The Narcotic of Reassurance
Why the Toronto Star’s David Coletto prefers schoolyard taunts to evidence
If you believe in free speech, here’s the bad news: it isn’t actually free. It costs $5 a month. That’s less than the latte you complain about, less than the Netflix shows you’ll never watch, and far cheaper than your last regrettable bar tab.
For that, you get three essays a week, open comments, and the satisfaction of knowing you’re funding uncensored writing in a world addicted to censorship. Everyone says, “It’s just a cup of coffee.” Fine. But here’s the pitch: give me your coffee money and I’ll hand you something stronger—essays with bite, arguments with teeth, and the freedom to say what others won’t.
Subscribe today. Because silence is free—and it’s worth exactly what you paid for it.
The state of Canadian media is a slow-motion tragedy. The Toronto Star? It still fields a half-decent sports section, but beyond the box scores, it’s a padded cell of columnists scribbling the same sermon every week, each mistaking their own hubris for a functioning brain. And if Shree Paradkar is still on the roster, you hardly need to read the byline — the column is always a Xerox of the last one: “You’re all racists, except me. Have a great week.”
The CBC and Global? They long ago traded inquiry for catechism.
At the Globe and Mail, the new motto might as well be: “We’re not biased — it’s just that Google and the government pay 46% of our salary.”
Meanwhile, the CBC stares at its shoes and asks whether you’ve caught the latest rerun of The Beachcombers — to which the twelve surviving senior viewers in New Brunswick reply, “I still love Relic.”
And as if the CBC could ever be impartial: its entire payroll knows that if the Conservatives stumble into power and deep-six the place, they’ll all be out shopping for new careers — and there are only so many barista jobs to go around.
In this landscape, it’s really Postmedia and a handful of stubborn independents against the entire grey wall of establishment monotony. And here I am, the ultimate little guy, shouting into the void with more conviction — and, dare I say, more evidence — than all their editorial boards combined.
___________________
“Pierre Poilievre is deeply polarising. Mark Carney reassured Canadians.” — David Coletto, Toronto Star.
I don’t subscribe to the Toronto Star, nor do I intend to, and on the evidence of this feeble Coletto analysis, I never shall. What Mr Coletto offers here is not journalism, not analysis, not even partisan hackery of the energetic sort—it is the kind of assertion that would earn a red slash in a first-year logic class.
He pronounces Poilievre “deeply polarising” and Carney “reassuring,” as though the mere repetition of adjectives is the work of argument. I completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of MN a hundred years ago, and one professor said that excessive use of adjectives was a sign of a weak writer; verbs, baby, verbs.
Let us begin with “polarising.” The word has become a lazy pejorative in our political lexicon, trotted out whenever someone dares to challenge the status quo.
If an entire nation is barreling toward a cliff, and a third of the passengers are drunk and urging the driver to go faster, then the man who grabs the wheel and shouts “Stop!” will indeed be called polarising.
Sounds like my teenage years.
To be polarising is, in such a moment, a virtue—the willingness to alarm the somnolent. But in Coletto’s telling, “polarising” simply means “I don’t like him.”
It is slander disguised as analysis, no more sophisticated than the schoolyard taunt: “Everybody hates you.”
And when he claims that “everybody loves Carney”? Here, facts intrude. In the 2025 federal election, the Liberals won 49.27 percent of the popular vote, while the Conservatives took 43.76 percent.
That is not a landslide, not a coronation, not the kind of universal swoon implied by Coletto’s prose. It is a narrow margin in a divided nation. Cast your mind back just four years further, to the 2021 election, when the Conservatives actually won the popular vote—33.74 percent to the Liberals’ 32.62 percent.
What Coletto peddles as universal adoration for Carney and universal contempt for Poilievre is in reality the arithmetic of a split electorate. To insist otherwise is not analysis; it is propaganda at a junior-high level.
Now to “reassurance.” What precisely did Mark Carney reassure Canadians of? Fiscal discipline? Hardly.
Elbows up? Spare me. Carney collapsed like wet cardboard the instant Trump lumbered onto the stage, discovering with commendable haste that a pissing match with the great orange bruiser — whose stream, even from a member the size of a cocktail sausage, could flatten a fire hydrant — was suicide by bravado.
Poilievre, for all his sins, had warned precisely against that very spectacle, though without the benefit of Carney’s pantomime of toughness.
Carney then mocked Poilievre’s concerns about deficits, only to adopt the very remedies he once dismissed.
Competence? Carney has repeatedly taken credit for accomplishments of the Harper era that were not his own.
Steadiness? Yes, but only in the sense of a steady, almost metronomic output of bullshit — that peculiar substance Harry Frankfurt rightly judged to be worse than a lie.
Carney once told Canadians he had “no investments” — only property — when in fact he sat atop a blind trust swollen with hundreds of holdings and was still entangled in Brookfield stock options and deferred compensation.
He brushed off conflicts, only to have an ethics screen erected days later, effectively walling him off from Brookfield and Stripe, a tacit admission of the very entanglements he had denied. He implied that Brookfield’s move to New York occurred after he left the board, when the filings and press releases indicate otherwise.
Carney is not admired for what he has done—he has done almost nothing in elected life—but for how he makes people feel.
This is politics as aromatherapy: lavender candles for the anxious liberal. And just because we have devolved into a witless, feelings-based electorate—choosing leaders on the strength of their “vibe”—does not make it good.
