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John Robson: In Mark Carney's Canada, nothing matters

Not even being conquered seems to matter all that much

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The other day I got a really scary idea. Second-hand, this time, from Post columnist Chris Selley who cast it before X last December and I pounced. Does it matter?

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Not that I’m pinching it. As John Ruskin said, borrowing is fine if you pay interest. And what Selley said that should interest us all and has been haunting me since was: “Historians will (hopefully) view this as the period when Canadians and their government(s) realize, to their horror, that some things actually matter.”

John Robson: In Mark Carney's Canada, nothing matters Back to video

The premise, clearly, is that currently Canadians and their governments are conducting themselves as if nothing mattered. And logically, before reacting to any claim you ask “Is it true?” Or, here, “Can it really be true that we are acting like such fools?”

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Sadly, I follow the news. So I know our record non-pandemic deficit of $78.3 billion piled onto a runaway national debt will be even higher due to blithe fiscal incontinence that sees a parade of press releases cross my screen about subsidizing every possible applicant as an “investment,” as if not even words matter. (A real example from last week: “$797,557 for Eviance (Canadian Centre on Disability Studies Incorporated) for their project, Spotlight on Women Entrepreneurs with Disabilities in Canada. With this federal investment…”)

The police also treat policing hate crime as a part-time job while the politicians treat boasting of compassion as a full-time one. And we act as if prosperity didn’t matter.

The prime minister may promise to sweep aside internal trade barriers, and build things at speeds thought impossible. But when he doesn’t actually do it nobody cares. Not even that he’s spent over $300,000 on in-flight catering alone since taking office, plus nearly half a million on hotels. We don’t even care about his attitude of detached entitlement or his carbon hypocrisy, let alone that instead of going to the office to battle a stack of tricky files, he basically spends all his time gallivanting about internationally and exchanging clichés with Keir Starmer. (Of course one could argue that given what he achieves while at his desk he might as well be abroad.)

Or take housing policy… please. It blights lives and menaces social cohesion if the dream of home ownership becomes a nightmare. But we get endless windy press releases and speeches about the government “supercharging” it using its magic powers we all secretly know it hasn’t got, then housing starts go down, and nobody cares.

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It doesn’t dent the popularity of the politicians who promised it. It doesn’t prompt policy changes. It doesn’t even stop the press releases.

To be fair, as I recently cast onto X about the PCO flubbing access to information, “when rank incompetence meets raw partisan advantage, it’s hard to know which is leading the dance.” But either way, they promise openness by default, then hide everything, and we reelect them so it doesn’t matter.

Also, journalists are hyperventilating about a built-in-Canada mega-defence spend-fest. But I also know defence procurement has been a hopeless mess for decades (DND even spends hundreds of millions renting transport services because it lacks basic logistics) yet nobody is punished and nothing changes because we think planes and ships don’t matter. Or national security.

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Hence given firm evidence that Chinese Communists are subverting our elections, penetrating our institutions and intimidating our citizens, we do nothing whatsoever. The police don’t swoop. The promised foreign agent registry never materializes. Politicians don’t stop flying to Beijing. Exactly as if being conquered doesn’t matter.

It might seem mild by comparison. But note also that no matter how much evidence accumulates that our health-care system, far from being the envy of the world, is unreasonably expensive while condemning large numbers of Canadians to pain, suffering and even death while on waiting lists, there is absolutely no discussion of repealing the Canada Health Act, as if all that suffering didn’t matter.

By the same token, it doesn’t matter how badly our school system underperforms, or how much emphasis politicians and pundits place rhetorically on preparing the youth of today for the world of tomorrow, nobody is seriously interested in vouchers, charter schools or anything else that might actually improve outcomes. Instead it’s all DEI, which rather obviously makes things worse.

Speaking of woke over worthwhile, what Selley thought might actually jolt us out of Neverland in December was a guy charged with stalking Jewish women being denied refugee status over seven years ago but not deported. And nobody cared. Not about security, not about the rule of law, nothing.

I asked if we could really be acting like such fools. But to borrow a line from the Goon Show’s Dennis Bloodnok, we’re not acting. Because many things do matter, as you learn too late if you ignore them.

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