Canada Day, Again

And why we should all wear black, as in mourning black

On this sunny placid Monday, July First 2024 in Victoria, everything appears normal. Aside from fireworks tonight, it could just be another Monday, not our official day to celebrate all things Canuckian. But are we still ‘an obscenely rich nation, governed by idiots’, as the late, great Mordechai Richler observed more than fifty years ago.

Since then, a lot has happened but somehow, we have managed to remain more or less the same puzzling country Richler loved. (BTW, he was perhaps Canada’s greatest novelist and sired a whole tribe of writing Richlers).

If he came back to take another look, he would instantly recognize us. Except for the fact that we now have a lot more of the aforementioned idiots and that they have, finally and at long last, managed to ruin this no longer obscenely rich country. Richler might edit his original conclusion to this: We’re well on our way to becoming an obscenely poor country governed by Idiots. He would also have something cogent to say about Trudeau 2.0 and remark that all those early trips to communist countries clearly had an effect. We all live under something weird that might be called TrudeauComm2.0, and we’ve been unable to foment an uprising to get rid of it. Also, Richler might notice that T2.0 may or may not be a useful idiot for certain ‘stakeholders’. That he may be an unmitigated catastrophe, even for them.

Because under his ‘leadership’, Canada has sunk to the bottom of the pile. Any pile, whether it’s housing (highest prices among shrinking supply), ‘health-care’ (millions without a doctor) or economic productivity (40% lower than the USA). And that’s not even getting at the strange optics of welcoming millions of legal/illegal migrants into a country that cannot absorb them. Or the woke propaganda we have to endure, every single day and that has infested every public body, the universities and the corporate sector.

That things cannot continue like this is obvious. However, unlike the rest of the world heading for change via the polls, (yes even Biden is history, calling it now), Canada has to wait until next October before we can throw the bums out. We have a rather unique situation here that has the leader of the third party, the NDP, a guy in a pink turban, propping up T2.0 for reasons nobody quite comprehends. If not for him, this illiberal joke of a government would long have been dispatched. He’s interfering with democracy, no less, doing something that isn’t illegal but also, unprecedented. And shameful. Next year, Trudeau’s idiots calling themselves a ‘government’ will fall. But that is a long time hence and they can do a lot of serious damage in the meantime. We know this. It feels like there is less and less of this great nation, every day. It’s shrinking, in every way possible. Soon, there might not be a country left at all.

So, when a friend texted me that he is wearing black instead of the expected, celebratory red, I texted back: we should all be in mourning for what was once a pretty decent country!

Also, the slide into oblivion isn’t new; it’s been going on for years. And last summer, I wrote a lament for this lost country that I used to love. Someone posted O that I were young again on Lew Rockwell, where it got over 2000 hits. At least the American ‘far right’ understood my lament, and it felt lovely.

At the risk of repeating myself as old people do, here is that poem again.

O THAT I WERE YOUNG AGAIN

A lament for the late great Nation of Canada/With apologies to William Butler Yeats

How could I, that girl waiting/At the immigration station/Know what is coming/The struggles with English/Things I know I don’t know/A stranger hiding/Behind a perfect smile in the last row

My new country is a gift/A many splendoured land/Vast various and open/The breath of liberty riding on the very air/All is fair and in our hands we balance/Sweet hope and dark despair/Like a brilliant token

But all is changed/Changed utterly/The kaleidoscope has frozen/Into an eerie inky hue/This place is no longer/The True North Strong and Free

I am but an old stranger leftover from another time

Canada is a place where/They are making Faustian deals/Reciting rote isms/Why do They take up arms/Against us/And foster schisms

And maybe what They say/Of western culture’s end is true/Or maybe it’s a false alarm/And we will bend/And rise again on cue

But O that I were young again/Innocent and trusting/When everything was possible

And we could clearly see/A life without alarms/ our living future beckoning with long and lovely arms