Whips and Scorpions - Captain Airhead’s St. Valentine’s Day Manic Meltdown

 

In the 2015 Dominion election Captain Airhead, the son of the man who up to that point had been the worst Prime Minister in the history of Canada, was swept into the Prime Minister’s office by a second wave of Trudeaumania, much worse than the first, and he has remained in that office ever since, despite scandal after scandal and a combination of gross incompetency with massive egotistical arrogance that resembles a dark, sinister, unfunny version of the kind we associate with characters portrayed by Peter Sellers in the movies..   He was whittled down to a plurality of seats in 2019, which he just managed to retain in 2021, but with help, sometimes from the socialists, sometimes from the separatists, he has managed to cling to office.   In his hubris, which puts even that of his father to shame, he has continued to govern as if he had the mandate of a majority government – even a supermajority – in the House behind him.

 

Captain Airhead has always seemed to be more concerned about the image he projects than anything else, including the good of the country whose government he leads.   The groups he has most often sought to impress have been the young and the woke – his domestic support base – and the “international community”.   His efforts have at times failed in ways that rendered him – and Canada – a laughing stock.   Earlier this year we were given yet another example of this.   When the rest of the world was finally coming around and deciding to treat the bat flu like the normal flu and lifting restrictions and mandates, he, who had been scapegoating the unvaccinated for all the country’s problems since last summer, decided to double down instead and removed the vaccine mandate exemption for long haul truck drivers crossing the border from the United States.    This led truckers, vaccinated and unvaccinated, from all across the Dominion to head towards Ottawa in one big protest convoy.   As they approached, he hurled insults at them and then, as they began to pour into the capital, he fled to an “undisclosed secure location”, citing a conveniently timed need to self-isolate due to exposure to the bat flu.    This earned him the scorn and derision of his opponents and allies, at home and abroad, alike.    The image he was clearly projecting for all to see was that of a sniveling coward.   

 

The trucker protest has been ongoing since, both in Ottawa and other major Canadian cities.   Captain Airhead, in an address to the nation from his hiding place on the Monday after the convoy arrived in Ottawa doubled down on his insulting language and his arrogant tone but despite his efforts and those of his sycophants in the media to portray the trucker protest as a small group of astroturfed racist ideologues it was apparent to everybody watching that unlike the protests he himself supports – anti-pipeline and anti-petroleum environmentalist protests, Black Lives Matter, etc., which typically consist of professional protesters funded by far left billionaires like George Soros – this was a genuine, grassroots, working and middle class protest.    

 

It differed from the kind of protest Captain Airhead admires in one other way.    Whereas Black Lives Matter rallies broke out into riots, vandalism and looting in major cities all across North America and last year’s demonstrations arising out of wild and irresponsible allegations against the former Indian Residential Schools led to the arson and other vandalism over well over fifty churches and the toppling and decapitation of statues, the truckers’ protest has been an actual peaceful protest rather than an anarchistic riot declared to be peaceful by media fiat.   While loud and noisy, it has not been violent and destructive and, indeed, would be best described as the world’s largest and longest block party.   Where some of the spin-off protests have arguably crossed the line from expressing their legitimate complaints about the infringement of their own rights and freedoms into interfering with those of others has been the impediment of traffic across the border with the US at important commercial crossings such as the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor, Emerson here in Manitoba, and Coutts in Alberta.   Many have noted, however, and rightly so, that those condemning the freedom protestors on these grounds had no objection to the entire border being closed by the government to anything but supply-chain commercial transport for almost two years nor have they ever insisted that the government do anything when groups of Indians – in many cases paid environmentalist protestors claiming to be Indians would probably be more accurate - have blockaded commercial infrastructure such as highways or railroads to back up some demand or another of theirs.

 

Over the past couple of weeks most Canadians when asked, regardless of what they thought of pandemic measures or the truckers’ protest itself, agreed that Captain Airhead’s attitude and behaviour were only making things worse.   In the midst of calls from everyone except the most bootlicking of his supporters to deescalate the situation he seemed determined to do the exact opposite.

 

On Monday, the fourteenth of February, Captain Airhead decided to do just that and to send a Valentine to those questioning and challenging his heavy-handed pandemic policies in the form of the invocation of the Emergency Measures Act.   Technically this is the first time this act has been used, although it was introduced in the premiership of Brian Mulroney in 1988, not as a first-of-its-kind piece of legislation, but as an update and replacement for the War Measures Act.   Captain Airhead’s own father had been the last to invoke the War Measures Act – and the only Prime Minister to do so in peacetime.   Indeed, the thought that was almost certainly foremost in Captain Airhead’s mind as he decided to do this was that he could dispel the image of a coward he had crafted for himself by conjuring up that of his father’s handling of the October Crisis.

