By Mary Ellen Kirby
Local Journalism Initiative
It is the morning after the night before and I have the mother of all hangovers. No, I haven’t been drinking. It’s just that I stayed up far too late, watching the federal election coverage. I hoped, prayed and voted for a different outcome, but alas – here we are with the results I dreaded but pretty much expected.
In the sober light of day, I see a number of ironies at play, not the least of which is the fact that in their fervour to “oppose” Donald Trump, Liberal voters just handed him exactly what he wanted, on a big red and white platter. Since his inauguration in January, Trump has on several occasions opined that he much preferred to deal with a Liberal government and complained that, “Stupidly, that conservative guy is no friend of mine…he’s not a MAGA guy…he doesn’t say nice things about me.” Translation: he was banking on more easily obtaining favourable trade concessions from the libs than the cons. ‘Annexing’ Canada would almost certainly guarantee a solid block of permanently Democratic voters, so I have a hard time believing a Republican president would ever float that as a serious proposal; I think we just got massively pranked by the mean boy next door.
For all the Liberal party braying about the evils of ‘American-style politics’ this is exactly what they have unleashed. Against all sense or logic, the central issue in this campaign was the Canadian approval rating of DJT, the leader of a foreign nation…as if it even mattered. It was a very cunning bait and switch con job executed with Machiavellian precision by the Liberals. If they had allowed voters’ attention to focus on their dismal decade-long record of runaway debt, waste and scandal, they undoubtedly would have joined the NDP on the sidelines. The NDP paid dearly last night for holding Canadians hostage to the dysfunctional Trudeau government: they have now lost official party status and shrunk to a measly seven seats. The Bloc Quebecois’ involuntary weight loss program cost them 10 of their 33 seats, so we now have a defacto two-party system in place…just like the Americans. We also have an increasingly polarized and divided electorate…just like the Americans. We saw an election campaign that fixated on leaders instead of examining party platforms. In other words, our election was based on the cult of personality…just like the Americans. Mark Carney chose to publicly announce his bid for the Liberal leadership on an American T.V. talk show, was endorsed more than once by Trump and hired a wealthy American actor to film a cringey hockey rink campaign ad. I think all the pseudo-patriotic railing against 51st statehood is a day late and an American dollar short: it looks and feels to me like we are already there.
And then there is the très grande irony of the Quebec vote. If I was the leader of either the CAQ or the PQ, I would be thinking long and hard before advocating again for separation. Apparently, when the chips are down, a majority of Quebecers prefer the safety of the flawed federal system. Even the undeniable fact that Mark Carney’s French language skills are sub-par, to put it politely, did not deter the loss of a third of the Bloc’s seats. So much for Quebec’s insistence that a bilingual prime minister is non-negotiable. So much for the pipe dream of Quebec independence, too. The illusion that Quebec was ready, willing and able to stand alone as its own nation died last night. It now appears to me that fifty years of separatist threats have been nothing more than an elaborate ruse to extort money and privilege from Ottawa. How can anyone take Bloc voters – and by extension, Quebec – seriously when, at the first sign of rough waters, they abandon ship?
