The Canadian Sickness

According to a heavily redacted RCMP report delivered to the federal government, and quoted in the National Post, “Canada may descend into civil unrest once citizens realize the hopelessness of their economic situation.” Entitled Whole-of-Government Five-Year Trends for Canada, the report warns the government that “many Canadians under 35 are unlikely ever to be able to buy a place to live,” and that “The coming period of recession will … accelerate the decline in living standards that the younger generations have already witnessed compared to earlier generations.” Economic forecasts, we learn, “for the next five years and beyond are bleak.” 

The prognosis is indeed bleak, as a majority of Canadians have known for the last several years. Living standards will tank, household debt will skyrocket, inflation will eat away at retirement savings, a significant recession is looming—though it is, in fact, already here—along with stagflation. As the independent media and news outlet The Hub writes in a seminal exposé, “Although the timing of the next federal election is unknown, it seems increasingly clear that the ballot question will be about whether voters believe that ‘Canada is broken.’” New polling finds that the answer is yes, identifying  “various factors, including the cost of living (particularly food and fuel), housing, health care, immigration, and the prime minister himself, behind these gloomy public sentiments.”

GDP per capita has been stagnant for six years, actually declining for the past six quarters. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s progressivism, involving large-scale deficits, astronomical public debt, a larger and more intrusive state, an undermanned and toothless military, a punishing and unnecessary carbon tax set to increase exponentially, a growing focus on identity politics and rampaging crime in the streets means that, as The Hub puts it, “We’re effectively facing a lost decade.”

The RCMP report is merely walking on well-trodden ground. It offers no data that is not already self-evident and that has not been the subject of innumerable articles, essays, editorials and books. The real problem with the report, aside from its redundancy, is that it is etiologically flawed, citing the risibly wrong reasons for the sickness from which the nation is suffering—in effect, it fawningly recycles the government’s evasive talking points. As retired judge and senior fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy Brian Giesbrecht says, “the RCMP appears to be more like the servants of the Trudeau Liberals than a serious national police force.”

Thus, the burden of the report is that citizen disillusionment with the Liberal government is owing to “misinformation,” “conspiracy theories” and “paranoia.” The government’s policies are not at fault with regard to the approaching social and economic collapse. In a mainly blacked out and awkwardly written section we read, rather, that “authoritarian movements have been on the rise in many liberal-democratic nations” and “Capitalizing on the rise of political polarization and conspiracy theories have been populists willing to tailor their messages to appeal to extremist movements.” The allusion is obviously to the leader of the Conservative Party, Pierre Poilievre, who is currently riding high in the polls. Therefore, “Law enforcement should expect continuing social and political polarization fueled by misinformation campaigns and an increasing mistrust for all democratic institutions.” In consequence, the report recommends that “Emergency management planning should be considered by law enforcement decision-makers to ensure continued levels of service delivery.” We know what that means. The hypocrisy on display is frankly indigestible.

There is no doubt that Canada is a broken nation suffering not only from a national wasting disease that can be attributed, as the report naturally fails to reveal and strives to suppress, almost wholly to Justin Trudeau and the Liberals’ three catastrophic terms in office—though a bedazzled and myopic electorate is also responsible for the debacle we are facing. Any astute observer knew that Trudeau was evidently unfit for office from the very moment he appeared on the political stage—a preening, frivolous, poorly educated, economically illiterate, privileged, demagogic narcissist with little to recommend him but a head of wavy hair and a family name. And yet even the expository nomenklatura—John Robson, who could not bring himself to vote for Stephen Harper, or Jonathan Kay and Conrad Black, Trudeau’s early hagiographic boosters—were easily taken in. 

But the Canadian sickness—the erosion of good governance, the scuttling of prosperity, the decline of public order and the suspension of the rule of law—is clearly exacerbated by the official and media tendency to locate the source of the malady where it doesn’t exist and to offer prescriptions whose effect will be to aggravate, compound and prolong the disease. The problem is not, as the RCMP report claims, “paranoid populism,” associated with the so-called “far right.” Far from it. 

Populism is really a movement of restoration toward economic sanity and traditional morality, as we have seen in Giorgia Meloni’s Italy, Viktor Orban’s Hungary, Nayib Bukele’s El Salvador, Javier Milei’s Argentina, Geert Wilder’s Netherlands, and, of course, Donald Trump’s America.  We see it in Canadian provinces like Alberta and Saskatchewan and American states like Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Idaho and South Dakota. We note the unexpected spike of Nigel Farage and Richard Tice’s Reform UK in Britain. Populism is the cure, not the syndrome. The real illness derives from progressive or far-left (rather than “far-right”) administrations like Trudeau’s or Biden’s. They are the source of extremist, paranoid and ultimately pathological policies and legislation. They destroy, they do not create.

The attempt to justify the tenure of corrupt and incompetent governments by placing the blame for a country’s social immiseration and desolate future prospects on the very movements that offer and generate remedies is the standard ploy of the political Left. As has been often remarked, the psychological process at work is classic projectionism, condemning populism for the irreparable damage that globalist-oriented and autocratic governments have wrought. Cheerleading the planned demise of once-democratic nations has become the major function of the legacy press and digital platforms as well as official government agencies like the FBI in the U.S. and the RCMP in Canada.  

If Biden is re-elected in the U.S. and Trudeau in Canada, there will be no recovery. The social fabric will have been torn and shredded beyond the possibility of repair. It would no longer be a question of five years or a decade but of the indefinite future. Moreover, the RCMP warning that unregulated access to data via social media and the internet will allow “private entities to develop the means to exercise undue influence over individuals and populations at an unprecedented level,” is abject nonsense and is symptomatic of the political mausoleum that is being prepared for us. Hence the barrage of internet Bills designed to prevent or curtail access to information and censor exchanges among people. Not only is the origin of the sickness being hidden or misplaced, which is an aspect of the sickness itself, we will not be permitted to discuss and communicate freely about how to rectify the disaster. 

The final paragraph of the RCMP report, titled “Next Steps,” ends ominously. It is entirely redacted. As Calgary columnist Cory Morgan writes, “Does it mean they don’t know what to do next? Or does it mean the steps are so extreme that they fear what will happen if citizens hear of them?” The question is not even close to being moot.