Skid Row Canada

Canada is not a country you love. It is a country you worry about. — Robertson Davies, quoted in David Olive, Canada Inside Out

It is difficult to avoid a crisis of personal depression over the wretched condition of our country. It is truly a melancholy spectacle. In trying to change the channel, so to speak, if only to achieve a state of relative equanimity by casting further afield and concentrating on other things, I recently came across a poem by Thomas Wolsey, former Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain during the reign of Henry VIII. It is a verse in praise of the city of London rich in physical grandeur and burgeoning prosperity and, by extension, a paean of homage to England riding a wave of national confidence. The poem reads in part:

Strong be the walls that above thee stand;

Wise be the people that within thee dwells;

Fresh be thy river with its lusty strands;

Blythe be thy churches, well sounding thy bells;

Rich be thy merchants in substance that excels…

There was no consolation to be found here. Not one line of this fragment would apply to Canada today except in ironic reversal. Our walls are no longer strong as immigrants legal and illegal flood with government assistance into the country. A people that elected the Trudeau excuse for a government three consecutive times is not a wise people. Our rivers and freshwater ecosystems are affected by industrial effluent, agricultural runoff, municipal sewage pollution, and increases in toxic algal blooms in lakes and coastal waters. Over 100 churches have been burned to the ground on the faux pretext of religious residential school deaths among indigenous children—though not one body has been exhumed. And our merchants are sinking inexorably into poverty. 

It is no surprise that more and more Canadians are moving abroad. As The Epoch Times reports (June 6-12, 2024) there are many reasons for the growing trend: The rising cost of living, egregiously high immigration outstripping economic sustainability and lowering the standard of living, uncontrolled inflation, a shrinking home market, a stagnating economy and rising political tensions. 

This summation pretty well tells the story. The Liberals and their NDP confederates have driven up the cost of energy, deliberately raised our taxes, and hiked the debt ceiling by another trillion dollars, coldly mortgaging the future. Not content with so outrageous a fiduciary maneuver, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has, as of this month, raised the capital gains tax, an action which he claims will only affect the wealthiest 0.13 percent of the population—another of Trudeau’s self-serving lies. This is a prime minister, after all, who  routinely runs a record truth deficit.

The Fraser Institute explains: Trudeau’s gloss “creates a distorted view of who will pay these capital gains taxes. Many Canadians with modest annual incomes own businesses, second homes or stocks and could end up paying these higher taxes following a onetime sale.” In other words, the resultant income will be exaggerated as it will include the elevated capital gain rather than only the normal income, leading to a massive tax bite. According to a 2021 study, “38.4 per cent of those who paid capital gains taxes in Canada earned less than $100,000 per year, and 18.3 per cent earned less than $50,000.” The Institute concludes that “Contrary to Prime Minister Trudeau’s claims, raising capital gains taxes will not improve fairness. It’s bad for investment, the economy and the living standards of Canadians.” In plain language, like his prohibitive and unnecessary carbon tax, it’s a disaster. 

As National Citizens Coalition journalist Spencer Fernando reports, Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister, the lamentable Chrystia Freeland, is trying to shift public anger away from the Liberals and towards productive Canadians. Freeland is “deliberately seeking to incite Class Warfare in Canada through the use of divisive and apocalyptic rhetoric.” Do you want to live in a country, she orates, “where those at the very top live lives of luxury [while] the wrath of the vast majority of their less privileged compatriots burns so hot?” 

This, she pretends, is the reason the government has raised the capital gains tax. Her attempt to deflect blame rings hollow as Canadians come to realize that the new tax impacts not only the rich but, as we’ve seen, certain home owners, small businesses, and family-run farms. “The Grain Gowers of Canada (GGC) points out that local operations will see a 30% hike under capital gains inclusion rate changes.” 

Nothing gets better under this bunch. The Department of Social Development estimates that approximately four million people now live in poverty, which amounts to 10 percent of the population. “High inflation coupled with lagging household incomes has led to affordability pressures among many households,” it blandly asserts, though anecdotal evidence would markedly inflate that statistic. Our home city of Vancouver now ranks as the third least-affordable in the world. Remarkably, 175,000 households face a 50 percent mortgage payment increase. Young couples can no longer afford to buy a house and start a family. Fiscal irresponsibility is through the roof as federal moral accounting is through the floor.

Moreover, evidence has recently surfaced of Chinese Communist intervention in a number of parliamentary elections, influencing the results with candidate complicity. Despite legal requests from the Foreign Interference Commission, only redacted documents have been released by Trudeau’s Liberals and many have been withheld, prompting suspicion that the government has something unsavory to hide. 

As Terry Glavin writes in the National Post, “what is happening here is not so much about ‘foreign interference’ as it is about unseemly mutually beneficial collusions and collaborations between hostile foreign actors and Canada’s politicians at all levels of government, in both 'witting' and 'unwitting' arrangements.” Indeed, “Justin Trudeau has been a one-man Chinese influence operation for years.” If this is not treason, one is hard out to define what it is. Glavin mischievously concludes that “This is exactly why the prime minister is not, strictly speaking, a traitor. Treason by way of collaboration in foreign interference operations requires that the conduct be clandestine. With Trudeau, with only a few possible exceptions, it’s been in plain sight, brazen and in broad daylight.” The distinction would appear to be vanishingly small.

But the question of collusion with a foreign nation in the conduct of our elections, that is, the question of treason, continues to hover over parliament, which compounds the issue of a government driving the country into bankruptcy, a violation of national responsibility which some may also regard as treasonable rather than merely a species of incompetence.

Cardinal Wolsey’s panegyric reveals a man proud of his country. Canadians have very little to be proud of. Can one be proud of a country approaching Chapter 11, a once-affluent and privileged country now subsiding into third-world status, a country whose representatives and leaders flirt with the spectre of treason, a country that offers no prospect of a viable future for its younger generations?  

Canada is now on skid row and Canadians are searching for second passports in record numbers. Who can blame them?