As much as I would rather stay silent on the confusing developments gripping our country, I cannot. As someone who sought and will again seek to represent Nickel Belt in Ottawa, it falls to me to try to speak reason to madness.
I don’t have all the information. I am dealing with conflicting sources, fatigue and social complexities, but I’m well served in this by my full-time occupation.
Our country is sick. Let’s start with a medical analogy and try to stick with it. Medicine is amoral, dispassionate. We identify the cause of a disease without moral outrage at a weak kidney or a perforated bowel. We don’t examine blood-starved cardiac cells for confederate flags.
And so we must learn to look at the current illness wracking our body politic. Our fellow Canadians who have different appearances, different choices, different fears and challenges, different ways of looking and thinking about life and different tolerance of different risks are not the problem, they are not the source of all social evil. They are differentiated cells in a body that has become divided against itself because of poor decisions by our central governing apparatus.
If we fail to look after our body, it gets sick. The smooth passage of oxygenated and nutrient-rich blood, the clearance of waste, and all the systems which rely on this become impeded. If left unchecked, the body becomes weaker and weaker until the inevitable.
The well-being of our body politic is first and foremost the responsibility of Ottawa. The provinces may hold some areas of independent jurisdiction, but the ability of Ottawa to influence media narratives, to disburse health-care funding, to define the tone in our national discourse puts Trudeau and his Liberals in the central role in maintaining the political and social health of this nation.
Although by my recollection Trudeau did not start out as the grand divider (his election campaign of 2015 struck a rather different tone from the last one,) he has, since his 2019 downgrade to minority government, become increasingly in thrall to divisive scapegoat politics.
It started with the firearms ban, which his own consultations concluded would be divisive and have no impact on public safety (as per documents sent to me by MP Marc Serré), and it continues with the ever-harsher federal vaccine mandates he imposed on federal employees, air and rail travellers and those working in the trucking industry, and accusing those who dissent from him of the unholy trinity of modern polite society: racism, misogyny and Trumpism.
It has allowed him to retain and consolidate power by creating ever more strident fear in one substantial minority of the populace towards a somewhat less substantial minority of the populace. It makes the country harder to govern, and degrades the overall quality of our political discourse, but it has so far worked for him.
Although many were fed up with him when we went to the polls in September, he managed to create enough misplaced fear in enough of the electorate that enough “nice” people preferred to accept the lacklustre leader they believed would keep them “safe” from the “nasty” people over a sensible alternative that refused to define their policies by the divisive fear that Trudeau had fostered.
Good for him, he won the election with the smallest proportion of votes in Canadian history. The Liberals are exceptional at playing this game with ruthless determination and it frustrates us well-meaning Conservatives to no end.
So they won the election. And this is the country they get to govern, the country they weakened in its unitary resolve in order to make it possible for them to remain in control of it. A country divided against itself with ever-increasing fervour, to the point that the anger of citizens is beyond the ability of public safety authorities to control.
It is natural to want to blame the symptoms of disorder for the suffering they engender. While understandable, doing so does a disservice to fruitful political discourse, as demonstrations of this scale and intensity don’t occur in a vacuum. Understand that doing so is akin to demonizing the clot that blocks an artery after years of well-informed self-abuse.
In order to have a sensible dialogue on the chaos and anger gripping our nation, we need to understand the cause. It is not the truckers, it is not social media, it is not the Americans or Trump or Joe Rogan or tinfoil hat people.
The cause has been brewing since Trudeau saw division as the path to his much-desired majority, and took that ugly road without care for the consequences for our nation, our communities and our families.
The protests currently generating so much controversy are a symptom of poor government, end of story. The Liberals placed winning the election over the health of the country, and they have received their deserving prize: a sick, dysfunctional country over which to reign. Now that they realize this, they don’t even have the decency to take responsibility for the mess they created. They knew what they were doing, and they did it anyway, and we’re all paying the price. If you want to be angry, be angry at that.
Charles Humphrey
Greater Sudbury