Canada Has Become a Standing Joke

Here lies W.C. Fields. I would rather be living in Philadelphia    

W.C. Fields’ proposed epitaph 

There are a number of Canadian jokes making the rounds these days. Here are four.

What’s the difference between Canada and North Korea?

One country is a police state under the boot of a young tyrant scion of his father’s dynasty who brutally crushes opponents, free speech, and liberty, and the other is a country in Asia.

Here’s another from The Babylon Bee: “Under orders from the Supreme Chancellor of the People’s Republic of Canada Justin Trudeau, all ATMs will screen people for unacceptable views before they can withdraw funds. According to sources, anti-mandate freedom protestors have already formed their own parallel economy trading in beaver pelts, maple syrup, and Bitcoin.”

And another (of a kind): Romanian Member of the European Parliament Cristian Terhes denounces Justin Trudeau for his declaration of martial law to crush the trucker convoy in Ottawa: “The prime minister of Canada, the way he’s behaving right now, he’s exactly like a tyrant, a dictator. He’s like Ceaușescu in Romania.” Can this really be? Ceaușescu? In Canada? It must be a joke, no?

Last, this one: How many Canadians does it take to change a light bulb?

                       What’s a Canadian? What’s a light bulb? 

The first is funny in the wry way you look at it. Humor makes imminence palatable by teasing and satisfying apprehension, a pleasure similar to solving crossword puzzles. The second is funny in a bitterly premonitory sense, a joke with a best before date, humor that may eventually erase itself as no longer funny. Enjoy it while you can. The third, a news item, is not really funny, no matter how you look at it, though one may laugh in disbelief. The fourth is funny because it follows the classic template, culminating in the prospective surprise—but it is also meaningful. Things we took for granted are about to disappear. These are political jokes, true in the way Peter Schlemihl’s missing shadow is true. The shadow is not palpably visible to onlookers, but it exists. The shadow belongs to the Devil.

Jokes by definition tell an unanticipated truth or a real or hypothetical possibility, cemented in the punchline. Of course, sometimes the entire joke is the punchline, as in the example from The Babylon Bee. One assumes it will be funny even before reading it. But generally speaking, if the punchline is signaled in advance, the joke becomes something else, a banal truism and a disappointment, not a punchline but a flatline. Additionally, the concept of the joke has a pejorative sense, in which the word can also suggest something that was never funny in the first place but distressingly serious or inherently preposterous: “You must be joking,” “Trudeau is a joke.” In other words, it can function in the mode of ironic reversal or what is called “antiphrasis.” The thing or the person is not a laughing matter.

A good joke is funny because one expects the unexpected within a psychologically established framework. We wait for the punchline. A bad joke is not funny in two ways: objectively, because the punchline is anticlimactic, or subjectively, because one does not expect the unexpected, as in a shaggy dog story that goes nowhere; that is, there is no intricacy, no schematism in play. We are not amused because there is no preliminary tension, no inherent and accepted structure or convention of how a joke is by definition set up. 

Related: Canada and the US: What a Difference!

As things have developed, Canada has, in the idiomatic sense, become a joke, that is, a bad one, in effect, a joke that is not a joke. In other words, we never expected the unexpected, a liberal democracy transformed almost overnight into a fascist dictatorship, a travesty of a former assumption. Just yesterday, who would have thought that truckers’ operating licenses would be revoked. Or Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson would intend to sell confiscated rigs under the Emergencies Act. Or that banks can freeze accounts of individuals and corporations involved in the protests without a court order, as announced by Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland who, as Michael Walsh points out in The Pipeline, sits on the board of trustees of the World Economic Forum, “the most dangerous threat to real democracy and freedom in the world today, and whose journalist grandfather was reportedly a Nazi collaborator.” Or that a thrice-elected prime minister and darling of the electorate would assume the mantle of a totalitarian despot. Or that people would be savagely beaten by masked police without badge numbers and jackbooted RCMP officers think they are “living the dream” at the prospect of “police horses trampl[ing] peaceful protesters.” 

This is a country that has closed down practically all avenues of political dissent. There is no effective opposition in Parliament, which has approved of the government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act; we cannot vote ourselves to freedom. Demonstrations have been crushed (unless, of course, they are mobilized by the Left); we cannot protest our way to freedom. There are no democratic expedients remaining to loyal citizens on the ground, save a massive general strike, which is highly unlikely. Canada is at this moment, for all intents and purposes and pending deliberation in the Senate, a totalitarian machine, a country that can be described as a Justinocracy practicing the religion of Chrystianity.

We might say there are really three Canadas: Institutional Canada, comprising governing, media and corporate elites; Majority Canada, consisting of the mass of compliant and apathetic citizens who support the elites; and, let’s call it Trucker Canada, involving a small cadre of patriotic, working-class citizens and true conservatives. The third group understands that the first two classes are a joke, but they’re not laughing.

The fact is, for those who regard themselves as loyal Canadians, who make the country run at the most fundamental levels, living in Canada today is no joke. We did not expect the unexpected. We did not prepare for conclusions. We did not anticipate being surprised. We did not see the unforeseen as, at least theoretically, a plausible development. We never suspected that Canada could in the blink of an eye become the West’s facsimile of Cuba, or Venezuela, or Communist China.

Poet W.B. Yeats wrote of Ireland in 1916 in the midst of civil upheaval: “All changed, changed utterly.” If the Senate does not find against the Act or if the Governor General does not dismiss the prime minister, which is in the legal authority of the Office, the same will be true of Canada in 2022 and thereafter. Nor is there any guarantee that a newly minted dictator would comply with legal resolutions. Nonetheless, as of this writing, failing a prolonged national strike or Constitutional decisions on the part of the Senate and/or Governor General, democratic life in Canada will have reached its end. 

In such a worst-case scenario, the joke would be on us.