The self-righteous suicide of a middle power
How does a nation go from serving as a shining beacon of above-averageness, to the celebration of food stamps for a third of its populace? Gradually, then suddenly.
Consider the twenty, thirty, or forty-something-year-old Canadian who doesn’t yet own a home and makes less than $120k.
Lest the rapture comes, the years ahead will be packed with 8-10 million Canadians (many of them new, who have been falsely promised a chance at true prosperity) playing musical chairs over 2-3 million new homes. With odds that bad, many, like yours truly, have given up on the dream entirely.
At least here, anyway.
If only that’s where the institutional — nay, constitutional — problems came to an end. But that’s just the tip of the big government suppository.
Need a family doctor? Join the club.
Can’t afford the few thousand dollars in carbon sin taxes per year? Stop complaining and just buy a $60,000 EV that also draws power that comes from… well, never mind. And forget about heating your home…
Worried about state censorship, and the Trojan horses of C-11, C-18, or legislation like America’s ‘Restrict Act,’ which are each being hand-waved through the city gates? You’re just falling for disinformation. (And don’t worry, there are ‘Digital Safety Commissions’ being put in place to cure you of that plucky individualism.)
Tired of the open-air drug market scenes in your central business district, and sick of sharing transit with violent schizophrenics who are now overly coddled by those in denial that society can still function when there are thousands of Phineas Gages running around on a given day, only the railroad spike has been replaced by a never-ending and far more potent drug supply? What have you been radicalized by Tucker Carlson or something? (Instead of, y’know, not wanting your kid murdered by a degenerate on his thirtieth round of bail, dished out by a judge with his vaccine status in his Twitter bio.)
Are you decidedly not a racist, but foreign election interference continues to stick in your craw? Nah, you’re a regular Nathan Bedford Forrest for taking issue with the pervasive powers of the Mandarin-bloc; the election interference receivers said so.
Worried about a federal budget that all but placed a sarcophagus of burning kindling over the remains of an inflationary economy running like the no. 4 reactor at Chernobyl? Don’t fret about that continued juicing of supply-side demand, and the treatment of the symptoms, instead of the disease (read: MONEY PRINTING), we’ll get back to balance before the radiation leaks into the groundwater. Promise.
With an entire generation now being instructed to just count their (remaining) blessings, grin and bear it, and switch off the part of the brain that’s responsible for critical thinking, lest they be accused of Literal Fascism, it’s almost as if the West’s neoliberal governments are actively trying to lose elections.
Yet no contemporary holds a candle to Canada’s sitting minority government and their NDP partners, nor comes close to their interest in ‘post-national’ managed decline, the kind of champagne socialist indulgences that lead to the Daily Stabbing, and the need for certain writers on Substack (who just had their rent hiked by 8%) to start looking up real estate prices in Portugal.
But bemoan we mustn’t! Because a near-third of the population of the definitely-not-broken Canada was just handed the most expensive set of food stamps in recorded history. That’ll solve it…!
If it weren’t all so downright depressing and dystopian, there might be more room for levity. Instead, it’s feelings of being “riled up and anxious” that rule the day for the majority of non-subsidized dissenters who have the gall to take issue with the controlled demolition of their prosperity, purchasing power, and hopes for tomorrow.
Yet we’re not even allowed to be “riled up and anxious” apparently, as that means we are but wheat being harvested at the right-wing rage farm, instead of adults who contain multitudes, and who come by their grievances honestly.
Canada wasn’t perfect under the last guy(s), but it just so happened to work, and the trappings of self-righteousness and progressive flagellation were normally better self-contained over gin and tonics at the National Club, not carried around by each and every living adult on handheld INGSOC telescreens.
So how did a nation go from serving as some shining beacon of above-averageness, to the celebration of food stamps for a third of its populace? Gradually, then suddenly, it seems.
There’s still time to right the wrong, of course. Perhaps not for the middle children in this all-too-brief current moment, but for those coming after.
Considering the sheer breadth of needless damage, leaving them with something less bad would be a start.
Well done Alex, for laying out the challenges currently facing Canadians. Challenges that have been created from within. If only this was mandatory reading for all students in primary and secondary schools across this country - and their parents.
Wonderful work.. Alex. I've struggled to define my space in this social demolition derby. This piece crystallized the elements fro me. Thanks.
I can now see that I’m not alone in this liberal vortex .