An Increasing Lack of Trust

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Almost daily, reasons why political leaders are losing the citizens’ trust becomes more apparent. Cynical attempts to distract attention from their serious misconduct, or from damaging policies by using Covid-19 or Climate Change as an excuse, have become the norm. Meanwhile a deluge of opioids, lack of housing for the poor and middle-income earners, lack of routine medical care, and plugged courts are commonplace.

Government at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels are failing in their most basic responsibilities. Politicians cite the need to counter the progress of Covid-19 or halt the onset of Climate Change as the reason for new taxes and regulations. Few if any of these levies or directives have had any success in eliminating disease or affecting climate.  Most, however, can be directly tied to the desire to support some barely related policy of the government concerned.

The federal government’s countermeasures to Covid-19 for the last eighteen months have been based on a series of conflicting instructions followed by a barrage of unverifiable statistics.  The speed with which some senior politicians personally disobey their own instructions for appropriate conduct only serves to indicate some other standard is in play.

Closer to home, British Columbia’s medical administrators have talked about the prospect of another pandemic for decades. It seems not to have occurred to them to have made even the roughest estimate as to how the means of fighting it could be superimposed on the need to maintain regular service. The province’s surgical waiting lists have been a scandal for years and are now even longer, as hospitals hold space empty and leave medical staff idle against the prospect of being overwhelmed by pandemic patients. The waiting lists did not shorten even after it became evident that hospitalization requirements had been drastically overestimated. Is this a situation likely to build trust that a solution is even possible?

The prospect of vaccination attracts objections from people who claim they are likely to suffer irreparable damage from this treatment. Experts use statistics to pillory protesters as “Anti-vaxxers,” but any suggestion that the vaccinations are less than successful are deluged by further orders that people should have more of them. Trust is never earned through compulsion.

Furthermore:

While confusion reigns in medical circles, local law courts are plugged. Demonstrators who have decided that their interpretation of adequate forestry management is superior to that provided by a variety of experts and supported by statistical evidence, are released from jail after repeated arrests. Judges operating the release portion of the “catch and release” program cite the conduct of the police officers charged with enforcing the law as a contributory cause of breaking it. Is this supposed to build confidence in the rule of law among those who are paying for the service? Are statistics and expert opinions less superior depending on the choice of circumstances?

Provincial deaths from opioid overdoses are exceeding those from Covid by a considerable margin. Governments point to mental health problems as a primary explanation for the situation. The possibility that this disastrous situation may have emerged from a permissive accommodation of the use of cannabis or other readily available recreational narcotics is ignored. Also overlooked is the fact that a network of dealers, providing drugs in ever stronger concentrations, can operate with the same impunity as the aforesaid protesters who are cheerfully breaking other laws. A fine base upon which to build trust among the electorate!

Add to that, the civic service debacle:

Municipal authorities, incredibly, have found ways to add to housing shortages. Despite the property development solutions now moldering behind town council regulatory barriers, unit prices are rising as the Councilors are transfixed by process, not outcomes, and taxes have been hiked well beyond the level of inflation. Municipalities are using the proceeds to tackle massive social objectives well beyond their levels of authority or ability to influence. These are people who merit trust from the citizenry?

What about Canada?

In the recent federal election, few leaders, and certainly none of the principal ones, found anything to celebrate about Canada. Many seemed almost gleeful as they stigmatized dead Canadians from the past and vilified the living for their ancestors’ supposed sins. None felt the need to point out that Canadians had, virtually always, followed a path where they took the lessons of history and used their example to make things better. Those voters who hold their patriotism close find it hard to make their voices heard above the mob.

It is a painful wait for alternative leaders to present themselves, but voters still strive to elect politicians to do the things in society that it is impractical for them to do themselves.  Leaders in the future aspiring to earn trust must do so by regaining control of government away from the hands of an unrestrained and proliferating bureaucracy, which appears to have usurped governmental function. It means accepting responsibility – something which no democracy can survive without.

Naïve perhaps, but it is all a matter of TRUST – at every level – all the time.

Canada can do better! 

References:
Spencer Fernando, Insight  “Why Canadian Politics is Broken”  Sept 27, 2021
Rex Murphy, The World News  “Contradictory COVID advice”  Sept 30, 2021
Martin Grunn, C2C Journal,  “Can We Handle the Truth?”  Oct 1, 2021

Where’s the Money?

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One cannot pick up any newspaper without seeing a reminder that advances in technology are rapidly changing the way people now live and work. Canadians are as active in developing new ideas as any national group but are not as good when it comes to reaping the benefits of their future commercial developments.

Whoever wins the current election might be well advised to make changing this a priority because it is from ideas that jobs in manufacturing, distribution, and sales spring. Furthermore, one idea often leads to another, and the economic development process starts anew.