We get the leaders we deserve, yes, the mirror of our culture, but that only means the country inherits its own mediocrity, gift-wrapped in cologne.
Carney’s volcanic temper is whispered about even within his own cabinet, and judging by the exits, a few have decided they’d rather risk unemployment than another eruption.
This is not steadiness but stagecraft — the calm tone, the bespoke suit, the rehearsed inevitability of a man who mistakes fear for loyalty and silence for respect.
What Coletto calls reassurance is better described as hypnosis: the drug administered to a weary electorate, the promise that nothing must change, the soothing murmur as the car keeps rolling toward the cliff.
One thinks of the schoolyard absurdity of “elbows up” — a taunt so fatuous it survives only because it is repeated often enough. This, too, is Carney’s reassurance: the empty chant of a playground bully dressed in bespoke tailoring.
This is the triumph of “vibe voting.”
Ask a Carney enthusiast which specific policy of Poilievre’s they oppose, and you will be met with the glassy silence of a cultist caught without the hymn sheet.
Their quarrel is not with substance but with optics. They whine that “PP” — and note the intellectual depth of an opposition press that steals its nicknames from the vocabulary of potty-training toddlers — looked “too cocky” as he calmly disassembled a hapless little B.C. journalist over an apple.
The man’s arsenal consisted of questions whose answers were already smuggled in, a dreary revival of that antique favourite, “When did you stop beating your wife?”
Ask voters why they like Carney and you’ll get adjectives: “calm,” “competent,” “prime-ministerial.” These are not policies. They are aromas.
Carney is not admired for what he has done—he has done little in elected life—but for how he makes people feel. This is politics as aromatherapy: lavender candles for the anxious liberal.
Meanwhile, his record abroad tells a different story. At the Bank of England, he was derided as erratic, ideological, even authoritarian. At home, his reputation rests on a book—Values—that most Canadians have not read and that he has never renounced. In it, he sketches a vision not of market dynamism but of technocratic control, where every loan, every investment, every economic decision must pass through a climate confessional. A man who believes that bankers should function as priests of the environment is not offering reassurance—he is offering control. The fact that Canadians are largely unaware of these positions is not proof of moderation, but rather a sign of ignorance, and ignorance is not a mandate.
Yet Coletto assures us that Canadians were reassured, and the Star prints this drivel without blushing. What Canadians were, in fact, reassured by was the collusion of the media class. The Globe and Mail, the CBC, and of course the Star all donned their vestments for Carney’s coronation. Only Postmedia held out, which is why conservatives speak in a constant undertone of disadvantage. When one side enjoys the megaphone of the national broadcaster and the other is left to the comment pages of the National Post, the playing field is not level. Carney’s “reassurance” is in truth the comfort of monopoly.
Coletto’s piece, then, is a symptom of a deeper rot. He mistakes assertion for evidence, likability for leadership, and optics for substance. To suggest that likability is the measure of a prime minister is to confuse politics with a beer commercial. The man you want to drink with may not be the man you want negotiating with Beijing, or managing an economy in decline. The electorate’s preference for the soothing over the substantive is not a strength; it is a national weakness.
One might remind Coletto that Carney is not the unflappable oracle he imagines him to be. Under pressure, he wilts. When cornered, he flees. His temper, volcanic and unchecked, has already prompted ministers to consider resignation. A clever tie and a public-relations team cannot conceal character indefinitely. Eventually, the cracks will show, and the voters who thought they were buying reassurance will discover they were sold snake oil.
And so we return to the basic idiocy of the Star’s prose. Canadians did not vote en masse to affirm Carney’s genius. They were divided, uncertain, weary, and easily flattered. To dress that up as “reassurance” is to insult the reader. To smear dissent as “polarisation” is to treat Canadians as children. The Star has once again mistaken atmosphere for argument, tone for thought, schoolyard jeers for reason.
But then, what else should we expect? A stupid culture elects stupid leaders. Our last Prime Minister was Mr. “I’ve never really had a job, but I do have a famous last name. I like 14-year-old girls, competitive frisbee, taking my shirt off in public, and clutching teddy bears.”
The electorate adored the performance art. And when the public finally grew tired of the hippie dad who used to throw the bills on the dining-room table and rely on grandpa to sneak in and pay them, they turned instead to the man in the suit — the one who had worked in that exotic, far-off place called England — and convinced themselves he might bring some maturity to the household. A stepdad, or perhaps a new dad, just a little more adult. That, apparently, is what “reassurance” now means.
The criteria for leadership have been reduced to the emotional reflex of a family in therapy: give us someone who looks stable, sounds calming, and wears the suit properly.
Mark Carney reassures us, apparently, that the steady hand will keep us on course. What course? Toward stagnation, declining per-capita GDP, and a G7 record that should shame rather than soothe. To be reassured in such circumstances is to be drugged. Poilievre unsettles, yes—because he is the one shouting that the cliff is there. To Coletto, that is divisive. To anyone with a sense of reason, it is sanity.
The Toronto Star has once again given us not an argument but a lullaby. Canadians deserve better than to be sung to sleep.
If you're looking for a serious article on Carney, here it is. You’re welcome. It even has pictures.
If you found value in this article and wish to support my ongoing work, please consider leaving a tip. Your support helps me continue producing uncensored content on critical issues.