 

He has succeeded, however, only in presenting the image of a weak man trying to appear strong, of a little man – or potato, to borrow China’s favourite contemptuous epithet for him - trying to appear big.    The contrasts with his father are far greater than the similarities.

 

In 1970 Pierre Trudeau was dealing with a militant Quebec separatist organization that had been committing acts of terrorism against Canada since the early ‘60s.   These had been increasing in intensity.   The previous year they had bombed the Montreal Stock Exchange, injuring several people and causing a million dollars’ worth of damage.   In the crisis in which Trudeau acted the FLQ had kidnapped the British Trade Commissioner James Cross and then kidnapped and murdered the Labour Minister of Quebec – he was also deputy premier of the province – Pierre Laporte.   This was a situation that called for a display of government strength although Pierre Trudeau was criticized then and afterwards – justly in my opinion – for taking this to an unnecessary extreme.

 

By contrast, the people over whom Captain Airhead is throwing a tantrum have not blown anything up, kidnapped anyone, murdered anyone, or done anything remotely similar.    They have parked their trucks in the vicinity of Parliament – and several provincial legislatures – with the declared intention of not leaving until their demands are met.   Those demands, unlike the separatist demands of the FLQ, are entirely reasonable.   They are demanding that the government return to them – and to all Canadians – the basic freedoms that belong to them, that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is supposed to protect, but which the government has treated as if they were its own to give and take away as it sees fit for the duration of the bat flu pandemic of the last two years.    Since these reasonable demands translate into a reasonable objection to government overreach, piling more government overreach on top – indeed, the maximum overreach available to the government – after two weeks of doing nothing but insult the protestors, can only be seen as an irresponsible and incendiary response.

 

It is not his father, Captain Airhead has come across as resembling, so much as Rehoboam, the son and heir of King Solomon.   At his coronation at Shechem as recorded in the twelfth chapter of I Kings, Rehoboam received a delegation of Israelites headed by Jeroboam which asked him to lighten the yoke his father had laid upon them.   He asked them to come back in three days for an answer, then consulted with the wise elders of Israel, who advised him to grant the request.   Then he asked the advice of the hot-headed youth of his own generation.   They told him to make the yoke heavier instead of lighter.   Rehoboam discarded the advice of the wise elders, and heeded instead the reckless advice of the fools he had grown up with and told the delegation “My father made your yoke heavy, and I will add to your yoke: my father also chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.”    This went down as one of the most boneheaded moves in all the history of Old Testament Israel.   By behaving this way Rehoboam provoked all the tribes of Israel except his own tribe, Judah, and Benjamin into rebelling against the Davidic dynasty and split the formerly united kingdom of Israel into the Northern and Southern kingdoms.   Captain Airhead’s similar response to the freedom protestors is unlikely to be looked upon any more favourably than Rehoboam’s in generations yet to come.  

 

This situation in no way meets the stringent requirements written into the Emergency Measures Act for its invocation.   The protests do not “seriously endanger the lives, health or safety” of Canadians nor do they “exceed the capacity or authority of a province to deal with it” as ought to evident from the facts that even as Captain Airhead was preparing to make his announcement the Ambassador Bridge and Coutts border blockages were being cleared by ordinary police action and the provincial premiers – with the exception of the dolt in charge of Upper Canada – were all telling him to take a chill pill, they could handle the situation, the EMA was neither necessary nor wanted.   Captain Airhead most likely believes that none of this matters, that with the support of Jimmy Dhaliwal’s New Democrats he will be able to ram approval of the EMA through the House of Commons and get the Senate to rubber stamp it while the courts, if they act at all to hold the government accountable rather than merely defer to the government, will act too late to stop him.

 

The speech in which Captain Airhead announced this step was his most brazen one to date.   How he managed to keep a straight face while saying that this was not something a Prime Minister should do lightly, that it is not the first step, nor the second step, but the last step that should be considered, is beyond me.    Perhaps he is a better actor than I had given him credit for.  Michelle Ferreri, the Conservative MP for Peterborough-Kawartha put the question to the government in Question Period on Tuesday of what other steps had been tried first.   The “answer” from Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair sidestepped the question.   Obviously, the government did not exhaust all other means available to it before taking this step.   It did not, for example, try talking to the protestors, hearing their complaints, and negotiating.    Indeed, the only other “step” it appears to have taken has been to hurl insults, lies, threats, condescension and other abuse at the protestors.    

 

It was also mighty rich of Captain Airhead to smugly and self-righteously pat himself on the back and justify this unjustifiable power grab by saying that the people of Ottawa deserve to have their lives back.    That all Canadians deserve to have their lives back is, of course, precisely the point of the truckers’ protest.   The truckers’ protest has been going for about a month.   To whatever extent it can be said to interfere with the daily lives of the people of Ottawa that interference is insignificant in comparison with how requiring businesses to operate at a fraction of their capacity, closing churches and other places of worship, telling people that they cannot have friends over or meet with people outside of their own household other than through the internet, ordering people to wear masks everywhere, and forcing them to take a foreign substance into their bodies against their will by taking everything away from them until they “consent” has affected the daily lives of all Canadians.

