So Long, Canada. We Hardly Knew You

 

Big Pink

The world is mad. It has always been mad, but something snapped around 2020.

Canadians are in terminal Trump Derangement. They are prepared to burn down the country out of spite.

Trump and the USA of course have every sovereign right to impose tariffs at their border. This is not a hostile act. 

Trump is not threatening to annex Canada. That is paranoid fantasy.

It is insane for Canada to impose retaliatory tariffs. We cannot win a trade war with the USA. The sane course is to negotiate 100% free trade instead. But no Canadian politician dares say this. Instead, we will just stand there and pour gasoline all over ourselves, then light a match.

Unless things change dramatically in three weeks, Canada is about to re-elect the Liberals under Carney; with a majority government. 

Right-wing commentators are as delusional as everyone else, insisting that the polls must be wrong.

With the Liberals’ environmentalist agenda blocking the development and transport of Alberta’s energy resources, Alberta is then planning to hold a referendum on secession. 

It is likely to pass, with the Liberals in power. But Easterners all still insist on voting Liberal.

If Alberta separates, Saskatchewan is likely to follow. BC will probably need to go too.

If this happens, Eastern Canada will be left an impoverished rump. 

Trump gets his best case scenario: he can admit the resource-rich West to statehood, and get full access to their resources. He need not let in all those left-leaning voters in the East.

Congratulations, Canada. Darwin would be proud.

The Real Schoolyard Bullies

 

Childhood's end: Saint John, NB, March, 2025

A couple of days ago, someone set fire to our local playground. It was a beautiful playground, including a water park, in one of the poorer parts of town. Now it will be closed at least for months, if the city can afford to reconstruct, just as the summer is about to begin.

Why would somebody do this?

The answer is only too obvious; but it is one we do not want to accept.

I become increasingly convinced that there is a war against children. Many people hate children. They increasingly feel they have license to act on their desires.

Why do people hate children? Primarily, perhaps, because a child is a reminder of one’s own mortality. One day you will be gone, and they will inherit the earth. An intolerable thought to a true narcissist.

Also perhaps because the evil will resent innocence. It is an unpleasant reminder of what they have themselves lost.

Also perhaps because children, by being conceived, complicate the animal enjoyment of unrestricted sex. Then, for a moment’s pleasure, you have to support them for eighteen or twenty-four years.

Surely, you might object, everyone instinctively loves children?

Maternal instinct often does its work. But demonstrably not in many cases. Apparently one in four women alive in the USA today has had at least one abortion. Infanticide was a common practice throughout the ancient world, among the Romans, the Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Canaanites; until quite recently in the Far East.  Judaism and Christianity stood apart in prohibiting the practice. 

It seems that once unrestricted abortion was again okay, the ancient floodgates opened. Encouraged, no doubt, by the “population bomb” notion that there were already too many people in the world.  

No-fault divorce and almost automatically giving custody to the mother pretends to take the children’s interests into account, but only a little research proves it is disastrous to children. If it is not done from malice, it is certainly at least done because we do not care. 

We knew from the kibbutz experience in Israel well before daycare became standard practice and publicly funded, that raising children in daycare was harmful. At best, we did not care.

While pretending to be “helping” or “reconciling with” First Nations, we are now systematically sacrificing untold numbers of aboriginal children by closing down the residential schools, shutting down the adoption option, shutting down the orphanages. Missing and murdered aboriginal women? Teens on reservations forming suicide pacts? Rampant fetal alcohol syndrome? Gee, I wonder why? Yet we do everything possible to avoid addressing the obvious cause, aboriginal family life. We do everything possible to avoid helping them. If a teenaged aboriginal girl escapes her abusive family and makes it to the city streets, she is arrested by the authorities, assigned the blame, and forced back home. 

Minimum wage laws and child labour laws seem calculated to trap the young in abusive situations, denying them the right to make a living. 

For that matter, the demands for unnecessary academic qualifications for almost any paying occupation are abusive to the young. 

Heck, the modern school and college is abusive to the young. They are ordered around like cattle, their time wasted on things of no value to them, and the teacher holds dictatorial powers. It is always up to the student to learn, not to the teacher to teach.

For a while—it now seems long ago--we pretended to be horrified by pedophilia. But that was only so long as we could pretend it was only happening among Catholic clergy. What this actually was about was cutting away one more escape route for abused kids: the local church and pastor; the local religious-run orphanage or residential school.

Now we increasingly discover child trafficking and pedophilia is widely practiced, in the public schools, in the public libraries, and especially among the rich. And here is no public outcry; instead, the outcry is against anyone objecting, or wanting to hold anyone accountable.

It is getting too obvious.