Once again, Matt & Jen articulate SO WELL what so many of us have been feeling for quite. some. time.
Jen was really on a snow induced rant & roll. Matt trying to get a word in edgewise reminded me of John Candy's character in Uncle Buck trying to do the same on the phone with his understandably angry lady friend Chanice:
Matt and Jen are bang on with their thesis that those things that have made the winters we must endure together tolerable are either falling apart, dying, or stone cold dead.
Things Canadians used to be proud of:
- Relatively good economic opportunities for the majority of citizens.
- a healthy small business environment in terms of taxation / regulation
- Semi-competent, well meaning, honorable, and semi-respectable politicians, beauraucrats, and business leaders.
- Dependable, somewhat slow, but generally effective family & emergency health care.
- Safe public streets, transit, and other shared spaces mostly free of petty and violent crime.
- Clean, abundant water supplies.
- Adults in charge of our public finances.
- A manageable addictions problem and relatively small homeless population.
All of the above are either crumbling or have vanished.
I have four kids; three are adults.
They WANT to love this country, but...
- They were profoundly disillusioned by how the pandemic was handled at ALL levels.
- They can't afford to buy a house, and can't even find rental accommodations.
- They are struggling to afford gas & groceries and now stay home rather than going to sporting events, films, theatre, clubs, and restaurants.
- They see incompetent people in positions of authority over them personally, and similar incompetent people running the critical services and overall leadership of our communities, province, and country.
I'm more like Matt than Jen when it comes to contemplating leaving Canada.
I travel frequently to the US for professional development and networking, and aside from reuniting with family and friends at home, dread returning to Canada. My American friends are baffled at what has happened to Canada. In response, I point out their two presidential candidates.
I will not fly from a Canadian airport on a Canadian airline - I drive to much better run, less expensive airports in the US.
Poilievre, assuming he wins a majority, better fix things quickly.
If he doesn't, this time around we won't just have a 'brain drain' issue, we will have a mass exodus of our young and capable citizens the likes of which we've never experienced, or even contemplated!
Another great episode: love the even-handed analysis that's so hard to find these days.
You briefly touched on the left-right split and fortunately didn't fall into the trap I expect much of the media to next election: IMO "right-wing" is the wrong way to look at Poilievre's appeal. I consider myself a progressive and will be voting NDP in the next BC provincial election (Eby seems to at least understand the problems and is trying to address them) who is also seriously considering voting for Poilievre federally.
Why? Forget platitudes and vibes, under Trudeau, Canada seems to be rapidly moving away from progressive ideals. For example:
1. A housing market becoming increasingly aristocratic and feudal ("bank of Mom and Dad")
2. Renters who work middle-class jobs legitimately having to worry about becoming homeless.
3. A public transit system and public spaces feeling more dangerous, thus pushing people back into cars and private spaces
4. Companies able to easily import cheap labour rather than improving wages or working conditions to better attract/retain talent
5. Us apparently being totally okay with just openly exploiting young folks in developing nations (charging them 30k to study in a strip mall, etc)
6. A public health care system that's falling apart
7. Young families struggling to access childcare
8. High spending that's exhausted our fiscal capacity, but without all the great social programs or infrastructure I'd imagined would come with that high spending.
Are all these problems Trudeau's fault? No, but many of them can be traced back, at least in part, to policy choices by his government, and in any case, he seems incapable of acknowledging the problems or understanding the gravity of the situation. Singh seems equally lost. Poilievre - while somewhat distasteful - at least seems to understand the problems Canada is facing. Will he fix them? I have my doubts, but it's at a point where I feel like it might be worth a shot.
The Line Podcast was poorly engineered today. I could barely hear Jen in Calgary and Matt was really loud......where's the producer or someone on the levels? Great topics, always a pleasure to read the newsletter but the podcast needs to get more Professional. Tom
I think that you have put your finger on the Poilievre success factor. Many Canadians are angry. They are angry about the cost of living and health care and other economic issues. Butthey are also angry at the "disrespect" they feel they are getting from Mr. Trudeau and his fellow Liberals. I am reminded of the way certain American voters felt about Hilary Clinton in 2016.
