These Canadian mornings may have human feces, the grist from the diploma mills, and a 16-hour waiting room stint for a burst appendix, but they also offer a chance for growth, for the building of like-minded community, to revel in normality, and to commit to its defence.

They also mark our numbered days; more specifically, a certain prime minister’s.