Rick Mercer. Don Cherry. Both brilliant masters of the craft of holding eyeballs. But they represented polar opposites. Mercer was the glib political voice of This Hour Has 22 Minutes. There was never any doubt in CBC’s upper reaches about whose side he was on in the culture war. Cherry was the unpredictable voice of Hockey Night in Canada. Who scared CBC/ Rogers to death.

Mercer was worshipped by the folks in the C suite.

Both these leaders, for better or worse, changed politics irrevocably. Trump’s audacity and pitiless style— thought to be political poison— have re-written the book on what works. Politics will never ever be the same down south. The same can be said for the style of Justin Trudeau. He defined a style of politics for Boomer Canada, long on Woke platitudes, short on concrete policy. It worked. Three times.

Canadians dozed when Trump made clear in his election campaign that the American economy is the greatest in the world. If you want to fish in that pond it’s not going to be free. That means tariffs. Now they’re shocked.

Nowhere is victimhood more bizarre— and dangerous— than the Hamas infatuation. “Terrorists, criminals, psychopaths, and fantasists from every part of the globe have grafted themselves on to the Palestinian cause,” writes Lee Smith in Tablet. “(It) gives hope to each of these groups—hope that their own nihilistic and murderous ambitions could win world favour as well. And they have.” 

The contradictions between Carney’s promises and reality will soon pile up. His Euro-based climate and social media policies will tell on a jaded public. His housing minister— who has promised to stabilize house prices— produced 170 percent jump in home prices while mayor of Vancouver. 
Which will give Danielle Smith all she needs to introduce plans, if not for separation, then for a new decentralized Canada.

For those Canadians in media who regularly make fun of Americans’ bravado and bluster there has been no awareness of how Canadians had been played like a cheap violin. Nice work if you can get it. Mark Carney got it, and now his Boomers can swallow deep.

Nice work if you can get it. Mark Carney got it, and Boomers swallowed deep.

Canadians who blissfully voted for Carney should realize that cozying up to Europe means doubling down on the climate extremes of carbon taxes and failed new tech that currently hobble the EU.  As Ireland has learned, in exchange for its money the EU wants you to also accept its politics.

it’s highly likely that this was the final Canadian election fought by the old rules where the have-nots (Atlantic Canada) the haves-but-outraged (Quebec) and the indolent (Ontario) control the math for making government. The money pump (Alberta, Saskatchewan) will seek to attract eastern BC and southern Manitoba to their crew. In the worst case Carney may be the nation’s final PM of ten provinces plus territories.

With scant days left in the campaign the problem for Conservatives is not that the Liberal base believes Carney and their heroes. They know he’s a fraud. But their #TDS will never let them admit to backing a lying, losing hype train. That would be like death to them. So they’re closing their eyes and hoping it will all be over soon and they can go back to Mr. Dressup.

The Liberal Party “Team Canada” propaganda war— featuring longtime U.S. emigrés Mike Myers and Neil Young ripping Trump’s tariffs on Canada-- is just the latest in a cultural war against America. That conflict has its roots in the estimated 50-100 thousand draft resisters who came to Canada and turned its politics leftward. It persists today.

Donald Trump has activated Canada’s affinity for authority and the expert class. While the rest of the world has awakened to the government’s deliberate manipulation of fear and white-coat reverence during Covid, Canada’s Boomers are still in awe of people like Carney. They still think the vaccines work. That The Science was behind it all. That Carney is a respected economist.

With so little uniting the regions of the country any longer, devolution on the UK model might provide a solution. While the idea is fraught with pitfalls it nonetheless remains preferable to talk of a breakup of the nation, which four more years of Liberals rule under Mark Carney and the same Trudeau characters will likely precipitate.

Rather than confront the China problem Canadians have decided to engage in a Mike Myers nostalgia fest for a nation long gone. A nation overly dominated by its smug, satisfied +60 demographic that sits back while younger Canadians cannot get into the economy. Reaching past the sunset media to those people is Pierre Poilievre’s task.

There is a compelling cultural story surrounding non-binary Carney. Sasha is just one of a dramatic spike of young middle- and upper-class persons born as women who are engaged in a campaign of mass psychosis over dysphoria. With or without the help of parents many are hacking themselves surgically or castrating themselves chemically. It’s a demographic disaster.

Why are 43 percent of 18-36 male CDNs telling pollsters they would accept U.S. citizenship if they were guaranteed full rights and financial protections? These young men appreciate Canada but they don't share the Boomer nostalgia for the Canada of 1967-2000 that is powering the current patriotic spasm. And yet they’re being passed over.

In this collision of solitudes Canadians are putting aside Trudeau’s hypocrisies or Mark Carney’s ‘oopsises’ on the campaign trial to link arms with Myers and Kumbaya themselves to death. Already Trudeau, spun up by the EU globalists last week, is sniffing the rank air and hinting he might perform as a “caretaker PM” till Carney learns not to extemporize in front of open mikes. 

Watering down the product with a lot of teams no one wants to watch nationally or globally seems counter productive. The move away from quality toward quantity serves only the gambling industry. But since when has Gary Bettman truly cared about quality of the product? So long as he gets to say, “We have a trade to announce” at the Draft, he’s a happy guy.” 

Who needs debate? The Liberals have settled on their enemy and it’s not Pierre Poilievre. It’s Donald Trump. They’re convinced themselves that targeting Beelzebub Trump, not addressing the tariff crisis, is all they need to expunge the Trudeau Follies and win a March election. In Canada they’re walking into a minefield looking for a place to picnic.

Poilievre has to stop pretending that a heavily indebted and structurally crumbling Canada can withstand the next four years of Trump bombast. He must have an intervention with the Canadian public to bring them to the bracing reality they face. Only when they know which side is up, away from Trudeau, will they start to climb out of this mess.

Trump has asked a question that petrifies the Canadian establishment. Would Canadians rather join the powerful U.S. and abandon a rickety Canadian union? Which future holds the greater attraction, being a state/ partner of America or continuing to go it alone in a world of ambitious nations like China, Russia and India? The polling is shocking.