I spent some time early in February 2022, talking to truckers. (I live in Ottawa.) Most were quite inarticulate, but I did get the sense that they were enjoying a release from, yes, anger. Sparks and Wellington Streets were the scene of a street party, in part a letting off steam party. They certainly didn't seem to be a threat. And indeed there was no physical violence, apart from some pushing and shoving when the police finally broke up the protest. But the participants remember their moment of finally expressing themselves. I think that was a major factor in Mr. Poilievre's rise.
Whether or not Mr. Trudeau called these people racists and misogynists (and he did, in a French language interview), they certainly got the impression that is how he considered them and still considers them. That keeps the anger going. Wedge issues can win elections, but at a long term cost.
Finally, why live in Canada? I went to graduate school in New Jersey, and received several job offers there and in Washington. But there was Vietnam. Some of my classmates wound up there, others kept one step of their draft board, one actually helped burn down the draft board in his district. Downtown Newark, like other U.S. cities, still showed the scars of rioting. The Weather Underground was blowing up things. By contrast, Canada looked pretty good. I was proud of the place, even after October 1970.
Now it's too late for me. I told my children to move away, but of course they didn't listen. Maybe my grandchildren will. All very sad.
First off, note to the guy/girl running the sound board - could hardly hear Jen but Matt was booming. Matt - sorry you have the sniffles man.
So, I grew up under the Big Blue Machine and moved west when I graduated. I prospered more than my mom (dad passed early) and my kids eem to be doing better than my better half and I primarily because of their education (doctor and teacher). My point is that there does not seem to be the feeling that the twenty something today is going to get ahead. Yes, housing in Regina is not badly priced - 50's bungalo for under $400,000 and the equivalent in Toronto being $1.1 mil adn that is just the start.
The present federal government does not reflect my view of Canada, as you point out, and I am tired of being told that I am racist, a transfobe or whatever simply because I question the prevailing wisdom. You're gay or lesbian? - don't care so have
a nice day. Transgender? don't care have a nice day. Living in your parent's basement because you don't have an education/job? - you have every oportunity in life so what did you do with it? You made decisions to do the drugs? - move along that isn't my problem. Don't get me started on residential schools please but at some point people need to take responsibility for bad decisions in their lives and stop telling me it is my fault.
I spent my life working for a better life for myself, my family and my community. I paid my taxes to support the military,health care, education, roads, police, and all the municipal infrastructure I need. I didn't pay taxes to see money sent overseas to support terrorist organizations, nor to support anti hate organizations in a country where we are not perfect but we are not racisit. My taxes weren't for putting feminine hygiene products in men's washrooms in federal buildings or to subsidize a rich neighbour buying an EV - or for a battery plant as far as that goes either (you do know that EVs are not the answer right?). I could go on and you could add a long list of different issues. My point is that Canadians go along and get along but we have been pushed way too far on the social activism, virtue signaling, say stuff but don't actually deliver, waffle on the Hamas terrorism, and all the other stuff that we have been expected to just swallow. Canada is in a tight spot financially and the voter recognizes that, like my fixed pension, our way of life is slowly being erroded to a rich/poor split that is not Canada.
I think that we are actually waking up to what Canada is slipping away from and we are looking to someone to come forward with a plan and a set of goasl or projects to get us back out of the econoomic and social drift we have been living in for the last decade. Is PP the one? Sure hope so but time will tell. I wil say that my better half who has been a lifetime Liberal is voting CPC when the election comes because she is tired of the crap from Ottawa and JT.
The weather part of the discussion was fascinating. I grew up on the prairies. Don't know if I could ever go back to that. And I am fortunate to now live in a not-too-pricy part of the west coast. It's probably not big-city enough for you two, but damn, it's a great place to raise a family.
But it's true, people have put up with the weather in Canada because we have (had, actually) other great things. I really miss loving my country.