 

Since Captain Airhead, for all of his talk about providing local law enforcement with the “tools” necessary to end the protests, does not seem to be interested in sending the military in to support local law enforcement – credible reports, prior to the invoking of the Emergency Measures Act, indicated that he had already asked the military to intervene and had been told, essentially, to “truck off” – it is obvious that it is the extra financial powers spelled out by Chrystia Freeland after his announcement that he is after.    This should come as a surprise to nobody.   Even though Freeland, Captain Airhead’s deputy prime minister, has only been in the Ministry of Finance since Bill Morneau was forced to fall on the sword to save Captain Airhead in the WE Charity scandal of 2020, she and the Prime Minister have been seeking to take control over their finances out of Canadians’ hands since they came to power a little over six years ago.   As smug and arrogant as her boss, on Monday she announced that under the Emergency Act the Canadian government would be requiring crowdfunding platforms and their payment providers to register with FINTRAC and report large and “suspicious” transactions, somehow regulating cryptocurrency, telling banks and other financial institutions to review the transactions of their accountholders, giving those institutions the power to freeze the accounts of convoy supporters without a court order and protecting them against civil liability for doing so.   In other words, she and the Prime Minister gave themselves the power to utterly destroy dissenters by seizing their assets without due process and leaving them no legal recourse.   For the record, I, like all sane people, am opposed to government ever having this kind of power under any circumstances.   Not even in a real emergency – which this is not.   Not even to combat real terrorists rather than non-violent protestors.   A government that has this kind of power is not a government limited by constitution.   Nota bene, Freeland also said that the government would be introducing legislation aimed at making its new financial powers permanent.   This shows the utter hollowness of the government’s assurances that their actions under the EMA would be subject to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

 

On Wednesday, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino, presented the House with the motion that would confirm the Emergency Measures Act.   Let us hope and pray that there are many Liberal MPs chafing to get out from under Captain Airhead’s whip.   Let us hope and pray that there are NDP members left who can recognize that it would be a betrayal of an important legacy of their party which in 1970, led by the legendary Tommy Douglas, had the distinction of being the only party in Parliament to take a just stand against Pierre Trudeau’s peacetime use of the War Measures Act against actual terrorists, to follow Jimmy Dhaliwal in using martial law to crush a protest by the working class their party once claimed to stand for.   Let us hope and pray that there are enough of both who will stand with the Conservatives and the Bloc in refusing to confirm the EMA so as to send the message to Captain Airhead and his goons that their assaults on constitutional government and personal freedom will be tolerated by Parliament no longer and that they can take their whips and scorpions and stick them where the sun don’t shine.

Trudeau and the Middle Class

In Rob Reiner’s 1987 film adaptation of William Goldman’s novel The Princess Bride, Wallace Shawn’s character of Vizzini, the leader of a trio hired to kidnap the title character, utters the word “inconceivable” every time something happens that interferes with his plans. After the umpteenth such exclamation, his associate Inigo Montoya, a Spanish swordsman portrayed by Mandy Patinkin, turns to him and says “you keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

This is something that should have been said to Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau during the 2015 Dominion election every time he promised that the Grits would make the “middle class” stronger. He accused the previous Conservative government led by Stephen Harper of pandering to the wealthy at the expense of the middle class and claimed that his party would do the opposite. The Liberal Party’s “New Plan for a Strong Middle Class”, their platform during that campaign, stated:

A strong economy starts with a strong middle class.

This is a true statement, but it is probably the only true statement in the entire document. It immediately went on to say “Our plan offers real help to Canada’s middle class and all those working hard to join it”. Among the promises made were “We will give middle class Canadians a tax break, by making taxes more fair.”

Over the summer, however, Finance Minister Bill Morneau announced the government’s intention, when Parliament resumes in the fall, to introduce changes to the tax code as it pertains to the incorporation of small businesses. Trudeau’s evil henchman, of course, described these proposed changes in terms of closing loopholes that the wealthy exploit to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. This, however, is what in the language of Apuleius would have been called an onus stercoris. It is not the superrich, the “1%” about which there has been so much talk in recent years, that “trust fund” Trudeau and his gang are going after. It is the couple who own the local grocery store that barely manages to survive against the competition of the giant corporate chains, the family struggling to scratch out a living on their farm, and the guy who had a great idea for a business that would provide a valued service to his community and employment for his neighbours and who has sunk everything he had into the uphill battle to make this dream come true. In other words, the middle class.

