It's a couples' retreat, but no surrender, for latter-day Liberals

On self-inflicted wounds and Bond villains.

“I’ve been told a few of you are sharpening knives, so I’ll keep the orientation brief.”

Nanaimo, British Columbia is a study in contrasts.

For every charming mid-century neighbourhood, where what’s left of the Canadian Dream should be possible — a tent encampment.

For every whale cresting the surface off Gabriola Island at sunrise — a structurally enabled-yet-abandoned addict attacks a young woman on a bus.

For every decadent, eponymous dessert, stuffed with coconut and custard — a morphine and hydromorphone pill marketed under the brand name Dilaudid, or "Dilly," is handed out by the government like some sweet treat.

Extortion is up 551%.
Violent crime 51%.
Sexual assaults 95%.
Homicide 27%.

And now, amidst all that beauty and all that squalor, a party gathers there in retreat but not surrender; the same party that helped enable all that needless entropy to begin with.

To the Liberal Party of Canada, it’s just another day at the office.

For those forced to live in it. forced to sit back and enjoy the back-slide, their feelings are understandably less charitable.

The government burnout out here is real. It’s palpable. It burns hotter than the contents of a B.C. government crack pipe. (It’s no coincidence the B.C. NDP now finds themselves on the ropes for the first time since 2017 with a fall election looming, and the province may elect its first Conservative-leaning government since 1991.)

This isn’t working. Not for you, anyway.

It was never supposed to.

But it was supposed to work better for them, too. For longer, at least.

So they meet, and they plot, and they try to become unstuck from rock bottom.

It isn’t going well. It can’t go well.

The future of a country more or less depends on it.

How bad has this caucus retreat gone for the Trudeau Liberals so far? Let us count the ways.

• Five chiefs of staff have jumped ship, including the federal campaign director, who informed his betters on the way out the door that it’s “time to make way for others.”

• Saying the quiet part out loud, Liberal MP Taleeb Noormohamed, part of the ‘Heritage’ team in charge of media subsidies, led into the proceedings by all but threatening a National Post reporter that she should be less critical of the government that helps legacy media outfits keep the lights on.

• With their coalition with the NDP now a thing of the past, in their desperation the Liberals have turned their eyes towards… the separatist Bloc Quebecois. A move that would make the rupturing of Canada all but final, and drive Western alienation like never before.
  
  Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has already signalled she’d play hardball in response: “The federal government does not have a mandate to bargain with Quebec separatists at the expense of Alberta, the West and the rest of the country. If the Liberals go down this path we need an election to be called immediately.”

• Liberals comms pros and CBC panelists continue to mine the depths of political decorum by repeatedly turning to “the Conservatives I disagree with are white supremacists,” to non-existent results.

• Those culture war calls continue to come from inside the House, as back-bench attack dogs appear to have been instructed to libel their media opposition as Russian assets, only to half-heartedly walk the comments back under threat of lawsuit.
  
  (A development so wildly unimpressive it inspired this columnist to clear his morning schedule so he could get down to business here. Shout-out to our wonderful readers.)

  

• And the final “Dilly” on top of the proverbial nanaimo-flavoured sundae? Mark Carney, “man of destiny,” has arrived to save Canadians from our pesky selves.

To say Carney’s appearance on the scene is inevitable would be an understatement. As deputy and finance minister Chrystia Freeland proves herself historically incapable on both files, and with the Liberal bench depleted, the former Bank of Canada governor, who has made no secret of his technocratic (and downright dangerous) political ambitions, was always bound to return to the fold.

How he eventually transitions into the next Liberal leader is one of the only real questions worth asking. And for those wondering about the kind of advice the Liberals’ new “special adviser” will be dishing out to Justin Trudeau, there’s little reason to overcomplicate it. It’s perhaps best to look no further:

That Carney is the only seemingly viable option as a slow-rolled replacement is the real story.

Carney’s Agenda is promoted by the United Nations and other international bureaucracies and a vast and ever-growing array of non-governmental organizations and fora, especially the World Economic Forum (WEF), where Carney is a trustee. Also, perhaps most surprisingly, by its corporate victims. No one wants to become climate roadkill.
(National Post)

An ‘ESG’ zealot who seeks government control of the economy and to exert the added pressures of social influence onto businesses big and small, Carney’s high-minded, authoritarian style of global governance is the stuff Bond villains are made of.

And the last time the Liberals made a call to the bullpen for a “special economic adviser,” it was Canada’s other Bond villain, Dominic Barton, who turned single-sourced government contracts into his own personal piggybank; in effect, turning Canada into a consultocracy, not a democracy, overnight. Meanwhile, on the side, Barton was scheming up Canada’s present-day mass-immigration crisis, before eventually selling what was left of his soul to the PRC.

With Carney’s laundry list of conflicts of interest arguably worse, who will he represent? Will it be Brookfield? The UN? The WEF?

When it comes to a so-called “man of destiny,” with all the charisma of a maitre-d at a hotel for ghosts, who makes failed Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, famously stiff as a board, come across like 80’s Eddie Murphy in comparison, these latter-day Liberals continue to seek out complications in place of obvious solutions.

That they refuse to see their Nanaimo problem — their lived reality problem — remains a marvel.

When offered countless opportunities to show contrition, to tell uniquely-forgiving Canadians “Hey, our bad, we’ll change course,” they answer with more of the same.

Only, this time, they put forth something, someone, even worse.

Alexander Brown is a writer, comms director, and part-time politico. To support the best-selling Acceptable Views newsletter, become a free or paid subscriber.