As for Trudeau handling parts of the pandemic well, I'm not so sure. One of his first moves was to try to get carte blanche to be able to fully control parliament for a couple of years. That's where he showed his true colours. Antagonizing the 10% or so of truckers who weren't vaccinated was another place where he showed us his true colours. And his response to Portapique was absolutely bizarre. He was practically frothing at the mouth for the opportunity to implement his gun policy with an order in council. (This is not directly related to the pandemic, but people held him in high esteem during that part of the pandemic, overjoyed with their CERB cheques. It's easy to act like a dictator when your population is distracted.)
So while I didn't fault him in the very early days for his pandemic response, it soon became clear that it was just an opportunity for him to further his agenda.
A lot of governmental dysfunction comes down to a basic lack of competence, and I think that’s ultimately the result of the loss of experience and expertise.
Watching the response to COVID made me wince because I could see public health authorities and governments making elementary errors apparent to anybody with experience trying to tackle a novel problem under pressure. Lockdowns were a containment measure - containment measures are meant to buy time to figure out what’s going on and develop a better solution. That didn’t happen - authorities rarely looked more than one step ahead at a time. They didn’t figure out how to deal with the information problem: what do we really know, what do we know we *dont* know, what could be the unknown unknowns? When information did start to develop, they were very poor at integrating it into their thinking and adjusting their approaches in response. Still, I get frustrated hearing people critical of a lot of the steps taken when they forget that they’ve now got the prescience of hindsight. This stuff is HARD. It takes practice and experience to get it right. By 2020, everybody with first-hand experience dealing with such an outbreak was dead or retired.
The same problem infects the Liberal government. They were so thoroughly gutted following the Chretien era that they didn’t have anybody left who knew how to run a government. They kept trying to chase shiny progressive initiatives when they didn’t even have the skills to do the routine stuff. This is what worries me about the populist turn of the Poilievre Conservatives- are they going to retain enough of the experience in government from the Harper era to execute, or are ideological prerogatives going to lead them to purge the experience from the party?
Why do Canadians stay? Look at the folks who are coming here, mostly those leaving war, grinding poverty, ethnic strife, etc. Canada is famously the least picky of the Western Nations so they come here because no one else will take them in a timely and secure manner.
One thing old stock Canadian nationalists need to understand about immigrants, many if not most are here because they weren't allowed into the US. Deal with it. They would leave for the US in a heartbeat if they could. Why? Because they are ambitious and the US is the land of ambition. The US is closer to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in 2024 than Canada is of peace, order and good government. Yes, that is an indictment of Canada's governing class and elite, more concerned with their luxury beliefs and featherbedding than the people or the country.
Pre-2015 Canada was a long time ago and today's Canada is made by and for Laurentian boomers I suppose.
A minor clarification about the COVID school closures - it was absolutely the right call epidemiologically for the first couple waves, but there was a twofold issue:
1. Few people on either side of the issue understood that it wasn't about the health of the kids. The kids were always going to be fine. The issue is that the kids were spectacularly effective disease vectors. School is a place where thousands of people who would otherwise never come into contact send their kids to crawl all over each other every day, and then they bring them home and let them crawl all over their overweight, elderly, or immunocompromised relatives.
2. The barn door was closed too late. This was a consistent failure of Canadian COVID response: by the time the situation was evidently bad enough that politicians felt like they had political cover to shut down society, the damage was done. With every single wave, we locked the panic room door after the serial killer had strolled in with us. *By the time* we closed the schools, it usually didn't matter much.
The right time to close the schools was (and will be a century from now) so early that 90% of the parents will think the government is being alarmist. That's why the government invented public health officials and imbued them with vast powers - to be expendable sources of a kind of courage that skilled politicians simply cannot be relied upon to have.
1. You’ve nailed the Poilievre analysis- completely, wonderfully. Nothing more to say or add. I love and appreciate how you drew this back to the convoy. I agree that’s when the dam (or spell) broke.
2. JG, in a moral panic, does the righteous party (ie the non-witch burners- or maybe those opposed to the witch burning) forget quickly? Because in Covid I get the sense one half has easily/conveniently forgotten about it - the other half, I’d say you’d be mistaken to think so. Theres a deep well there, maybe it afflicts men more? But as a 40something man, I know a lot of us have been changed by that experience. It has changed our perspective on what this current government is and what government can be. It was shocking. We are not over it. And we have not forgotten.