For all the encouraging information coming out about ground-breaking new developments, there seems to be an equal amount emerging about technology that is on the verge of production being sold to a large, often offshore, industrial or investment concern. In too many cases it means that the technology itself is exported and the highly skilled manufacturing jobs it generates are developed for other people. In other cases, the income derived from it benefits the offshore buyer, and not Canada.

If this is a matter of real concern, Canada’s tax system could stand reforming to allow for large scale capital assembly so that money created from peoples’ good ideas stays in the country to be used for the development of new businesses.  If any of the local candidates could use some suggestions for where the money could be used, they might consider the opportunities available in the forest products sector and their potential for new materials used in the construction of new housing.

Quebec Nation

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It appears that due to conditioning, with help from the government education curriculum, many citizens of Canada have lost sight of, or have never known the political history of the country they call home.   For example, many Canadians do not know what the 1763 “Treaty of Paris” is, and why Canada effectively has a French colony inside its borders.

From early contact with First Nations, to the basic-survival of the Pioneers, and their respective ensuing diplomatic struggles,  leaders of different nations and cultures, some capable and some inept, forged forward with plans that did not always end well.  From the French and Indian War/Seven Year War (1)  of 1754-1763 that culminated in the ratification of “The Treaty of Paris”, to the failure of “The Albany Plan of Union” in 1774, there are volumes of history that answer many questions as to how Canada evolved divided, and how some historical decisions are still negatively reverberating today.  (2)

For example, after the “Treaty of Paris”, addressing Quebec separately was accommodated by “The Quebec Act” of 1774 which reinstituted French Civil Law in Quebec, pointedly for matters of private law (i.e.: law between individuals) but left English Common Law intact for public matters (i.e.: between individuals, governments, and institutions).  (3)

The “Official Languages Act” which formally added French as one of the official languages of Canada, did not exist until it was championed in 1969 by PM Pierre Trudeau.  (4)  Along with other increments, one of the most recent concessions Quebec has sought is to be recognized as a “Nation” – which will likely lead to future Constitutional repercussions.   As the current Premier of Quebec, Mr. Legault signifies in his own words; …his government has “the right and duty to use the clause, especially when the foundation of our existence as a people in America is at stake.”, he emphasizes a rarely spoken opinion that Quebec has distinction and status above all other provinces. (5)

Parents of any family know that showering special treatment on one child, especially if it is at the expense of siblings, is a recipe for disharmony, if not complete disaster.   If Canada can be seen as a big family of provinces, all the historical and recent concessions, along with exorbitant transfer payments to Quebec, extracted from provinces that are struggling, indeed come across as questionable.  If the federal government truly wants equality, it should start here.  It is long past time for Canada to become one country, undivided.

(1) Milestones: 1750–1775 – Office of the Historian (state.gov)

(2) Albany Plan – Wikipedia

(3) Quebec Act, 1774 | The Canadian Encyclopedia

(4) Official Languages Act (Canada) – Wikipedia

(5) Quebec seeks to amend Canadian Constitution with new language law – The Globe and Mail

 

Green Proxies

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Some think the rhetoric around the overused and ill-defined term, “climate change” is really a means to  “total global governance” under the UN agenda, and they are excused for thinking so.  Along with the term’s colloquial cousin, the “existential threat”, the slogans appear as proxies; tools used to achieve an end.

Being environmentally conscious is a good thing, and many people are even on board with paying a carbon-tax to accommodate emissions control.  But true environmentalists should be outraged (and some are) over what appears to be the psychological abduction of human emotion, around the topic of atmospheric conditions, in a quest to satisfy an unspoken end-game of dominance over every aspect of their lives.

If one cares to “look at the science”, (a phrase those with self-imposed moral superiority tout continuously, and sometimes vociferously), one will see that earth’s climate has been cyclical in nature since the time before Gondwanaland.  The example of the Holocene warming period and inter-glacial epochs demonstrate convincingly that the left-wing science of an impending “manmade climate-catastrophe” is manipulated data.  For example, Alaska was once, on average, at least three degrees warmer than it is today.

Unfortunately, climate hysteria is escalating as it is continuously relayed through a myriad of media sources day after day, and dutifully regurgitated.   Becoming an ingrained mantra, it has solidified into mass consciousness.   People, who in the past, were well-equipped to question almost everything, now appear afraid, or intellectually incapacitated from questioning anything, especially when it comes to the term “climate change”.

 

Canada’s Election 44

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Election 44 seems to be more about the personal political needs of one individual Canadian than the needs of the (approximately) thirty-eight million other people who call Canada home.  It is about spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars frivolously, on an unwanted and unnecessary election, at a time of financial and medical crises.  The current circulating opinion is that full unadulterated majority, i.e., control, is what is sought, as this is what is needed to unfold and implement a specific agenda upon the nation.

