The Soggy Triumph of Canadian Virtue

How a Limp Paper Straw and a Clueless Elite Drown Us in Moral Quicksand

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This wretched, limp paper straw—sopping wet, collapsing like a spineless bureaucrat under questioning—is the perfect totem of Canada’s sanctimonious folly. Zero environmental upside, maximum performative piety. Isn’t this the very essence of our politics?

A parade of dim-witted, jelly-spined leaders, issuing edicts that save nothing, solve nothing, and torment everyone—especially the disabled, the elderly, or the poor sod who, grappling with this soggy abomination, pops their Coke lid and anoints their lap, their seat, and possibly their car in a sticky deluge.

If they crash trying to mop up the mess, they’d likely take that humiliation to their grave rather than admit it.

Can you conjure a single artefact that better shrieks our smug moral vanity? Perhaps our bizarre, masochistic worship of a healthcare system that shuffles patients into queues longer than a Tolstoy novel, as if waiting is a personality trait.

It’s the kind of idiocy that recalls my late aunt, who, in the ‘90s, was told her VW Beetle was a marvel of engineering.

She clung to that verdict like a zealot, driving the rusting hulk for decades, with bumpers dangling and floorboards so eroded that she half-Flinstoned her way to the grocery store. I wouldn’t be shocked if the sheer exasperation of piloting that relic nudged her toward Alzheimer’s, maybe lead paint. Not sure.

But is there any object, any symbol, that so perfectly encapsulates our obsession with preening moral superiority? Our healthcare fetish comes close, but this flimsy, futile straw—emblem of good intentions gone soggy—reigns supreme. It’s Canada distilled: a nation that mistakes inconvenience for virtue, and discomfort for progress.

But as far as performative idiocy, it would be the paper straw.

Next time I go to the States, I’ll buy a plastic straw multi-pack, stash it in the glove compartment, and toss the mushy Canadian straw back at the blue-haired non-binary barista who imagines their six-month stint at Starbucks qualifies them as a global ethicist.

First, let’s deal with the facts. Over 99% of plastic waste in the oceans comes from ten rivers—eight in Asia, including the Yangtze, Indus, and Ganges, and two in Africa. Canada’s contribution is statistically nil. We may sob at the sight of a straw in a turtle’s nostril (and please, don’t email me that it was a tortoise—I don’t care), but it’s a safe bet we didn’t put it there. Odds are it was staged by a cash-strapped nature photographer desperate for a viral moment.

It is a bit like math. When you combine the statistically retarded leader who views one photo as an exemplar for all of the country, like it’s a situation of where, “sorry I was late for work today boss, ya, up and down Queen St, had to keep pulling straws out of turtle schnozzs.”

\But when you combine the performative political idiot with the 12-second attention span voter, who confuses vibes with meaningful reasons you get a government that bans plastic straws because it pissed off a turtle, tortoise, whatever.

But this is the intellect-deprived level at which our public decisions are made. We are a nation of neurotics and irrational morons with five hundred top priorities and no idea how to figure out what is truly important. We are stirred into moral panic by stock photos and TikTok. Facts are for fascists; feelings are for progress. Enter Mark Carney—our new paper straw prime minister-in-waiting, a man so ephemerally virtuous that he practically composts himself.

This is a bit of diversion, but I’m trying to figure out who the real Mark Carney is. Here are some highlights from his book, Values: a tired, pretentious, and, to be honest, clichéd and dated polemic.

Here are a few of his favourites. I haven’t heard him talk about them lately. Strange that.

• Enshrining “humility” as a chapter and core value

Carney devotes an entire chapter to humility, urging leaders to be modest, even as he pitches up before international audiences as the globe’s moral banker. Quite charming, except for the hollow irony—a former Goldman Sachs toady turned “humble” pontiff. It’s like installing a tiny “modesty statue” in Buckingham Palace.

• Markets are humanity “distilled”—turn grappa back into wine

He quotes Pope Francis, suggesting that we’ve reduced markets to grappa—numb, distilled self‑interest, then proposes a global spiritual wine‑restoration program.

Nice metaphor, but do we tour the Vatican or the Bank of England? For all his solemnity, Carney offers the sort of top‑shelf moralism more suited to a priestly homily than a policy roadmap.

• Replacing the U.S. dollar with a Synthetic Hegemonic Currency (SHC)

Yes, seriously. Carney muses about a Libra-style “Synthetic Hegemonic Currency,” a blockchain-baked Franken-dollar backed by central bank digital currencies.

Because if there’s one thing Canadians desperately need, it’s to dismantle the dollar’s supremacy at the cost of multinational chaos—no biggie.