3. Matt I’m with you on Hockey getting us through the winter. Small town hockey tourneys, early morning practices, and AC/DC pumping over the PA at an 8am Saturday game! Let’s go! Theres no time to notice the dark hellscape that surrounds us. Jen, the spring snowstorms are as predictable as July thunderstorms (Alberta). You’ve got to embrace the suck! This is one of the things that makes us Canadians.
4. There are still cultural things about Canada that hold value. The bigger the city the less it’s present. But there is still something special about the place and the people. Justin Trudeau directly attacked those things. “We don’t want to be known just for our resources but our resourcefulness” (as if those aren’t the same thing). But it’s still there, and it’s finding its voice again. And it’s what made us great (or at least good!).
I think the silent majority of Canadians that sat back and “tolerated” the “wokeism” of the Trudeau liberals finally had enough. We are done being told we “think wrong” by people that say men can have babies. That may be an over simplification BUT common sense seems to have totally left our current government (if they ever had it) they are just so out of touch with the average Canadian.
And the average Canadian is just done with that
Beware the silent majority when they no longer remain silent.
Will be interesting to see what this proposal to delay the next election by a week and get a bunch of NDP and Liberals their gold plated pension plan plays out in our main stream media. Unconscionable!!!!
I have wondered about why Caribbean nations haven’t had to send us aid for dealing with winter . They expect aid from us as climate change makes the water rise but have never given us a dime to help with developing winter gear or cover the cost of the Canada goose coat (lol) .
Once again, Matt & Jen articulate SO WELL what so many of us have been feeling for quite. some. time.
Jen was really on a snow induced rant & roll. Matt trying to get a word in edgewise reminded me of John Candy's character in Uncle Buck trying to do the same on the phone with his understandably angry lady friend Chanice:
https://youtu.be/Tn7WF3S-4VI?feature=shared 🤣
Matt and Jen are bang on with their thesis that those things that have made the winters we must endure together tolerable are either falling apart, dying, or stone cold dead.
Things Canadians used to be proud of:
- Relatively good economic opportunities for the majority of citizens.
- a healthy small business environment in terms of taxation / regulation
- Relatively affordable housing, fuel, groceries, goods & services.
- Semi-competent, well meaning, honorable, and semi-respectable politicians, beauraucrats, and business leaders.
- Dependable, somewhat slow, but generally effective family & emergency health care.
- Safe public streets, transit, and other shared spaces mostly free of petty and violent crime.
- Clean, abundant water supplies.
- Adults in charge of our public finances.
- A manageable addictions problem and relatively small homeless population.
All of the above are either crumbling or have vanished.
I have four kids; three are adults.
They WANT to love this country, but...
- They were profoundly disillusioned by how the pandemic was handled at ALL levels.
- They can't afford to buy a house, and can't even find rental accommodations.
- They are struggling to afford gas & groceries and now stay home rather than going to sporting events, films, theatre, clubs, and restaurants.
- They see incompetent people in positions of authority over them personally, and similar incompetent people running the critical services and overall leadership of our communities, province, and country.
I'm more like Matt than Jen when it comes to contemplating leaving Canada.
I travel frequently to the US for professional development and networking, and aside from reuniting with family and friends at home, dread returning to Canada. My American friends are baffled at what has happened to Canada. In response, I point out their two presidential candidates.
I will not fly from a Canadian airport on a Canadian airline - I drive to much better run, less expensive airports in the US.
Poilievre, assuming he wins a majority, better fix things quickly.
If he doesn't, this time around we won't just have a 'brain drain' issue, we will have a mass exodus of our young and capable citizens the likes of which we've never experienced, or even contemplated!
I like, and I (remain) subscribed.
Thanks, Matt & Jen!
Another great episode: love the even-handed analysis that's so hard to find these days.
