That Justin Transition

and the shameless urban voter

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Young Castro (I cite his politics, obviously, not his parentage) has been caught once again with his pants down, this time by CSIS. But don't worry. A special rapporteur, another apparatchik like Commissar Rouleau, will look into it and recommend new britches that are as easily pulled up as pulled down. Meanwhile, the RCMP will investigate the real problem, disloyalty at CSIS, which no longer knows what to do with embarrassing files.  

Shame and embarrassment, as Augustine observed, are a sure sign of disorder and an invitation to get sorted out. The other option, of course, is to become shameless, like our prime minister. Permit me to paraphrase the latter:

Foreign interference in a federal election? Nothing to see here. The CCP was only helping out, in neighbourly fashion, our own Natural Governing Party.

Secret treaties with the World Economic Forum? The future is global, friend. You should be glad that your post-national government already lives in the future.

Super-secret treaties with big pharma? Just sign that NDA and you can have a peek. Welcome to the world of public-private partnerships.

Illegal data collection and dishonest data suppression during the pandemic? Relax; everyone does it. Besides, when we've finished Sinicizing the place it won't be illegal, at least not for those with party connections.

Emergencies Act abuse? Come on! What are the police for, if not to keep the party in power? Anyway, like big pharma, they needed the practice. When you're making a Justin transition there's bound to be turbulence. Gotta keep the boys in shape.

The behaviour of this man, and of his party, is not merely irresponsible. It is criminal in character and treasonous in kind. It makes a mockery of Canada's fundamental law and openly repudiates the principles on which the country was built. It regards the nation-state as such, the country itself, as an anachronism. The Justin Transition is not a transition from nasty fossil fuels to beautiful green energy. (Ask the Chinese about that.) It's a transition from democracy to oligarchy.

Yes, the prime minister is shameless. But so are we. We put him into power. We've been keeping him in power. It's not a few yuan here, a little strong-arming there, and a couple of rented busses that have kept him in power. It's not even the hopelessly compromised NDP. It's the urban voter in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal. The urban voter has kept him in power.

Now, the intrepid Terry Glavin has shown that Canada's China problem is very much larger than most people would like to think. (Thank God there are still a few journalists unafraid to do that sort of work, which is exhausting and dangerous.) But, at the end of the day, it's not really a People's Republic of China problem we're facing, is it? Rather, it's a supine people of Canada problem. We have become so morally diminished, and in consequence so politically lethargic, that we stand for nothing and can abide almost anything.

In the United Kingdom, The Telegraph has been showing Brits the scope of their own problem. Not by intrepid reporting—which the British media, like the Canadian, abandoned years ago for government subsidies and palatable lies—but because Isabelle Oakeshott handed it the Hancock files. (Funny how we don't hear much about that in the Canadian press. You'd think Hancock was a Dutch farmer!) But there, too, only the impossibly naïve could suppose that the egotistical, immorally reckless Mr Hancock and his ilk are the real problem.

The real problem there, as here, is that people have grown to prefer lies to truth. The urban voter doesn't much care about truth. At all events, he won't bestir himself to discover it, if the discovery threatens to be at all uncomfortable. Which is why he is such a mark. Tell him something is necessary for his safety, or even for his convenience, and he'll be the first to queue up for it. As if there were no truth but what the party says is truth, nor anything just but what the party says is just.

The urban voter, I repeat, is a mark. What is truthful about the transition from fair elections to foul? What is just about the "just transition" from self-sufficiency to surveillance capitalism? Or from communities of our own design to fifteen-minute cities of someone else's design? Fifteen minutes indeed! That's how long the principle of subsidiarity will last once people are penned up in their "smart" new kennels, where their every move will be monitored.

Did the urban voter learn nothing from the last three years? He was told to follow the Science, which turned out to be dangerous, unscientific nonsense, serving only to advance chaos and, with it, the new world order of authoritarian technocrats. Climate “science” is no different. Yet he presses on blindly, undeterred by the evidence of his own folly or by an ever-more-brazen ruling class.  

Jesus told us that we would know the truth and the truth would set us free. J. S. Mill, who was still listening to the Serpent, told us that if we were free we would know our own truth. There's a world of difference there, in that clever reordering that puts freedom before truth, as Bill Gairdner (sans reference to the Serpent) observed in The Trouble with Democracy. And the difference is this: in the one world you get both and in the other you get neither. For those who fancy themselves free to invent the truth are sure to become the subjects and playthings of those more inventive than they. More inventive, or in young Castro's case, more determined and more shameless.

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