Justin Trudeau does not have a clue what a middle class is. When the question was put to him directly in the 2015 election he answered “I’m going to let economists, and I have a few around me, argue over which quintile or decile the middle class begins or ends in.” In other words, he thinks the middle class is a group of people whose income falls between an upper and lower limit, even though he cannot define what those limits are. In the old days, however, when the words middle class actually meant something, they referred to those who were neither the “rich”, who could live comfortably off of their already accumulated wealth nor the “poor” whose only respectable means of subsistence was by earning wages by manual labour but rather those whose income came through the management of their own small properties and businesses. Two and a half millennia ago Aristotle argued that it was this class that made for a secure and stable state because it was a responsible class and where it is strong neither poor nor rich are likely to be oppressed as one or the other would be in an oligarchy of the rich few or a democracy of the poor many. This is lost on our Prime Minister, however, who could not understand the Politika even if someone translated it into English or French for him, and who is most likely unaware that there ever was any other Aristotle than Jackie’s second husband.

The Trudeau government’s proposed tax code changes have nothing to do with fairness and everything to do with their desperate need for revenue due to their fiscal mismanagement. They have been running deficits far in excess of those they had projected during the election campaign, saddling our country with a load of debt that will take centuries to pay off. Pierre Trudeau had ran massive deficits in the ‘60s and ‘70s and Justin’s attitude to the Canadian taxpayer is summed up in the words of Rehoboam – “my father chastised you with whips, but I shall chastise you with scorpions.” Nor is the spending that the Grits are unwilling to curb going into development projects that will benefit Canada and Canadians for generations to come so much as into sustaining Trudeau’s international image of a generous humanitarian at the expense of Canadians.

During the election campaign Trudeau said that his government would commit to growing the economy and that as a consequence of that growth “the budget would balance itself.” Those who sought to defend Trudeau from the charge of reckless fiscal irresponsibility that these poorly chosen words suggested maintained that this was basically a restatement of the premise of Reaganomics. While there is a resemblance, to be sure, there is also a fundamental difference. The idea of supply-side economics is not that economic growth eliminates the need for fiscal responsibility but that a larger total tax revenue can be generated at a lower rate if the tax cuts provide enough entrepreneurial incentives to spur economic growth. It is an argument for lowering taxes – not an argument for reckless spending.

At any rate, if your strategy for balancing the budget is to rely upon economic growth to raise tax revenues, then your policies ought to encourage economic growth rather than discourage it. The policies of the Trudeau Liberals, however, have all the appearance of being designed to bring Canada’s economy to a grinding halt. Their carbon tax needlessly and pointlessly – for even if the anthropogenic theory of climate change were true it would do nothing to alleviate the problem – increases the expense of doing business and in a way that further belies their talk about “fairness” as it is a thoroughly regressive tax, affecting people the hardest the further down the economic ladder they are.

Then there is their approach to the NAFTA renegotiations. Regardless of what one thinks about free trade in the abstract – I think that however good the arguments behind the theory sound on paper they have been completely debunked by history – a country’s closest neighbours will usually be its biggest trading partners and when you have a trade agreement with those neighbours and one of them decides that it needs renegotiation, your job, when you go to the negotiation table, is to look out for the interests of your country and to secure for it the best deal possible. Two of the three governments involved in the NAFTA talks understand this – one does not. The Liberals have made it their priority to inject climate change, gender equality, and a lot of other irrelevant and inane progressive nonsense into the discussions. This will not help them to secure the best deal possible for Canada and if anything will have the exact opposite effect.

Trudeau’s apologists will argue that the economy is healthy and growing because the GDP has been increasing faster than anticipated since the final quarter of last year. All this means, however, is that money has been changing hands at a faster rate in Canada over the last twelve months. GDP is calculated by adding up the sum of private consumption (C) with that of investment (I), government expenditure (G) and total exports minus total imports (NX or X – M). It is a pointless exercise because the figure you get doesn’t measure anything real. C and G go up the same regardless of whether it is wealth accumulated from past production or money borrowed that is spent. Neither is a distinction made between spending on projects that will have enduring benefits, spending on immediate needs, and spending that is wasteful or even destructive. Demolishing and constructing a building both raise the GDP and every time a bomb is dropped the GDP goes up. GDP is no indicator of productivity and real economic growth. Its chief purpose – perhaps sole purpose – is to enable finance ministers and economists to boast about their “growing economies” even as real incomes and savings drop while unemployment and debt grows. It has been used to obfuscate the truth about the devastating consequences of free trade for years.

Every time Justin Trudeau throws away money that the Canadian taxpayers’ will have to spend the next century or so paying back on some project of self-aggrandizement it increases our GDP. What it doesn’t do is benefit our middle class – or those working hard to join it.