You briefly touched on the left-right split and fortunately didn't fall into the trap I expect much of the media to next election: IMO "right-wing" is the wrong way to look at Poilievre's appeal. I consider myself a progressive and will be voting NDP in the next BC provincial election (Eby seems to at least understand the problems and is trying to address them) who is also seriously considering voting for Poilievre federally.
Why? Forget platitudes and vibes, under Trudeau, Canada seems to be rapidly moving away from progressive ideals. For example:
1. A housing market becoming increasingly aristocratic and feudal ("bank of Mom and Dad")
2. Renters who work middle-class jobs legitimately having to worry about becoming homeless.
3. A public transit system and public spaces feeling more dangerous, thus pushing people back into cars and private spaces
4. Companies able to easily import cheap labour rather than improving wages or working conditions to better attract/retain talent
5. Us apparently being totally okay with just openly exploiting young folks in developing nations (charging them 30k to study in a strip mall, etc)
6. A public health care system that's falling apart
7. Young families struggling to access childcare
8. High spending that's exhausted our fiscal capacity, but without all the great social programs or infrastructure I'd imagined would come with that high spending.
Are all these problems Trudeau's fault? No, but many of them can be traced back, at least in part, to policy choices by his government, and in any case, he seems incapable of acknowledging the problems or understanding the gravity of the situation. Singh seems equally lost. Poilievre - while somewhat distasteful - at least seems to understand the problems Canada is facing. Will he fix them? I have my doubts, but it's at a point where I feel like it might be worth a shot.
The Line Podcast was poorly engineered today. I could barely hear Jen in Calgary and Matt was really loud......where's the producer or someone on the levels? Great topics, always a pleasure to read the newsletter but the podcast needs to get more Professional. Tom
Nicely done.
Thanks to Jen for articulating so well.
I think that you have put your finger on the Poilievre success factor. Many Canadians are angry. They are angry about the cost of living and health care and other economic issues. Butthey are also angry at the "disrespect" they feel they are getting from Mr. Trudeau and his fellow Liberals. I am reminded of the way certain American voters felt about Hilary Clinton in 2016.
I spent some time early in February 2022, talking to truckers. (I live in Ottawa.) Most were quite inarticulate, but I did get the sense that they were enjoying a release from, yes, anger. Sparks and Wellington Streets were the scene of a street party, in part a letting off steam party. They certainly didn't seem to be a threat. And indeed there was no physical violence, apart from some pushing and shoving when the police finally broke up the protest. But the participants remember their moment of finally expressing themselves. I think that was a major factor in Mr. Poilievre's rise.
Whether or not Mr. Trudeau called these people racists and misogynists (and he did, in a French language interview), they certainly got the impression that is how he considered them and still considers them. That keeps the anger going. Wedge issues can win elections, but at a long term cost.
Finally, why live in Canada? I went to graduate school in New Jersey, and received several job offers there and in Washington. But there was Vietnam. Some of my classmates wound up there, others kept one step of their draft board, one actually helped burn down the draft board in his district. Downtown Newark, like other U.S. cities, still showed the scars of rioting. The Weather Underground was blowing up things. By contrast, Canada looked pretty good. I was proud of the place, even after October 1970.
Now it's too late for me. I told my children to move away, but of course they didn't listen. Maybe my grandchildren will. All very sad.
Why cant Poilievre be both Lucky and smart? Thats my opinion!
First off, note to the guy/girl running the sound board - could hardly hear Jen but Matt was booming. Matt - sorry you have the sniffles man.
So, I grew up under the Big Blue Machine and moved west when I graduated. I prospered more than my mom (dad passed early) and my kids eem to be doing better than my better half and I primarily because of their education (doctor and teacher). My point is that there does not seem to be the feeling that the twenty something today is going to get ahead. Yes, housing in Regina is not badly priced - 50's bungalo for under $400,000 and the equivalent in Toronto being $1.1 mil adn that is just the start.
