You Took the Words Right Out of His Mouth

Canada, he can talk all night, but that ain't getting us nowhere. He told you everything that he possibly can. There's nothing left inside of here. Apologies to the recently departed Meat Loaf, but there's a point I needed to make in response to the latest tone-deaf din coming from the bored pundits in our northern fourth estate...

. . .

So Susan Delacourt was bored this weekend, and decided to pen a response column analyzing those curious numbers from the latest Nanos poll. In it she riffs on the Malarkey Malaka's meme that the Trudeau Liberals are offering "more of the same," and his pontificating that voters are tired of hearing about pandemic supports and need a break in the rhythm or they're going to start looking for alternatives.

Then she goes on to analyze how scripted and stilted political communications have become over the years, identifying media as one of the factors in that shift — but never actually laying blame upon her own industry, only on the Liberals themselves (and Trudeau in particular) for failing to adapt.

Journalists hate the robotic sloganeering, but that’s beside the point. Stephen Harper once said that if the media is rolling its eyes at a repeated phrase — like “Canada’s new government,” in his case — that’s about the time the words are only starting to penetrate the public consciousness.

Maybe, but the price may be authenticity. The more that politicians reach into their bags of communications tricks to “reinforce the message,” as they say, the less they seem like real people. If you were talking to a colleague who kept repeating the same line over and over again in one conversation, you’d soon be checking for a hidden camera or signs of day drinking.

All that scripting, frankly, also makes politicians look ill at ease. Trudeau always sounds vaguely relieved to get to the end of each sentence when he’s in message mode, like he’s ticking off a to-do list of things to say. 

Or maybe he's vaguely relieved to get the hell away from the media vultures who pounce on everything he says (or doesn't say), who bury good news or positive developments in favour of hyperventilating about supposed "controversies" or "scandals" that contribute to drama and ratings, and who fail to do their jobs of substantively informing the public about basic civics, and then chalk it up to a "comms failure" on the part of the government when voters fall for bullshit that lays the blame upon the wrong people when issues or hangups come about.

Maybe he feels like he's got nothing more to say, because there's nothing he can do that won't be spun into a misleading or "torqued" headline by the likes of Robert Fife and his crew of hacks and wannabe muckrakers. Maybe he's well aware that he keeps having to repeat the same "tired" message about vaccinations because there's still a significant chunk of the population that refuses to do it.

The snow is really piling up outside, as Meat Loaf once said. But that didn't stop the next wave of dumbass muthatruckas from steamrolling their way to the nation's capital to proudly proclaim their right to be stupid, while blaming Trudeau for why that supposed "right" isn't being "respected." And in doing so, to endanger everyone else — not just by prolonging the pandemic (that everyone claims to be so tired of), but by making white-supremacist grifters rich in the process. As trucking-industry insider, James Menzies (no relation to Rebel Media gadfly David or CRTC flack Peter), reports:

One disturbing trend is the amount of money being thrown at recent attempts to bring commerce to a halt. One initiative raised more than $900,000 via GoFundMe in less than a week.

This is fairly significant, and startling, when you consider where that money is going. The fundraising initiative was started by Tamara Lich, who has a history of association with radical groups, including the recently formed federal separatist Maverick Party in Alberta. Yes, by this weekend, there is likely to be about $1 million in the hands of someone affiliated with a party that wants to break up Canada.

 

She was also affiliated with the Yellow Vest movement, which was linked to death threats against our Prime Minister. Is that what we’ve become, Canada? To her credit, Lich attempted to distance her local chapter from those making the death threats. But think about that for a second…she was affiliated with an organization that threatened to kill our Prime Minister — and now has nearly $1 million of your money to distribute as she sees fit.

Yet instead of sounding the alarm, we have the "mainstream" Conservative party registering their support for such seditious antics — and their bogus arguments getting shamefully bothsided, even legitimized, by Delacourt's colleagues in the "mainstream" media, who run such claims without proper fact-checking.

Her own paper even ran a longread this morning about the "increasingly lonely" road of the stubbornly unvaccinated, profiling one such tough guy in sympathetic terms, in a lamentable and well-worn form of journalistic anthropological excursion into "flyover country" known as the Cletus safari.

These stories were a sort of pornography. They existed less as a way of explaining the country to their audience than as a way for media outlets to gratify themselves, or perhaps to atone for the perceived sin of overlooking Trump supporters the year before. Some profiles offered insight; many more did not. But together, in their sheer bulk, they illuminated a larger story: the longstanding media habit of indexing the American political narrative to the sanctified yearnings of a narrow slice of white voter. 

And the Canadian equivalent is no different. It's not the first time they've been on such excursions, normalizing the Cletus perspective as the default and couching their supposed grievances in neutral or even sympathetic terms. Every damn time, it's been these low-info morons — the "forgotten man," the "silent majority" (how can they be silent if they never shut up?) — getting their undeserved 15 minutes of fame through a televised sob story about their hard-done plight. At no point ever is any attention given to the fact that their solution to said gripes is always the execution of Justin Trudeau.

