Trudeau the Trucker

Our political leaders for the most part affect a baccalaureate sensibility without ever having done hands-on physical labor or economically productive work. Agricultural ministers have rarely tilled the fields or planted crops. Ministers of economic development have seldom had to worry about balancing household accounts. Natural Resources ministers do not routinely descend into the mines. Transport ministers almost certainly never drove a truck. Infrastructure bureaucrats never laid tarmac. I once met a government building inspector who never built or renovated a house and could not tell an awl from a burin, but was an ardent imposer of “code.” It makes sense to assume that a political or public official tasked with dealing with the nation’s business should have some knowledge of the trades, crafts, and industries he is responsible for, or at the very least treat the productive members of society with respect.

My own prime minister, the beneficiary of a large family trust fund, boasts a sparkling CV that lists such accomplishments as actor, snowboard instructor, and substitute high-school teacher. There is certainly little sympathy on evidence for those who do gainful and necessary work, who contribute to the economy, who perform maintenance duties and essential services, who keep the factories humming, who grow, build, transact, and deliver, whose labor is tangible and indispensable, who grease the wheels of the national machinery, who actually know their trades and disciplines and rarely take credit for what they do, who started their lives from scratch without status, legacies, and endowments, and who pay onerous taxes from dwindling revenues. Justin Trudeau’s record demonstrates no love for the salt of the earth.

This is the man who refused to meet with the blue-collar truckers in Ottawa protesting the COVID-19 mandates, the true working class whom he saw fit to slander as vandals, racists, misogynists (?), antisemites, and more. I may be mistaken—I do not wish to malign the man—but I suspect he never sat behind the wheel of a semi or even a pickup truck. He does not work a twelve-hour-plus day in harsh conditions delivering goods and services to his constituents. Rather, when he is not in hiding, on vacation, proroguing parliament, and governing from cottage steps, he is busy delivering not goods and services but autocratic decrees like the one imposing carbon taxes that constrict the livelihoods of people who actually struggle to make ends meet. Or proposing instruments like Bill C-11 that would give individual citizens little control over their personal data by restricting online content, Bill C-36 that would outlaw what is conveniently called “online hate” and stringently regulate freedom of expression, and Bill S-233 that, while instituting a basic living income, would lead to government intervention and control of personal finances, digital certificates, surveillance tracking, and a vast expansion of the welfare state.

Related: The Government From Hell

As Rupa Subramanya argues in the National Post, there is a radical disconnect between a “technocratic, managerial elite who coped just fine under two years of pandemic living by working at home in the virtual world of Zoom and Peloton” and a “brick and mortar physical economy which had been severely disrupted both by the pandemic and the restrictions imposed in response to it.” For the latter, “the lived hard scrabble reality…is not a theoretical concept but an existential one.” The elite class with immaculate hands and scrubbed faces may not be high-school substitute teachers, but they are substitutes for real working people.

I have a dream. I would like to see the sycophant bracket of political drones, bureaucrat leeches, and media flunkies meet the real world head-on and be compelled to earn their daily bread by providing for life’s necessities. I would like to see them deal in truth. I would especially like to see the prime minister work for a living. I would like to see him in the cab of an 18-wheeler negotiating the highways and weather conditions of the land he purports to govern and learning about the lives of the people he purports to administer—assuming, of course, he does not total the rig as he has the Canadian economy. Should he survive the venture, he might then be less likely to hurl calumnies and invectives, or release the full force of our mounted police, or freeze the bank accounts and bring in other punitive measures, against those whom the parasite class have called jerks, anarchists, yahoos and a fringe minority with unacceptable views, that is, against the very people who actually make the country run.

Vendettas based on idleness, partisanship, and ignorance are not a recipe for national success. What is obviously needed is that rare but essential synergy of honest labor and competent leadership. Trudeau the trucker might be a start, albeit a shaky one.