Ministers of mass consternation

Look at this photograph. Every time I do it makes me laugh.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but will you settle for 975?

What if the picture includes a most infamous of number twos, in the form of a forever skid-mark on our collective democratic girdle, now deemed largely redundant in the Ozempic era?

And what if such a photo also included two of the worst cabinet ministers in living memory? One, Seamus O’Regan (bottom right, being obnoxious), who folded like a long weekend beach chair on Canada Day, leaving thousands stranded at home and abroad.

And the other? Canada’s minister of whatever the heck is going on with mass immigration (and a former historic failure on the clean-drinking-water-for-Indigenous file), Marc Miller. (Third from left.)

Saed, my Uber driver over the weekend, had more than a thousand words for the men in this photo, but particularly for Miller, who has become increasingly combative in recent months as the breadth of the damage he continues to sign off on becomes unavoidable to even new Canadians, as well as the Liberals from nine years ago who continue to watch in amazement as their former party abandons everyone not on Dominic Barton’s Christmas card list.

As we cruised past houses, town-homes, and 1.5-bed condos the two of us could never hope to afford, the man of Persian descent, couldn’t help but bemoan the sheer incongruity of the modern Canadian experience, the lie sold to him and others, before the diploma mill and ‘temporary’ foreign worker taps were opened fully.

“It’s so beautiful here. And yet, I’m forced to work two jobs to break even. I came here to create a better life for my wife and my daughter, but within three years everything grew worse. University Canada West? Have you heard of such a place?”

Editor’s note: I had. It’s British Columbia’s answer to Conestoga College, another largely fake institution seen as a backdoor to P.R. status for an astronomic amount of (predominantly Indian) males pretending to study ‘management.’

“Suddenly, these so-called students were everywhere. I know they’re not actually studying. You hear from everyone who attends these places . . . you’re not even required to speak English. There’s zero expectation for completed work. Half don’t even bother showing up to class. Almost overnight, the rental market was flooded with the worst listings I’ve ever seen.

(Editor’s note: We’ve reported similar tales here, including dispatches from a teacher inside the diploma mill hustle.)

“I recently had to look at a three-bedroom apartment in Burnaby, where fourteen students were living with just one bathroom. The conditions were like a prison. They had to keep a 24-hour bathroom schedule. Three of them were sleeping in the hallway. The hallway. Can you imagine that? I may be struggling to find a place to live, but I could never sign off on something like that. It’s horrific. Inhumane. Why are they still coming? Who is this really for?”

The answer to that is certainly not us. Not them, either.

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Push the provinces on this, where Doug Ford and B.C. Premier Eby have been equally terrible, and you’ll receive mostly radio silence. (Another Editor’s note: Lord knows I’ve tried.)

Make any aspersions that the situation only grows worse by the day on the federal level, and a certain groomsman will meet ordinary folk, real-live industry experts (not of the Toronto Star’s Covid variety), the major banks, and liberal-oriented media with increasing disdain and all the antisocial tendencies perhaps befitting of a minister of basement internment camps and indentured servitude.

Even as the latest Liberal doom charts reach unimaginable heights, and spiritual new lows…

… and we’re talking serious new lows …

… these mediocre masters of the universe, these men like Miller remain all-in on their fundamental misunderstanding of the gravity of the situation, their piss-poor ability to reconcile with simple principles of supply and demand, and their refusal to show any contrition towards the millions of lives made needlessly worse by drowning the country in Well Meaning and “Forward for Everyone™.”

Be it through gaslighting or name-calling (over, and over, and over again), this groomsman, these groomsmen, only continue to beat on, boats against the polling currents, to be borne back ceaselessly into taking a weaponized supermajority, in a prescribed dose of two to the chest and one to the head.

In close-quarters combat, that’s referred to as The Mozambique Drill. In the case of Miller, Trudeau, and those who have skated by based off proximity to power and a certain head table in Montreal in 2005, The Mozambique North Drill — or Operation Hey Let Literally Everyone In To Create A Caste System For Us And Our Pals — has proven to be less effective, even as the right palms were greased for three interminable years, setting housing, healthcare, and a growth-less economy back a decade.

The jig is up. The doom charts too doom-y.

For ministers of mass consternation, basement apartments, and scenes of “post-national” hatred, and their corporate partners in wage suppression and the student-squalor trade, the golden age of grift has run headlong into the evidence of our eyes and ears.

Enough Canadians and valued newcomers can finally see that even in an immeasurably moronic era of blowing the doors off of the immigration system recently the envy of the Developed World, where seemingly everyone received an open invitation, none of us were ever worthy of cracking the Liberals’ guest list.

Given the cronies and crooks in attendance, it’s not always a bad thing to be on the outside looking in.

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.