Your Awful Government and You

Don't let the grumblings fool you. 

Canadians enjoy the decrepit state of their affairs at the hands of a frat-boy so useless that even his father set up a trust-fund that could only be accessed when he was forty-five. 

People in other countries would at least have an ounce of self-respect:

The federal Liberals want their recent cabinet changes to improve their economic message, but new data show Canadians believe the Liberal government is the party the least equipped do deal with economic concerns.

 

(Sidebar: and this after Justin dumped his most useless cabinet members. But not all of them.)

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Let's live off of other provinces!

That should help!:

Five provinces have solid finances that should carry the rest of the century, the Parliamentary Budget Office said yesterday. “All other provinces and territories have current fiscal policies that are not sustainable over the long term,” warned analysts. Two are headed for insolvency: “Manitoba will see the largest deterioration.”

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Millions spent on the taxpayer-owned Trans Mountain Pipeline are not included in total costs, records show. Additional subsidies were excluded from calculations used in supporting cabinet’s claim that “no more public money will be used to complete the Trans Mountain Expansion.”

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Who did you vote for, Canada?:

Canadians are buying fewer groceries due to food inflation, Statistics Canada said yesterday. “Shoppers are spending more but buying less,” wrote analysts: “Many grocery items have continued to increase month after month and on balance are 20 percent above levels reported two years earlier.”

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Canadian households are about to be hit with a demand limiting factor—income. Household disposable income growth is failing to keep up with inflation according to StatCan data. Even worse, once adjusted for inflation and the country’s booming population growth, it paints a dreary picture as debt problems surface. 

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We used to have an effective army:

 A Privy Council briefing note rates Arctic security “more important than ever.” Soldiers, sailors and air crew permanently assigned to the vast region number 300, it disclosed: “We have some 300 full-time military personnel in the North.”

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Flight logs show the Department of National Defence flew half-empty mercy flights out of Kabul for days before the city fell to the Taliban, trapping thousands of Canadians and Afghan allies. The department in a newly-disclosed memo said it flew with empty seats in part because it wanted to conserve fuel: “It was very obvious the city was coming under siege.”

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The Americans are right to laugh at Justin:

Canada is again in the U.S. spotlight for what one Republican senator is calling its "feeble commitment" to defence spending.

Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan called out the Liberal government's commitment to NATO during a confirmation hearing Wednesday for the next Norad commander.

Sullivan cited a Wall Street Journal editorial earlier this month that described Canada as a free rider on the global military alliance.

The country has a history of falling well short of NATO's agreed-upon spending target of two per cent of GDP.

And a Washington Post report in April said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has privately conceded that Canada, where defence spending is at around 1.3 per cent, would never meet NATO's threshold.

U.S. Air Force Lt.-Gen. Gregory Guillot, President Joe Biden's nominee to take over the continental aerospace defence system, promised Sullivan he would press Canada to meet the target.

"Americans get frustrated when our allies don't pull their weight," Sullivan said, noting the subject came up during the recent NATO summit in Vilnius.

"With regard to NATO, Canada's not even close to pulling its weight. Can you commit to us to have those tough conversations, but important, with your Canadian counterparts?"

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It's censorship to cover the graft:

 

The Senate Standing Committee on Indigenous Peoples has released a 30-page report titled "Honouring the Children Who Never Came Home: Truth, Education and Reconciliation." The report includes a recommendation “that the Government of Canada take every action necessary to combat the rise of residential school denialism.”

In similar fashion, Stephanie Scott, the executive director of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, says that support for “denialism” must be dealt with by legislation.

The report fails to define “denialism” specifically, but says that it “serves to distract people from the horrific consequences of Residential Schools and the realities of missing children, burials, and unmarked graves.” This suggests that “denialism” likely means any disagreement with the dominant narrative that Indian Residential Schools were unmitigated racism, genocide, or another form of pure evil.

Whether this dominant viewpoint is correct or not, the belief that government, with its massive resources and coercive power, should be in the business of “combatting” a minority viewpoint is frightening, and anathema to liberal democracy.

Only repressive regimes (whether fascist or National Socialist or theocratic or communist) are in the business of using government resources to “combat” the “wrong” opinion. The cause of truth is violated when government uses its power to indoctrinate citizens with the “correct” viewpoint. In contrast, the cause of truth is served by humble and open-minded inquiry, by the expression of multiple opinions including wrong and provocative ones, and by frank and honest debate. This messy and unregulated process, regardless of what issue is being debated, will invariably include comments made by people who may be ill-informed, and even from those who do not act in good faith. The free society assumes that adults can decide for themselves what is true or false, right or wrong, good or evil, rather than having the government impose its “truth” on society.

According to Amnesty International, Saudi Arabian authorities publicly flogged blogger Raif Badawi, who had been sentenced to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in prison for “insulting Islam” and founding an online forum for political debate. This is a practical example of what happens when government gets into the business of determining what is true or false. It is not difficult to think of numerous other examples across the globe, currently and in the past.

While Senate Committee Chairman Brian Francis and his colleagues are no doubt motivated by a sincere desire to achieve justice, their recommendation that governments use their massive resources to “combat” an “incorrect” opinion is the symptom of a toxic cancer that is slowly destroying Canada as a free society.