Note: I wrote this a while ago and never posted it. I think it's still relevant so I'm posting it now even though the events described in the post occurred some time ago. I have started writing again so new posts coming.
I’ve wanted to write something but have been unable to conjure up the words to describe the hell that we now live in. The list of calamities that continue to befall us is long: a pandemic (of denial), unsuppressed transmission of various airborne viruses, the collapse of public health, a genocide, an illegal war waged by the US and Israel against Iran that the western world tacitly supports, an oil shock that has yet to fully hit the west but which is fully in view, the strong likelihood of a hot and smoky summer.
The Globe and Mail is doing its utmost to convince people that nothing matters anymore. At the start of the illegal war on Iran, the paper published an editorial about how the US attack against Iran was illegal but shouldn’t have been. The problem, per Baron Thomson, was with international law, which needs to be changed because Iran is somehow uniquely evil unlike states that condone genocide like Canada.
After Avi Lewis won the NDP leadership race, the Globe appeared determined to destroy any semblance of intellectual rigour through their efforts to Corbynize Lewis. Despite Lewis being famously Jewish, the Globe ran an op-ed claiming that the NDP has an antisemitism problem. The screed itself is antisemitic as it seems to tie being pro-Jewish with being pro-genocide.
I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise then that the least ideological party on earth, the Liberal Party of Canada, has decided to lean into this void by welcoming all Conservative party floor crossers and diluting what little meaning “being a Liberal” had to begin with. The news that Marilyn Gladu – famously a far-right, homophobic, anti-choice, COVID conspiracist and antivaxxer – is now a member of the Liberal Party of Canada is both a shock and fits entirely within our corrupt meaningless present.
The Liberal Party of Canada appears to be conducting a soft, parliamentary coup (what a Canadian way to coup). It doesn’t matter how you voted. Carney will sweet talk the elected representative of the most right-wing and Conservative of ridings into joining his ever more right-wing party.
The next step involves barely bothering to hold elections. We can all be members of the Liberal Party of Canada, whether we want to or not. The LPC will be the Canadian CCP except at least the Chinese Communists believe in something. The LPC believe in nothing but the power to continue to strip the country for parts and sell them off to the lowest bidder.
The future for ordinary Canadians is continued dispossession and immiseration. Carney is spending a lot more on the military. Perhaps he is goal is to become an Anglo-Canadian El Duce except Carneybarely has a train system to run. The money for this is being and will be taken from social programs and services. At a time when the system works only for the rich and the old (an overlapping demographic), the young and the middle-aged (read millennials and younger) have nothing to look forward to.