Canadians have not been privy to the game plan, but a handful of recent Bills, ‘lying in wait’ in the House of Commons, spell out some of what is to come if the current administration is not held at bay.

It appears to many Canadians that the current Liberal government is not working hard for the struggling taxpayer, but instead is playing political charades, aggressively vote-pandering to the uninformed and special interest groups, (possibly with the intentional help of select media) in order to stay in office for its own self-fulfilling purpose.  In its truest sense of the term, this is not democracy at work.  It is the duty of Canadians to educate themselves of the facts and address this on September 20, 2021.

What is the Tipping Point?

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Human beings are not livestock, to be forcibly herded, corralled, inoculated, and used.  They are free autonomous beings.

A population is in danger when its leaders “bait-and-switch”, installing themselves with grandiose powers, instituting their own personal agendas and abusing the funds of the hard-working taxpayer.  Taxpayers generally have no opposition to paying taxes and expect to pay their share for their country’s infrastructure.  But when tax dollars are syphoned off by the billions and used for a leader’s external ambitions, or extraneous pet projects, citizens are justifiably outraged.  This citizenry-affront arises because of a leader’s failure to remember that taxes are not government money; taxes are monies entrusted by taxpayers to the government to work on their behalf.

A population is also in danger when its leaders try to stifle or psychologically muzzle them.  When people are coerced into a new governmentally subscribed vocabulary, to the point of some words and phrases being prohibited by law, a population is in peril of losing one of its most basic and treasured liberties – free speech.  When mandated indoctrination replaces free expression, all forms of discourse; humour, debate, opinion, and even simple conversations are jeopardized.  This is authoritarianism at work.

The question arises, as to what level does a society sink before it completely succumbs to full-fledged authoritarianism?  How far does neo-despotism have to go before it is widely noticed and challenged by a majority?  What has history demonstrated?  What is the tipping point between a population’s begrudging-acquiescence and open societal conflict? These are just a few of the issues and questions people in the free western world are now having serious conversations about.

 

CSAs Are Not New

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There is an old ideology called ‘Collective Agrarianism’ that is being presented as something new to replace Capitalism by left-wing ideologues.  (In Canada it is called Community Supported Agriculture, acronym: CSA)  As an offshoot of ‘Agriculturalism’ it harkens to a peasant-utopian-communalism as advocated in ancient Chinese philosophy.  It over-romanticizes the tilling-of-the-soil and labouring-in-the-fields while de-emphasizing modern farm-commerce modalities.

Not to be confused with communism, communalism shares many of its same attributes.  The two definitions are barely delineated from each other;  “….communalism is the common ownership of property, while communism is any political philosophy or ideology advocating holding the production of resources collectively.”  (1)

Older folks can still recall the repercussions of China’s abrupt turn to the countryside and Communism in “The Great Leap Forward”, where from the mid-1950s to mid-1960s it contributed to tens of millions of Chinese citizens starving to death. (The death toll is estimated as high as 45 million in some records).  It was documented as the largest famine in recorded history.  (2)

Following these horrors was China’s “Cultural Revolution”, a concerted effort to preserve and enforce Communism, which saw hundreds of thousands of city-dwellers forcibly sent to the countryside to labour in the fields, ostensibly to learn Agrarianism, in an effort to curb capitalist ideology and individualism.  Economic activity came to a standstill, history was erased, cultural material destroyed, and young people were employed to ravage and radically rebel against society and violate any citizen deemed bourgeois.  “Struggle sessions” were used as a form of psychological humiliation, persecution, and torture in the effort to reform minds.  (2)

In China, what was in antiquity penned as a utopian philosophy, guided by benevolence, became in modern times a regime of oppression under an iron fist.  History shows that Collective Agrarianism and Communalism may sound ideal at first, but their tendency to transgress into Communism does not bode well.

(1)  Wikidiff.com – accessed Aug 15/21
(2)  Grada, Cormac 2007, “Making Famine History”
Journal of Economic Literature, JSTOR 27646746, Wembeuer
Felix and Dikotter, Frank 2011, “Sites of Horror: Mao’s Great Famine, The Chinese Journal.
Wikipedia.com –  accessed Aug 18/21,
Pachen, Ani and Donnelley, Adelaide 2000, “Sorrow Mountain: The Journey of a Tibetan Warrior Nun”,
Kodasha

Facts versus Hype

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The Prime Minister of Canada called Covid-19 an “opportunity”, hence giving credence to L.H. Mencken’s quote:  “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”  (1)

With this in mind, consider the alarmist media coverage broadcasting to the masses, contrasted with the carefree movements and attitude of elites freely travelling around the country and across continents.   What double-standard allowed both scenarios to exist simultaneously?  The likelihood is that the elites had information that the media did not convey to the general public.  Take the following excerpts from Statistics Canada for 2020 into consideration:

  1. “Covid-19 deaths also disproportionately occurred in older populations during the March-to-early-June period”.   “Approximately 94% of the deaths caused by Covid-19 involved individuals aged 65 and older”  (2)

2,  “..about 95% of the deaths directly caused by Covid-19 during the Fall involved people aged 65 and older.”   “Dementia or Alzheimer’s are the most common comorbidities associated with Covid-19 deaths”  (2)    ie:  the patients were predominately geriatric.