 

 

It's almost like they don't actually care. Remember the yellow pests, in 2019? They were just long-suffering energy workers put upon by the oppressive "anti-western prejudice" of the prime minister's "draconian" environmental policies. Or the QAnon fanatic who plowed his truck full of weapons into Rideau Hall? He was just a "friendly sausage maker" who'd had his business ruined by the prime minister's "draconian" COVID policies. 

 

Same with the gravel-throwers during the campaign. To hear the pundits tell it, they were practically hired crisis actors strategically positioned to generate sympathy votes for Trudeau's straining reelection campaign.

So it's no surprise then if Trudeau has become stilted and maybe even a little tongue-tied, when faced with the firing squad of a press gallery that has boxed him into this situation with their own framing — and refuses to accept responsibility for it. That they have had a role to play in turning public opinion against him should therefore come as no surprise either.

Which brings me to Meat Loaf. The 1970s rock icon died this week at the age of 74, most likely of heart failure and, this part is important, after contracting COVID (ironically, a disease itself that came from a bat out of hell). To his very last, he remained steadfast in his opposition to common sense regulations.

Speaking to The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in August last year, he told the interviewer “I hug people in the middle of COVID,” and said: “I understood stopping life for a little while, but they cannot continue to stop life because of politics. And right now they’re stopping because of politics.”

The singer went on to complain about being asked to wear a mask on a plane, stating that he didn’t believe paper masks were as good at N95s at stopping the coronavirus from spreading. “We had to go on the airplane with the paper masks and then on the way back, we got a Nazi: ‘Get your mask on now!’ They’re power-mad now,” he told the paper.

After the interviewer replied “Oh, God. We’re being controlled by everybody,” the singer responded ominously: “Yeah, I know. But not me. If I die, I die, but I’m not going to be controlled.”

. . .

NB: Miss Fuddle Duddle wrote a song parody before she started blogging, about the strained relationship between the Ontario PCs and their federal counterparts in the 2019 Canadian federal election — from the perspective of dopey failing loser Andrew Scheer, whose campaign tanked in Ontario thanks in large part to the meaty premier's unpopularity. I called it, "I Would Do Anything for Doug (But I Won't Do That)." Someday I'm going to have to release an album of all these. But I digress.

. . .

Anyway... Mr. Loaf is the kind of guy who a Justin Trudeau, or a Joe Biden for that matter, simply cannot reach, but nevertheless has to keep trying. Everyone else gets sick of hearing it, because they've already done their part. But it's incumbent upon the incumbent to keep it up anyway. If that, of all things, ends up frustrating the majority public so much that they start withholding or switching their votes, that's unfortunate — but people are not rational actors. Antivaxers (who are the catalyst for mandates and restrictions) are not, and neither are voters who take out their frustrations with antivaxers upon the political leaders who have run out of options for getting everyone vaxed.

The upside for Trudeau is that it's unlikely this slump is permanent and there is time for him to turn this around. I've written before about how midwinters are often bleak for the Liberals, for whatever reason, and this one is no different. It's possible things will start to shift over the coming months, as it becomes clear the opposition aren't offering anything worthwhile either, while the Liberals are still early in this mandate and have plenty yet to do. Remember, polls are only a temperature check. The snow (and shit) is really piling up outside, but there's plenty of time for things to brighten up.

 

If anything, it's possible that people are "parking their votes" with the NDP for the interim as a signal to the Liberals not to get spooked by Skippy's austerity rhetoric, and to lean into continuing, even strengthening social supports. They don't actually want to vote for the NDP. They want the Liberals to mimic them rather than chase whatever phantom Joe Manchins may or may not exist on their right flank. Trudeau has "signalled" that's what he's going to do, but the message has gotten lost in the mix. My guess is, the upcoming budget will make it crystal-clear.

The only thing I can take away from this analysis is that maybe the prizefighter should be a little more punchy in his remarks to the hostile media and a public that's feeling ennui. Antivaxers don't represent all Canadians, not by a long shot. Heck, they don't even represent the majority of truckers. He's got to demonstrate loud and clear that there is a light at the end of the tunnel — and one that doesn't involve the healthcare system looking like it's been hit by a Mack truck.

We're getting there... but it depends on who you ask.

That small percentage of the population is living in an alternate reality. And something like half the country is feeling pessimistic largely because of that small percentage of the population. But eventually, something has got to give. All that Justin Trudeau can do is to insist that people do the right thing.

Other matters, like inflation and so forth, are out of his hands to address and will adjust based on external factors. He may well be playing the long game by letting Skippy have the stage. It is true that Liberal comms have often been lacklustre, almost as a trademark by now, so now more than ever is time to mix things up. But it's not solely on their shoulders. The best thing to do to strengthen the economy is to end the pandemic — and the best way to do that is to get your damn shots.

At the end of the day, remember this: Canada is a majority progressive country, its representation in government skewed by a lopsided political system that is more difficult to fix than simplistic NDP talking points would have you believe. The conservatives really only have support from about, or possibly even less than, one-third of the electorate. Which means that anywhere from sixty-seven to seventy percent of Canadians would prefer a Trudeau style of leadership to anything the cons offer.

In other words... two out of three ain't bad.