At a time when Canada faces generational challenges, our political class is carrying on  as if the ship called Canada was sailing in calm waters. Or their ideas to address the challenges amount to doing the same things that caused these problems in the first place.

REEL LESSONS

In the 1965 movie Genghis Khan, there is a scene where a messenger rushes into the Chinese imperial court with the news that a town called Ho-pei had been captured by some rebels. The town is too far from the capital for the emperor to know where it is, so a huge map is bought and spread out in front of him. Meanwhile, there is much panicked hubbub among the courtiers, so the emperor says, “The situation does cause concern, but there is no reason for alarm”.

My takeaway from this scene was that a leader must know exactly how much reaction any situation deserves, and when. The caveat here is that in politics, the reaction need not be intended to resolve the situation – and in fact, may have been designed to exacerbate it. Whichever the case, one would expect adequate coverage and analysis of their decisions and actions. At a more basic level, one would expect that there would be decisions and actions to cover and analyze. Sadly, in today’s Canada, neither is of these in evidence.

MAELSTROM

It is tempting to believe, now that Donald Trump is once again President of the United States of America, that the most pressing challenge facing us is his threat to impose tariffs on Canadian goods (and beyond that, the worry that his mercurial temperament may cause him to throw up more demands on us). However, as you know, there are several other MAJOR issues that we need to tackle on a war footing – but we aren’t doing that. In fact, our governments at all levels seem to have stopped doing the bare minimum (or engaging in token gestures, if one takes an uncharitable view of things) that they couldn’t resist the temptation of touting as great initiatives / achievements one year ago.

Take, for example, the housing crisis. When was the last time you heard a politician (federal or provincial) announce a new plan to tackle it? For all the grave importance of the issue on the lives of Canadians, the housing crisis seems  to have been no more than a ‘flavour of the month’ for them. And ditto when talking about healthcare (the system is in a shambles – and has been for many years; see the collection of my 13 articles detailing this at this link). On January 17, CBC presented (the umpteenth) report on the barriers faced by foreign-trained doctors while we suffer from a severe shortage of doctors. The next day, on January 18, they followed up with a report about the shortage of anesthetists. These issues aren’t new – I have been hearing about them for my entire 20+ years in Canada. Solving them appears to be beyond our capacity.

Meanwhile, the other problems that were caused by excessive immigration continue to rage on: paucity of jobs for Canadians, severe stress on the infrastructure, the deteriorating law & order situation and so on. If you think about it, all the major problems that we face today can be distilled down to one single word: Overpopulation. But unlike other countries that suffered the ill effects of overpopulation (I experienced this firsthand while growing up in India), Canada’s overpopulation problem is not endogenous, but rather a result of an out-of-control immigration system. The solution, though difficult to implement (and vastly more difficult to escape  a politician’s lips) is relatively easier to implement: take an unemotional look at what kind of workers Canada genuinely needs; these foreigners can stay, and the rest have to return to their countries. Towards this end, it may be necessary to secure the cooperation of the concerned foreign countries. Unfortunately, the largest cohort in temporary residents if from India, and over the past 16 months, we have basically torched our relations with the government of that country. I suppose any endeavour in this regard will have to wait until after the election (whenever it happens) and hopefully we have a different government in office.

MORE OF THE SAME

On a different side, the overzealous policy of jumping on the EV bandwagon continues, despite a steady stream of news from elsewhere in the world showing that the tide of EV-mania is receding as people realize how overambitious to goal was. Just today, Minister Champagne was in Guelph, ON to announce that Ottawa would ‘invest’ C$169.4 million, in addition to C$100 million by Ontario in such a project; the “investment is aimed at accelerating the development of technologies in the automotive sector, including EV parts manufacturing and semiconductor packaging methods for EV batteries”. The earlier ‘investment’ of around C$50 BILLION of taxpayers’ money in the EV field already looks iffy, but that hasn’t dampened our politicians’ enthusiasm for throwing ever-more taxpayer money at the industry.

On the social front, DEI is also suffering the same setbacks that EV’s are on the climate / industry / technology front. In the latest development, as former New York Times editor Bari Weiss noted in a post on X, President Trump ‘repealed affirmative action by executive order’. This follows the withdrawal by many major global corporations and other institutions from DEI and/or ESG initiatives. The Canadian establishment is blissfully unaware of these global developments; nothing has been said about these.

The one thing that governments (of all stripes) excel in doing is sending our cheques – or their electronic equivalent – the moment they sniff out an opportunity to do so. The immediate response to President Trump’s ‘tariffs threat’ was to issue a counter-threat of Canadian tariffs on American goods – but this would of course increase their cost to Canadian consumers and thus exacerbate the cost-of-living crisis. Enter the adage ‘Never let a crisis go to waste’. As Robert Fife and Steven Chase of the Globe & Mail reported today,  the federal government is ‘planning pandemic-level relief for workers, businesses if Trump imposes tariffs’. Though sinister, this is a political masterstroke; it would secure the support of the NDP, leading to the tottering Liberal government surviving a vote of confidence in the House of Commons when prorogation ends on March 24th. Not to be left behind, B.C. Premier Eby declared that the government of that province would ‘fill in the gaps’ (presumably in the federal measure). It looks like the phrase ‘pandemic-style relief programs’ has suddenly become highly popular in political circles.

Speaking of President Trump and his threatened tariffs, it is worth noting that after the initial flurry of announcements and press conferences on securing our border with the US, things seem to have gone quiet on that front – both from the politicians and the media. At one of these press conferences, I remember a RCMP official (I think it was the Commissioner) say that 2 additional Blackhawk helicopters had been procured to deploy at the border. I was told by someone with knowledge of this subject that there are only 4 UH60A Blackhawks registered in Canada, and that it is likely that 2 of these have now been leased to patrol the border. We know, of course, that buying additional helicopters has a much longer timeline; the only way to deploy more of them in a short timeframe is by leasing. Incidentally, both these helicopters appear to be former US Army units. I mention all this to highlight that our MSM hasn’t provided these details to the public – at least not that I am aware of.

REMORSE

In sum, (a) we have major challenges facing us that require work on a war footing on multiple fronts, and (b) the world is marching on in the direction of progress. But our time and mediascape is filled with news of a humdrum nature: a political party holding a leadership contest, a candidate being adjudged ineligible to run without explanation, a former (and forgotten) MP of the same party popping up as another candidate, the frontrunners securing the backing of members of the current government, the Premier of Ontario deciding to have an election before it is due because it is expected to be beneficial to him & his party and finally, the foreign interference issue being officially declared as a ‘nothingburger’. To any objective observer, it would be clear that this is the track that will leave us lagging behind compared to other countries. The people know this (or at least many of them do), but the politicians and their acolytes in the media don’t care. The end result may be difficult to predict in detail, but broadly speaking, it is foreseeable. The noted Hindin poet Gopaldas Neeraj captured it perfectly:

neend bhi khuli na thi ke haaye! dhoop dhal gayi

paaon jab talak uthe, ke zindagi fisal gayi

alas! my sleep hadn’t ended when the sunlight faded

my feet hadn’t moved before life slipped away from underneath

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Image Credit: Emil Grigoras-Artista Pintor via Wikimedia Commons; the image is at this link. Used without modification under Creative Commons License.