The present federal government does not reflect my view of Canada, as you point out, and I am tired of being told that I am racist, a transfobe or whatever simply because I question the prevailing wisdom. You're gay or lesbian? - don't care so have
a nice day. Transgender? don't care have a nice day. Living in your parent's basement because you don't have an education/job? - you have every oportunity in life so what did you do with it? You made decisions to do the drugs? - move along that isn't my problem. Don't get me started on residential schools please but at some point people need to take responsibility for bad decisions in their lives and stop telling me it is my fault.
I spent my life working for a better life for myself, my family and my community. I paid my taxes to support the military,health care, education, roads, police, and all the municipal infrastructure I need. I didn't pay taxes to see money sent overseas to support terrorist organizations, nor to support anti hate organizations in a country where we are not perfect but we are not racisit. My taxes weren't for putting feminine hygiene products in men's washrooms in federal buildings or to subsidize a rich neighbour buying an EV - or for a battery plant as far as that goes either (you do know that EVs are not the answer right?). I could go on and you could add a long list of different issues. My point is that Canadians go along and get along but we have been pushed way too far on the social activism, virtue signaling, say stuff but don't actually deliver, waffle on the Hamas terrorism, and all the other stuff that we have been expected to just swallow. Canada is in a tight spot financially and the voter recognizes that, like my fixed pension, our way of life is slowly being erroded to a rich/poor split that is not Canada.
I think that we are actually waking up to what Canada is slipping away from and we are looking to someone to come forward with a plan and a set of goasl or projects to get us back out of the econoomic and social drift we have been living in for the last decade. Is PP the one? Sure hope so but time will tell. I wil say that my better half who has been a lifetime Liberal is voting CPC when the election comes because she is tired of the crap from Ottawa and JT.
The weather part of the discussion was fascinating. I grew up on the prairies. Don't know if I could ever go back to that. And I am fortunate to now live in a not-too-pricy part of the west coast. It's probably not big-city enough for you two, but damn, it's a great place to raise a family.
But it's true, people have put up with the weather in Canada because we have (had, actually) other great things. I really miss loving my country.
As for Trudeau handling parts of the pandemic well, I'm not so sure. One of his first moves was to try to get carte blanche to be able to fully control parliament for a couple of years. That's where he showed his true colours. Antagonizing the 10% or so of truckers who weren't vaccinated was another place where he showed us his true colours. And his response to Portapique was absolutely bizarre. He was practically frothing at the mouth for the opportunity to implement his gun policy with an order in council. (This is not directly related to the pandemic, but people held him in high esteem during that part of the pandemic, overjoyed with their CERB cheques. It's easy to act like a dictator when your population is distracted.)
So while I didn't fault him in the very early days for his pandemic response, it soon became clear that it was just an opportunity for him to further his agenda.
A lot of governmental dysfunction comes down to a basic lack of competence, and I think that’s ultimately the result of the loss of experience and expertise.
Watching the response to COVID made me wince because I could see public health authorities and governments making elementary errors apparent to anybody with experience trying to tackle a novel problem under pressure. Lockdowns were a containment measure - containment measures are meant to buy time to figure out what’s going on and develop a better solution. That didn’t happen - authorities rarely looked more than one step ahead at a time. They didn’t figure out how to deal with the information problem: what do we really know, what do we know we *dont* know, what could be the unknown unknowns? When information did start to develop, they were very poor at integrating it into their thinking and adjusting their approaches in response. Still, I get frustrated hearing people critical of a lot of the steps taken when they forget that they’ve now got the prescience of hindsight. This stuff is HARD. It takes practice and experience to get it right. By 2020, everybody with first-hand experience dealing with such an outbreak was dead or retired.
The same problem infects the Liberal government. They were so thoroughly gutted following the Chretien era that they didn’t have anybody left who knew how to run a government. They kept trying to chase shiny progressive initiatives when they didn’t even have the skills to do the routine stuff. This is what worries me about the populist turn of the Poilievre Conservatives- are they going to retain enough of the experience in government from the Harper era to execute, or are ideological prerogatives going to lead them to purge the experience from the party?
Why do Canadians stay? Look at the folks who are coming here, mostly those leaving war, grinding poverty, ethnic strife, etc. Canada is famously the least picky of the Western Nations so they come here because no one else will take them in a timely and secure manner.
