Inside Job

As America seizes up in paroxysms of hate and corruption, the rest of the world scampers for the emergency exits. Shit’s bad with no relief in sight. Question is: Just how bad is it going to get? For them? And for us?

We here in Canada were assured during the federal election this past spring that we would be de-coupling from the runaway train wreck but so far, early into its mandate, Mark Carney’s government is showing few signs of actually doing anything of the sort. He has essentially given in to each and every erratic demand made by the Trump administration, from increased military spending, increased border security spending, elimination of the Digital Services Tax while responding meekly to the tariffs irregularly smacked on us. The Ottawa Citizen reported recently that we’ve already started clearing hurdles in order to join in on Trump’s monstrous Golden Dome missile defense system, a laughable coffer draining of public money into private pockets that’ll never get built in any way that would offer much actual protection to this continent.

There may be method to our Prime Minister’s apparent acquiescent madness. Indulging the nutty president until he flies off the rails and is replaced with as close to a saner option as the U.S. is capable of offering up at the moment. Maintaining the lowest of profiles until some order is restored and we can get back to business as usual. Keep the wreckage contained and hope that whatever damage is inflicted some of it will be salvageable.

Fingers crossed.

But returning to the status quo, to business as usual, say, October 2024 or, better yet, October 2016, doesn’t seem overly aspirational. The lofty Liberal springtime campaign rhetoric spoke of a different kind of future, suggesting not only unyoking Canada from an increasingly dystopian American sphere but also of extricating ourselves from the old paradigm of merely hewers of wood and drawers of water, dirty resource extractors. Time to move on and reinvent Canada, a Canada more in the line with the rest of the non-US world.

Or maybe, I just read too much into the words that weren’t really there. Hoped against hope. Fell once more for the Lucy Van Pelt Liberals’ latest variation of ‘sunny ways’.

So now any talk of increased self-reliance revolves around new pipelines to take our oil and gas to other markets, others markets that are moving away from oil and gas. Pipelines to nowhere in the long run. Further environmental ruination for less and less gain, to less and less purpose. Goaded on by the worst instincts of our worst politicians. Prairie populists like Danielle Smith of Alberta and Saskatchewan’s Scott Moe, and their eastern counterpart, Ontario’s bumptious reactionary premier and consigliere to developer donors, Doug Ford, now the new prime minister’s bestie, doing overnights in a Muskoka cottage and weekends in Ottawa to chew the fat and bend each other’s ears.

And Doug’s idea of a nation-building project? Digging an impossible tunnel under the currently jam-packed 401 highway bisecting the heart of the GTA, 19 feet wide, 3 layers deep, one for vehicles travelling east, one for vehicles going west and the third for a train, running for, what? 50 kilometres, from Mississauga to Markham, or some such nonsense. The details hardly matter for such a project so preposterous that the idea got properly shelved back in 2021 when it first floated into the premier’s empty head.

Now though?

Anything goes in the mad free-for-all that is defining the Trump 2.0 Canadian landscape. While it’s certainly politically expedient for a Prime Minister, a Prime Minister leading a minority government, to listen to the leader of the country’s most populous province, it doesn’t necessarily follow that he has to indulge him his reckless, misguided, “extinction-level event for Ontario’s finances” as Toronto Star writer John Lorinc describes it. Ditto the western sovereignty-minded demagogues and their northern visions of Drill, baby, Drill. Mark Carney secured his position as Prime Minister of Canada on promises of transforming the country away from its vulnerable position of U.S. dependence and toward a future that fit into the new realities of the 21^st century. Implicit in that pledge was breaking the mold of 20^th-century Canada.

It’s one thing to be forced to fight for your survival in the face of a threat from the outside. It’s another matter entirely to be challenged and endangered from internal forces, opportunistically taking advantage of a crisis in order to further their own agenda and that of those who put them into power. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s version of the country’s future is looking an awful lot like the country’s past which got us right smack dab down in the middle of our untenable present.