While the Eastern separatist tiger has been exposed as toothless, the Western one is awake and roaring in the aftermath of last night’s disastrous election results. In less than 24 hours, Alberta is well on its way to collecting the large number of signatures required to trigger a referendum on secession from Canada. Theirs is no empty threat. If Alberta leaves confederation, Saskatchewan may not take long to follow them. In the early days of the election campaign, both premiers warned eastern voters that electing another Liberal government would trigger dire consequences for Canada. Is it possible that we may have just voted in our final Canadian election? The distressing paradox here is that by conjuring up a bogus crisis and then selling himself as the only one competent enough to manage it, Mark Carney may have just set in motion the real existential threat to our country. Like it or not, the western oil & gas industry is the economic engine of this country and without it, Canada shudders to a standstill. If that happens, we will no longer be strong…or free. The 2040 dystopian hellscape posited in the Policy Horizons Report commissioned by the prime minister’s Privy Council Office may read like the script for a bad movie, but western separation could bring it to our doorsteps sooner than later. In order to invest and prosper, to create jobs, to build anything of lasting value, businesses need stability. A country in constitutional crisis cannot provide that stability. A weak, divided, destabilized country ultimately becomes vulnerable to predatory takeover. As revealed by the exhaustive work of Canadian investigative journalist, Sam Cooper, the Chinese Communist Party and its malevolent operatives are already fully functional inside our borders, and the new PM favours even closer ties with China. I can’t imagine a scenario where the US blithely ignores China setting up shop along its Northern frontier. I am fiercely Canadian always, even if not terribly proud at the moment. But if it comes down to choosing between becoming the 51st American state or the 24th Chinese province, I’ll take my chances with the Yanks, thanks.
I have been looking at Abacus polling data, trying to decipher what happened last night. I am ashamed to say that, according to those polls, my generation is responsible for this train wreck. For voters over 60, the central issue in this election was Donald Trump. Why? They voted to…do what exactly? Teach him a lesson? Express their personal distaste for him? While he insists that heads of state kowtow to gain his favour and show “respect”, the POTUS doesn’t care, not even a little bit, how the Canadian electorate feels about him. We are nothing more than a single mosquito trying to penetrate the iron-thick hide of a rhinoceros. Did we seriously think that our ‘elbows up’ nonsense would dissuade him from playing tariff whack-a-mole whenever he got the urge? The undeniable irony is that our election results have simply reinforced his enormously over-inflated ego. He is already strutting and preening, congratulating himself for being able to influence the outcome of a foreign election. Look, I get that Trump is boorish and bombastic; that he walks in hobnailed boots all over anything or anyone in his way. He baits people, using jibes and insults to score points in a game where he calls the plays, writes the rules and gets to decide the winners and losers; it’s just bonkers. But what is even more bonkers is that we allowed him to goad us into playing his stupid game. That was evidenced by a short interview I saw last evening: a journalist asked a sweet, little silver-haired granny about her voting preference as she left her polling station in Toronto. ”Oh Liberal, of course!” she replied with a big smile. “And why is that?” inquired the journalist. “Well, to stop Trump”, she exclaimed. “He is such an awful person…he shouldn’t even be the president of the United States!” I was left shaking my head in utter disbelief. Maybe we need to require more than proof of Canadian identity at the voting booth; maybe we also need to require proof of a reasonable understanding of international boundaries and how our parliamentary system functions.
So, I am in mourning today. I don’t grieve because my “guy” or my “side’ lost, that would be childish, and I am too old for that. I grieve because we allowed the loudmouth narcissist next door to steal our desperately needed chance for a reset. I grieve for my grandchildren’s generation who are watching the opportunities and living standards that my generation took for granted move further and further beyond their reach. I grieve because I don’t believe that the crew who caused the problems are capable of fixing them. And as late as December of 2024, an overwhelming majority of Canadians agreed with that assessment. How did just a few short weeks and some off-hand insults cause such a massive attack of collective amnesia? I grieve because we have recklessly exchanged our grandchildren’s future for a cheap and hollow ‘victory’ against orange-man-bad. I grieve because we were persuaded to vote with our elbows instead of our heads.
Does anyone remember the old-fashioned childhood game of shadow puppets? You know, the one where a favourite uncle or your dad or grandpa turned out the lights; then using just their hands in different positions in front of a flashlight‘s beam, they projected big scary shadow creatures onto a white wall or sheet while the littlest kids squealed and cowered in delicious fear. Fun times! I feel as though this is where we are as a country. The lights were turned off in January. All our attention was directed to the big threatening monster projected onto the screens of our imaginations. I don’t know how long it will take for the lights to come back on. And I don’t know when it will begin to dawn on us that the monster we should be afraid of is not the shadow, but the hands. What I do know is, that by then it will be too late.