One thing old stock Canadian nationalists need to understand about immigrants, many if not most are here because they weren't allowed into the US. Deal with it. They would leave for the US in a heartbeat if they could. Why? Because they are ambitious and the US is the land of ambition. The US is closer to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in 2024 than Canada is of peace, order and good government. Yes, that is an indictment of Canada's governing class and elite, more concerned with their luxury beliefs and featherbedding than the people or the country.
Pre-2015 Canada was a long time ago and today's Canada is made by and for Laurentian boomers I suppose.
Jen. Why does everything get better for you on April 20? (4/20). Thank goodness for legal weed eh???
Thanks for the rant, Jen, you echoed my thoughts completely.
A minor clarification about the COVID school closures - it was absolutely the right call epidemiologically for the first couple waves, but there was a twofold issue:
1. Few people on either side of the issue understood that it wasn't about the health of the kids. The kids were always going to be fine. The issue is that the kids were spectacularly effective disease vectors. School is a place where thousands of people who would otherwise never come into contact send their kids to crawl all over each other every day, and then they bring them home and let them crawl all over their overweight, elderly, or immunocompromised relatives.
2. The barn door was closed too late. This was a consistent failure of Canadian COVID response: by the time the situation was evidently bad enough that politicians felt like they had political cover to shut down society, the damage was done. With every single wave, we locked the panic room door after the serial killer had strolled in with us. *By the time* we closed the schools, it usually didn't matter much.
The right time to close the schools was (and will be a century from now) so early that 90% of the parents will think the government is being alarmist. That's why the government invented public health officials and imbued them with vast powers - to be expendable sources of a kind of courage that skilled politicians simply cannot be relied upon to have.
Another great podcast.
My thoughts,
1. You’ve nailed the Poilievre analysis- completely, wonderfully. Nothing more to say or add. I love and appreciate how you drew this back to the convoy. I agree that’s when the dam (or spell) broke.
2. JG, in a moral panic, does the righteous party (ie the non-witch burners- or maybe those opposed to the witch burning) forget quickly? Because in Covid I get the sense one half has easily/conveniently forgotten about it - the other half, I’d say you’d be mistaken to think so. Theres a deep well there, maybe it afflicts men more? But as a 40something man, I know a lot of us have been changed by that experience. It has changed our perspective on what this current government is and what government can be. It was shocking. We are not over it. And we have not forgotten.
3. Matt I’m with you on Hockey getting us through the winter. Small town hockey tourneys, early morning practices, and AC/DC pumping over the PA at an 8am Saturday game! Let’s go! Theres no time to notice the dark hellscape that surrounds us. Jen, the spring snowstorms are as predictable as July thunderstorms (Alberta). You’ve got to embrace the suck! This is one of the things that makes us Canadians.
4. There are still cultural things about Canada that hold value. The bigger the city the less it’s present. But there is still something special about the place and the people. Justin Trudeau directly attacked those things. “We don’t want to be known just for our resources but our resourcefulness” (as if those aren’t the same thing). But it’s still there, and it’s finding its voice again. And it’s what made us great (or at least good!).
Everything is going to be ok.
Watched the Kate video. Her eyes look so tired. Poor thing. It's going to be a tough year for that family.
Great podcast
I think the silent majority of Canadians that sat back and “tolerated” the “wokeism” of the Trudeau liberals finally had enough. We are done being told we “think wrong” by people that say men can have babies. That may be an over simplification BUT common sense seems to have totally left our current government (if they ever had it) they are just so out of touch with the average Canadian.
And the average Canadian is just done with that
Beware the silent majority when they no longer remain silent.
Will be interesting to see what this proposal to delay the next election by a week and get a bunch of NDP and Liberals their gold plated pension plan plays out in our main stream media. Unconscionable!!!!
I have wondered about why Caribbean nations haven’t had to send us aid for dealing with winter . They expect aid from us as climate change makes the water rise but have never given us a dime to help with developing winter gear or cover the cost of the Canada goose coat (lol) .