Commentary
As I tweet a torrent of stories about the sorry state of Canadian governments, I do recall Ian MacLaren’s “The Cunning Speech of Drumtochty,” in which downpours only prompt the locals to say it “threatened tae be weet,” saving stronger language for Biblical deluges. So when the prime minister insists sententiously that “Canada is not broken,” I concede that we are still better governed than most of the world. But surely there’s moisture about.
Or cold. The latest such episode being
yet another breakdown of the vaunted light rail in our capital city because of winter conditions that, apparently, were not foreseen. In what we used to call banana republics, or worse, tragicomic lack of competence or accountability in the public sector is to be expected. But in Canada? Yet they just dump in more money and tell us to be grateful the station doesn’t stink… if it doesn’t.
Before that it was the unwholesome influence of McKinsey on Canada’s China policy, which may actually become an issue now that the immigration aspect has
made it into the francophone media. And our failure even to
pretend to take defence spending seriously, yet burbling about our high standing in the world while others wait for us to shut up about ourselves so serious people can talk.
It may take some time. As Kelly McParland noted in the National Post, even politicians who conspicuously flop at their jobs
keep getting elected, often to new posts, which he rightly notes is on us at least as much as on them. And who, indeed, was punished because our “Phoenix” civil service pay system is not rising from the ashes of a 14-year disaster, but adding
more burned cash to the pile?
How many big companies, and even bloated governments, have computerized pay systems that work? But we can’t? And my final such tweet from last week alone concerns “Shared Services Canada,” which in bureaucratese means the feds’ IT system,
refusing to tell parliamentarians where its buildings are located because “We do not disclose certain information that would frankly be a playbook for those people who wish to attack our network.”
If our IT is really in the hands of people who think hackers smash windows to get in rather than doing it digitally, it would explain a lot about Phoenix. But it certainly is in the hands of people who refuse to tell MPs information that was in a 2018 press release and a 2020 Request for Information to contractors.
So is Canada broken? In a
column here last July on this issue, I said it depends on your standards. We’re doing better than the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and many other places it wouldn’t be woke to name. And one squall is not a storm. But given the pervasive dampness nowadays, I issued a challenge to defenders of the status quo to provide a checklist of what, in their view, would constitute not gaein’ aboot.
It was prompted partly by former top Trudeau aide Gerald Butts sneering, “the commentariat has declared Canada broken because they have to wait for their passports?” Nobody seems to have offered a list, and I guess Bill Morneau has finally had enough. But their tone suggests that many pundits regard Canadian governance as better than the proles deserve, while it is primarily the rubes who made the maple leaf an international symbol of freedom again who retain a sense that Canada can do better. (Though for once I’m with Erin O’Toole that they should start the self-improvement at home, by ditching the rude flags pronto.)
In Official Canada there’s a strong tendency to adopt the slogan “Yes we can’t.” They don’t just accept mediocrity, they embrace it. It’s eerily like an abusive relationship where we’re mocked if we ask to be allowed to mail off a passport application and have it completed within a month. Or stop the “catch and release” of violent criminals. Or settle disputes with the CRA within a year using actual information from their end. Or buy frigates for less than the Americans pay for aircraft carriers. Or Arctic patrol ships that aren’t way over cost, way behind schedule, unfit for service, and
with contaminated water.
It is how long since the
Broad Street Pump cholera outbreak, and our sailors can’t drink the tap water? Yet when we say such things we are insulted by our political masters as unworthy of decent basic services.
By the way, the fictional Drumtochty was so backward that “no meeting of protest had been held in memory of living man, and the ministers preached from the Bible.” Whereas we’re so advanced we don’t need a deluge to wash us away. Instead, a flood of smug rhetoric from politicians who seem to consider government a protest meeting, not a heavy responsibility, is doing it unaided.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