  1. “There were fewer than fifty Covid-involved deaths among those under the age of 45.  Pneumonia, and symptoms, signs and abnormal clinical and laboratory findings, not elsewhere classified, were the most common comorbidities among this age group.” (2)
  1. “100% of the Covid-involved deaths of Canadians under the age of 45 as of July 31 had at least one other disease or condition certified on the medical certificate of death.”   (2)
  1. “In the [WHO] international guidelines for certifying Covid-19 as a cause of death, certifiers are instructed to record Covid-19 on the medical certificate of cause of death for all decedents where the disease caused, or assumed to have caused, or contributed to death.”   (2)
  1. “when a pre-existing condition is suspected of putting a person at higher risk of a severe course of Covid-19 resulting in death, the death is counted as a death due to Covid-19 rather than a death due to pre-existing condition.  It is also possible that the death may have been influenced by Covid-19 but caused by another disease or an unintentional injury event.”   (2)   In effect, inflating death-by-covid numbers.

Yes, Covid-19 is real, and a serious threat to health-compromised individuals (whom should have been identified and properly sequestered from the outset).  However, the overall facts do not support the level of media hype that transpired.  And calling the situation an “opportunity” by Canada’s own leader is inexcusable – if not downright disgusting.

Ultimately, it appears the double-standard of the elites arose because of their apparent privilege to the facts in real time, which suggested they were not personally at risk, while the average citizen relied solely on the prescribed message delivered through the media,  and an administration seemingly preoccupied with exploiting an “opportunity”.

(1)  H.L. Mencken, In Defense of Woman 
(2)  www150.statcan.gc.ca, Statistics Canada, O’Brien, St-Jean, Wood, Willbond, Phillips, Currie, and Turcotte.

Fairy Creek Old Growth

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The Fairy Creek “old growth” protest on the west Coast of Vancouver Island is a marriage made on the picket line between adolescent American eco-warriors and professional Canadian catastrophists.

For the one it means a battle fought in Canada without having to draw attention to similar practices at home. For the other it’s an effort to destroy the economic livelihood of a community in the name of an ill-defined alternative.  Industry, (in this case a family firm in its fourth generation of BC owner-stewardship), is caught in the middle because any concession they might make is never enough. A First Nations entity with an interest in making a living is bulldozed to the side. Government is represented by an agglomeration of minor “I’m with you” politicians in search of cameras. It is an inevitable, if distressing appendage to the democratic process originated where people have co-opted the issue to meet some externally determined purpose.

Canadians, despite the efforts by those who purport to lead them, have rarely seen a time in their history when they have not tried to make bad situations better. Some Canadian leaders are demanding that citizens accept personal responsibility today for decisions taken by their predecessors well before most of them were born. It seems that the Fairy Creek protest has been wound into an aggregation of this imposed collective guilt and will likely feature in the election currently looming over Canada.

The left-wing people running this protest indicate they stand for the elimination of livelihoods they do not like, so anyone wanting something else has, for once, a fairly clear choice.

Remove the Protestors

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The fact that the Fairy Creek protestors are in the woods, intentionally blocking a company from working at their worksite, makes them aggressors.  That they are there in violation of a court injunction exposes them as criminals.  Harvesting trees, without a license or environmental impact study, makes them not only trespassers and thieves, but also hypocrites. The tampering of equipment and property earns them the title of vandal.  Working in the forest with chainsaws, against extreme-fire-danger advisories, demonstrates their recklessness, endangering themselves, the forest, and the surrounding community.

When protestors then resist arrest, in some cases repeatedly, it is apparent that their intention is to deliberately escalate the situation.  Escalation is a ploy activists have consistently used – provoke as big a scene as possible in order to push law-enforcement to deploy increased measures against them.  To then film the whole thing, edit, and subsequently deliver only one side of the story, in order to fit with a prescribed narrative, is just another tool, among many, in their toolbox.  One of the ironies is that many of these protestors are not even residents of the area, are externally funded, and some have travelled clear across the continent to be there.

Protesting is considered a right in the free world, but blocking a legal company, and its employees, from earning a living at their place of employment is not.

Unfortunately, the manpower required to deal with the mess is diverting resources, away from other more pressing crimes and situations, and is costing the public millions of dollars.  Taxpayers, the people who actually pay the bills, are fed-up and want the obstructers, who call themselves protestors, gone.