The luxury of loss

On Liberal hardships, never shared.

“… So if you really think about it, Randy and I have both pretended to be Indian. So anyway, back to how we’re making life more expensive…”

To even go for a walk through a Canadian city in 2024 is to risk the black pill: the sense you’re not really welcome, that this world is not really for you.

Like a bygone immigrant catching his first glimpse at the Statue of Liberty, I’m making my way, relatively awe-struck, through Vancouver’s affluent, all but desolate Shaughnessy neighbourhood, when I spot an elderly Chinese man who has literally fallen, and he can’t get up.

He’s alone. He’s visibly itinerant. His jacket clings to him like a wet sleeping bag.

He is in the middle of the sidewalk.

The Liberal-encouraged foreign real estate launderers and speculators who are even in town to temporarily run the pipes at their $30 million estates pass him without a glance.

I perform no great service here, nothing worthy of accommodation. I only note this with a larger point in mind. I go to help the man up and he’s profusely apologetic; I gather that much even through his frayed mixture of Cantonese and broken English. His hands shake, his wrists are bruised. I lift him as one would handle a water balloon, hoping his translucent skin doesn’t burst.

He’s in his eighties, maybe nineties. I have no idea how he’s made it this long. I help him gather his personal belongings, which happened to lose the same battle with gravity that he did. He smells like how all our public spaces now smell.

He assures me he’s just taking refuge in the parkette up ahead, that I don’t have to carry him across the finish line. I ask if there is anyone I can call.

A relative? A care centre? An ambulance?

There’s no one. He’s on his own.

I leave him, reluctantly, and head on down the road. A public utility worker in a high-vis safety vest is laying out traffic cones on the corner ahead. He’s large, handsome, clean-shaven in his forties. My brain thinks of him as Native but I’m writing Indigenous.

“Were you able to help that man back there? I was about to check on him.”

“I tried — I think. I’m not sure there’s any helping him,” I reply, attempting to recall this dialogue word for word.

“Not much help for any of us these days, is there?”

Justin Trudeau is preening like a bonafide, Grade-A dickhead in Brazil.

“It’s really, really easy when people are in short-term survival mode worried about being able to pay the rent this month and buy groceries for my kids to say ‘Okay: let’s put climate change as a slightly lower priority’ . . . We can’t do that around climate change.”

Even putting aside that he’s choosing to die on a hill that has a) yet to lower emissions and b) only serves to make every single item on the essential Canadian supply chain more expensive, the timing here is a doozy, even by the exceedingly low standards of a group no more related to the commonfolk than Randy Boissonnault is to anyone of Indigenous heritage.

And all as inflation jumps back up, the Canadian dollar grows weaker by the month, and the layman wonders if their government has the intestinal fortitude to deport the one-million plus — Trump-style — who were ushered in to help drive this whole mess in the first place.

When we’re issuing brand-new passports to human smugglers posing as fake refugees, and replacement Punjabi truckers, on oft-fraudulent licenses, continue to kill and maim innocent Canadians on our streets and highways, no one should be taking these people at their word, no matter how performatively semi-sorry the PM claims to be.

Desperate? Absolutely. Sorry? Not a chance. Not when it’s down to Trudeau and the reprehensible Keir Starmer, who exist largely as the G20’s last holdouts on de-growth, and, seemingly, to serve only the deliberate emmiseration of the working poor and middle class.

One cannot work to turn countries into multi-billion dollar foreign ponzi schemes, where ordinary taxpayers in 600 sq. foot work camps subsidize their own captivity, and then suddenly claim to care about the worst offence (mass immigration), while leaving the 1B offence unaccounted for (making everything in life more expensive, except in Liberal strongholds, as some perverse Secular Indulgence).

The mental math doesn’t add up; neither the moral math. Life has never been more expensive. Canada has never been worse. We are, frankly, barely a country. Yet forward we lurch, powered, stubbornly still, by rainbows and unicorn farts, and the stolen Gen-Z Kamala comms that proved to be historically ineffective.

Like many of you, I desperately need for that to change. But it’s the work, in the here and now, the hard work, the hard conversations, the causing offence and making life untenable for those insulated from their acts of enshittification, that must be as ruthless as a Liberals who would fake their identity to steal your tax dollars during a pandemic they viewed as a business opportunity.

Look around. This can’t just be chalked up to run-of-the-mill incompetence. There’s real malice here. Robert J. Hanlon and his Razor never met men like Justin Trudeau.

I see more of myself, more of our situation, in the eyes of the 90-year-old man splayed out on the Shaughnessy sidewalk than I do in the eyes of those who live there, of those who let this happen.

No one’s coming to help us, but us.

That will have to do.