When Governments Come Unstuck From Their People
It’s certainly true that governments in Canada are elected to govern. Once the voting is over, they have no legal requirement to pay attention to public opinion - or even to honour their election promises.
But we are allowed to notice.
I’ve already written about how Liberal attempts to control Canadians’ online speech are at sharp odds with the 74 percent of us who believe people “should be able to say what they think even if it offends some people”. For details on those attempts, see:
Bill C-36 - hate propaganda, hate crimes and hate speech (2021)
Bill C-11 - Online Streaming Act (2023)
Bill C-63 - Online Harms Act (2024)
Proposed Safe Social Media legislation
And that’s not all. Consider the broad unpopularity of:
Carbon tax
Bail reform
Drug decriminalization and “safe supply” programs
Weak policing of demonstrations supporting Hamas, antisemitic incidents, intimidation, and encampments
And who can forget immigration?
While the worst elements of Canada’s irrational immigration policy are at least temporarily on hold, I haven’t been able to forget them. In general, there was one thing I could never understand about the self-destructive immigration policies pushed not just here, but by many other wealthy Western governments: Why do it?
Why knowingly anger your own citizens by suppressing their ability to discuss real things that are in right front of their eyes?
Why knowingly harm your own citizens by tolerating “cultural” crimes like rape gangs?
Why knowingly cripple your economy by accepting far more asylum claimants than your systems can handle?
Why knowingly harm and marginalize existing populations (like Jews) by tolerating imported racism and violence?
Why knowingly reverse decades of women’s rights efforts by importing hordes of people who actively resist?
Governments must have known all this would happen. They realized it wasn’t in the best interests of most of their citizens. So why did they do it?
A couple of years ago, I wrote about the government’s own official claim that immigration was “critical to Canada’s economic growth”. I also showed how Canada’s distinctive lack of economic growth over the past immigration-heavy decade wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement for the policy.
Some claim that it’s really all about social/political manipulation, with the idea being that most immigrants will eventually skew left and vote Liberal. I wouldn’t dismiss such a possibility out of hand, but it would represent a high-risk, high-stakes gamble. And I wouldn’t be comfortable signing on without seeing some significant supporting evidence.
Of course, ten years of government policies weren’t all driven by just one thing.
Post secondary institutions no doubt lobbied for easier access to large and profitable pools of foreign students.
Elite policy insiders no doubt felt pressure to conform with the ideology that was popular among their international peers.
Governments no doubt found it difficult to reconfigure the immigration-related bureaucracy even after the consequences became obvious.
Perhaps there might be something to learn from someone’s recent post describing a trip to the UK:
“In my week in England, every single person that I met who was acting in a low-wage, employee/service capacity (waiters, hotel staff, shop workers, airport staff, etc.) was a South Asian immigrant, all with a weak command of English or, at best, a first-generation South Asian immigrant.”
The author emphasized that in the stretch of just one or two generations the entire UK working class was replaced by imported labor. The traditional lower class who served their “betters” for centuries and had now moved up the economic ladder, seem to have largely lost interest in dead-end service jobs. It was either import replacements or find a way to get by without a service sector.
I’m not sure how applicable all that is to Canada. Our employment economy isn’t identical to England’s. But our countries’ governing classes do seem to share a common dose of self interest and a noticeable lack of self awareness.
What has to happen to reestablish a healthy public-to-government connection?
Is Government Policy Making You Poorer?
I’m sure that by this point, most of you have read about Canada’s dismal per capita gross domestic product (GDP) - especially in comparison with what’s happening in the U.S. Just to get all of us up to steam, the Canadian version of that key economic measure has been largely stagnant over the past decade, while things have been firing on all cylinders d…
Canada's Federal Government Generates Disinformation at Scale
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