So there you have it, Mark Carney’s Value(s) is the quintessential self‑credited Davos manifesto—full of grandiloquent meditations on humility, spiritual economics, and regulated capitalism by a man who, in the same breath, professes moral sobriety while enshrining himself as our global conscience.

The irony is as thick as Carney’s metaphors: he demands we shrink our ego while inflating his own, proposes complex global currencies while ignoring democracy, and doles out chamomile tea to markets he helped mismanage.

Bravo—nothing says “pretension” louder than a 500‑page sermon from the moral high‑chair.

Our removal of plastic straws, which can’t be blamed on Carney, but he’s not about to roll it back, and he was advising Trudeau when it was pushed through, so he has some ownership, is a classic symbol of thoughtless virtue-signalling laws.

The strangest thing is that our politicians don’t ask, and our voters don’t suggest the most important question: will this idea work, will it do any good? No, we are too busy sunning ourselves in the rays of self-righteousness.

Straws are not the world’s biggest conspiracy to murder turtles, sorry tortoises, they are tools that allow people to drink while driving or provide disabled persons with basic autonomy, and to participate in a collective optical delusion. We sacrifice usefulness and reason on the altar of Liberal virtue-signalling, and we’re expected to cheer while choking on disintegrated mush.

No environmental gain. No reduction in global pollution. Just another squirt of moral foam from the Ottawa cappuccino machine: another cringeworthy PR ceremony, another minister ejaculating virtue into the ether.

Yes, I said it: virtue masturbation. And the country is covered in its sticky residue.

We are a country with the attention span of a fruit fly on fentanyl. We don’t think—we emote, posture, and post. We mistake censorship for decency and silence for civility. We elect mannequins who hire more bureaucrats to do less than ever before. At the same time, the real work—economic growth, infrastructure, and national security—is outsourced to whichever foreign power offers the most attractive pen set.

We paid $84 million for an app worth $88,000. We let foreign agents infiltrate our elections, then call it a privacy issue and change the subject. Our MPs still haven’t grasped that the people fighting Russia in WWII were Nazis. And when we do catch spies in Vancouver, it’s only because the Americans tipped us off. God forbid we read our mail.

And still we preen.

We ban plastic bags, forcing the populace to buy and hoard endless reusable cotton sacks, each of which requires 7,100 uses to offset the carbon cost of manufacture. Nobody uses them more than twenty times. We’re increasing waste in the name of reducing it. Well done. Perhaps I'm a bad person, but I'm batting pretty close to zero when it comes to bringing bags with me to the grocery store.

I note with grim amusement that Walmart now sells paper bags—those soggy, split-prone relics of eco-theatre—despite the fact they’re environmentally worse than thin plastic. I tried hauling groceries in one that hadn’t been pre-softened by Cheeto dust, and it detonated on the driveway like a guilt bomb. I used my gym bag to fetch the broccoli, but my mother-in-law did not insist the broccoli smelled like armpits. Nobody would eat it except me but that is typical with brocolli.

I told her to drown it in mayonnaise—the same culinary strategy behind every so-called “salad” Russian mother-in-laws make. Sometimes they end up like a tub of emulsified despair flecked with a token clump of chlorophyll. But I digress.

And me? I now own an entire drawer of reusable tote bags—each one a shrine to performative penance—that serve only one true ecological purpose: containing dog shit.

Mark Carney’s Canada is one in which substance is sacrificed at the altar of symbolism. Trudeau, under super banker Carney’s guidance, turned down the opportunity to sell liquified natural gas to Germany—helping a democracy and reducing global emissions.

Why? Qatar, the same nation that funded Hamas’s slaughter of 1,200 Israeli teens at a rock concert, got the contract. The blood is on our recycled hands.

Tim Hortons in Newmarket removed its garbage cans in the name of eco-theatre, assuming the public would nobly carry their trash home. The public, of course, dumped it on the ground in protest. One noble protester left a full cup of his coffee on top of the talk box in the drive through.

God bless the litterbugs—they’ve done more for civic resistance than any journalist in the country.

We are led by the sort of bureaucrats who call Public Safety on professors for mean tweets. We remove garbage cans from faculty offices in the name of "green" and get cardboard boxes that collapse under the weight of one banana peel and offices that smell like compost. But virtuous compost I am told.

Meanwhile, in India, middle-class families drive hours to visit Tim Hortons, pay triple the local price for burnt coffee, and proudly take the cups home as status symbols. They must really admire Canada.

And here we are, smug and mushy, sipping greenwashed lattes through slush-pulp straws, convinced we’re saving the planet one disintegrating slurp at a time.

We are a joke—and not even a funny one.

But I will still cheer for our hockey team at the Olympics, I’m not a communist.

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