My tone can be harsh, and my barbs can be sharp.
To read my material, one could reasonably assume that I was one miserable human being. Depending on the day and the topic, one could reasonably be correct in that assessment. And I completely get that.
By my account anyways, I’m kind of a good guy. If this was a movie, I’d want to be one of the fellers riding along with the loveable but crusty old sheriff in pursuit of Black Bart, that bastard who robbed the bank and shot up Miss Kitty’s saloon.
So why the tone?
It’s sometimes an uncomfortable reality that, when you’re fighting the “bad guys,” even the good guys have to employ the kind of tactics that the opposition use to advance their own causes, to use language that they might not appreciate.
If these were people who could be reached through rational, good-faith discussion, then sign me up, I could do that all day. But many of these types are well below that bar, are dismissive of rational argument, and couldn’t give a fig about what we may think.
To get their attention, you have to piss them off. And to piss them off, you have to get under their skin, expose their anger, flush them out of their smug certainty that being the loudest voice in the room is the one that ultimately prevails.
It’s tough to land a punch on people like this. And sometimes, with some of them, you have to take the elevator to the basement to even get within range of landing a punch.
So welcome to the basement.
Anger is a lot easier to sell than hope. Tearing things down is much simpler than building things up. Criticism is a low hanging fruit compared to creative productivity. Hatred stokes a fire better than anything else.
As objectively as I can do this, I can honestly say that Pierre Poilievre represents the very worst of Conservative party leadership, especially on a national level, that I’ve seen since I started following politics in the late 1960’s. And as a student of Canadian history, I can realistically say that this assessment extends all the way back to Confederation.
In Alberta, where spittin’ nickels and expressing hostility passes for a Thursday morning, this Poilievre guy is just the ticket, a bulldozer intent on levelling anything and everything in Ottawa, just because, well, it’s Ottawa. These are the people who took down people like Erin O’Toole and Jason Kenney because they weren’t hateful enough for their taste.
Ontario’s Conservative premier Doug Ford can’t stand the guy and won’t allow any of his PC government campaign for him when the feds go to the polls sometime later this year. When Ford would much rather sit down with Christie Freeland, or even Justin Trudeau, instead of Poilievre says something about the latter. And it says nothing good.
Robbed of his ace-in-the-hole, Poilievre without Trudeau is suddenly alone in a boat on a wide expanse of water with his only paddle lost overboard. All he has left to sustain himself is a bag of silly nursery rhymes that thoughtful Canadians dismissed long ago. His steady diet of razor blades has left him intolerant to any other kind of sustenance, and should he be rescued by a passing vessel, would surely be tossed overboard after darkness fell after the crew realized what it was that they plucked out of the water.
Say all you want about Justin Trudeau. Hate him with every fibre of your body. Lose your mind when you think of him, and wish all the fury of hell upon him if that’s what makes you click. Say your very worst. Sharpen your pitchfork.
And then look and listen to Poilievre.
I’m sorry, but you’d have to be having one of the worst days of your life to pick the second over the first. Look south of the border at what you get when people let anger be the determining factor behind their vote.
Trudeau’s gone now, or at least going, so the socks, the feminism, the wokeness, the cultural clothing, the prettiness, all of it gone. I think it’s the prettiness that male voters hate the most, not thinking that it’s right the prime minister looks better than the hag across from them at the breakfast table every morning.
No offence to wives and girlfriends. I was just on a bit of a roll there, and it’s true that men hate men that are prettier than they are. So I’d like to recognize the beauty of all the wives, mothers, and daughters of Renfrew County. I’ve used you to make a point, and I apologize. I understand completely that you’re not hags. I further understand that you sit at that same breakfast table and may well look across it and see Sasquatch Bob over there on the other side. It’s Bob I’m picking on here, not you.
Back to the basement.
So Pretty Boy is gone. What now?
A slogan doesn’t find you work or get you a job. You can’t eat a slogan. Slogans don’t look after your kids all day while you’re at work. They don’t pay for your dental and prescription drugs. No slogan anywhere ever did anything to mitigate the effects of climate change.
Nobody asks for a slogan at the food bank.
Slogans are for simpletons trying to dumb-down complicated things, and all things are complicated by having human beings involved. That’s what makes them complicated in the first place.
You don’t have to be brilliant to be angry. It’s easy, and replaces any effort that may be required to get to the bottom of things.
Having a bag full of nursery rhymes is not going to be the stuff that saves you when your adrift on the sea of public opinion. Unless the SS Dr. Seuss happens to be sailing by, in which case they’d save the nursery rhymes for themselves and toss Pierre to the sharks.
To say I don’t like this guy is, well, I don’t like this guy.
Poilievre’s never been anything other than a career politician, and now qualifies for one of the finest pensions in all of Canada. Yet he has argued for the rest of us to have to wait until age 67 to collect our Canada Pension. What a nice guy.
I’d have a really tough time articulating what I think might be his end-game, as in what does he want to achieve? He seems to be hell-bent on axing, and scrapping, and killing, and blowing things up. But what comes after that?
This man doesn’t get anywhere unless a lot of otherwise sound, responsible people give him their vote. But that’s the thing about people, right, sometimes they just lose their shit and do things for all the wrong reasons.
Our particular reason? Because he’s not the other guy.
But the other fellow is gone now. So now what?
Are we going to continue to go along with Poilievre? Like the Americans did with their guy? Are we willing to take that chance?
Give me a Conservative party without all the vitriol and you’ll likely have my vote. I started out as a Conservative, a Progressive Conservative. I remained that way until the hate-bags from out west chased me out, like I was worse than a Liberal. They haven’t come back from that posture since 2000, and that’s 25 years of bad temperament, resentment, bitterness, and angry decision-making. God, Guns, and Gallant.
When are we going to demand something better?
We’re Canadians, hopefully proud ones. We of all people, deserve the best democratic government in the world. Not a sullen pack of schoolyard hacks and bullies who would say anything to get what they want, no matter how irresponsible. People who want to pull all sorts of rugs out from under us.
And they’ll succeed because they’re counting on us to compromise ourselves in our hatred of Happy Socks. They’re more than happy to take advantage of us, to exploit our political franchise. Perfectly willing to use us for their own ends, whatever those may be other than to get that rich parliamentary pension for themselves.
Honestly, I wish I could recommend someone else for you. I don’t want to come across as a Liberal hack, because I’m not. And Jagmeet Singh lost some credibility when he couldn’t find the wherewithal to say anything about discriminatory laws in Quebec. With all due respect, when a guy wearing a turban can’t work up the courage to speak out against discrimination, then there’s something about politics that works against the common good. When someone who’s faced discrimination his entire life can’t speak up about that very thing, what does that say to the rest of us?
But all that said, there is absolutely no way ever that I would allow things to get to the point where I have to scrape the floor with myself and vote for someone like Pierre Poilievre.
I will vote, because staying home isn’t a responsible option. Staying home helps the bad guys, always. And yes, I live in a place where my vote doesn’t matter, and that may apply to you as well. But democracy is obviously imperfect. Nevertheless, we do what we must. So we vote.
We tend to be living in an age of anger, and that’s an absolute tragedy. My hope is that most of us, when we go to the polls, will try not to let that be the determining factor behind our vote.
No good decision is one that’s made in anger.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 