SAINTS PRESERVE US

Talking Baseball?

The fundamental promises of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms are “peace, order and good government.” Modest and sensible aspirations for a normally dozy democracy peacefully unified by a jigsaw assembly of British provinces in 1867. These basic tenets were not evident in the nation’s capital in recent weeks as orchestrated chaos enveloped Parliament Hill.

The “trucker convoy” protested persnickety pandemic protocols. Canadian covid messaging remains woefully inconsistent throughout every legal jurisdiction. Even as Alberta trumpeted a wide open “best summer ever” Quebec meanwhile imposed a curfew; sort of a national “Q’est-ce que fuck?” for long haulers. Though Canada has signed a revised pact purporting free trade between it and the United States, our largest trading partner, the countries’ rules and regulations aren’t always in synch. Free trade within Canada’s borders remains a weather dependent draft document. Moving freight around this continent is challenging at the best of times.

No single industry, business or worker has had an easy time of it these past two years. My first thought about the trucker convoy was “Get in line; we’re all fatigued.” Of course it didn’t take long for a simple demonstration of pandemic frustration to turn weird. We live in an age of whinge and whine. Social media has rendered civil discourse and rational discussion as archaic and arcane as Socratic Method. Digital platforms provide wonderful pulpits for those bent on fomenting or inflaming dissent. The trucker convoy metastasized into a “freedom convoy.” Protesters unfurled their Confederate and Nazi flags, inflated bouncy castles for the super-spreading amusement of the would-be new world order’s indoctrinated and uninoculated brood. Why does the far right wave loser symbols, and put their children at risk and even deploy them as potential human shields should the riot squad come calling? Awkward branding.

Last spring I re-stained the back steps of the Crooked 9, as I always do. I work downward from the door to the garden path. Because I was home alone and at the back of the house, I was careful to ensure the front door was locked. Last year unmasked anti-vax protesters gathered in front of hospitals across Canada blocking their emergency entrances. You’ve got to get into the ICU to check out. This month those sympathetic to the plight of international freight haulers blockaded crucial border crossings in Ontario, Manitoba, Alberta and British Columbia. Some were armed; I mean heavily armed, American militia or high school shooter armed. I was not a member of my high school’s debating society either.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is something of a charismatic milquetoast, the type of weak kneed liberal his philosopher king father would’ve despised. A wise man without the power to reason away what a fool believes. According to disparate freedom convoy sources, the Prime Minister is the bastard son of Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro, a communist and a war criminal. I submit that he’s really just an ineffectual leader who lacks ethics and good judgment.

Last year’s snap election was predicated on the virus: this Trudeau’s government’s relatively successful management of the international health crisis vis-à-vis Canada and the logical demonization of those citizens hesitant to take their medicine; it’s insane to deny the effacing effects of ten billion global jabs. Wedge politics is like a perfect isosceles triangle, there’s no right side to hammer on: I pound, you pound, we pound and they pound - until everybody’s tired and fed up. The final poll tallies reflected this, Trudeau was not granted the comfortable majority of Liberal parliamentary seats he sought and expected.

Protests are subjective assemblies. Is upgrading and twinning an existing pipeline along an existing right of way bad? What about logging old growth rainforests? In these days of universal complaint, protests not only draw police presence but anti-protest protesters. Matches meet gasoline on Tindr. With downtown Ottawa invaded and occupied by fascist clowns and locals becoming increasingly annoyed, the Prime Minister’s Office announced that Trudeau was self-isolating, having exhibited covid-like symptoms. This convenient dereliction of duty was akin to the Prime Minister’s decision to go surfing on Canada’s inaugural National Day of Truth and Reconciliation.

I wasn’t the only person shaking my head as the days added up to weeks. The White House telephoned Trudeau. President Biden wasn’t so much concerned with the Prime Minister’s whiff on peace, order and good government (never issues in Washington and a backward capital K if you’re scoring along at home), but the millions of dollars evaporated by stalled trade. International standards decreed Canada a failing state. Then and only then did Trudeau invoke the Emergencies Act, a cuddlier 1988 update of the War Measures Act which was infamously invoked by his father during the 1970 October Crisis (“Just watch me,” a double dog dare); a risky and reluctantly undertaken political maneuver for the embarrassed and scolded head of a minority government.

The Emergencies Act allows the federal cabinet seven days of carte blanche clampdown in the interests of peace, order and good government before the House of Commons and the Senate may vote on the merit of its utilization (it passed). In this case its enactment was a last resort shut down of a populist street party that never should have been permitted to be thrown in the first place. Yet the lunatic fringe seems well organized and well funded even though its message is lobotomized drool. I don’t worry so much about its hateful flags as its rallying around false ones: I wonder in whose interest it might be to exploit a wedge in an apparently fragile and poorly led western democracy’s increasingly divided society. Fun and games.

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of paranoid political snark since 2013. My novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com to find your preferred format and retailer.