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And so, in its infinite wisdom—or its boundless capacity for self-delusion-the Canadian electorate has handed Mark Carney the reins of a minority government, a triumph of vibe over substance, of brand over brains.
The noble Jagmeet Singh, that self-styled martyr of the New Democratic Party, has lost his seat but now spins a yarn of heroic sacrifice, claiming he sabotaged his party to shield the nation from the fascist, neanderthal, MAGA-adjacent Dr. Evil that is Pierre Poilievre. It’s a tale as risible as it is pathetic.
Singh, sucking at the teat of his political advisors ‘Go Lemmings!’ Inc entered a fool’s bargain to prop up Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, ignoring the historical lesson that such arrangements—think the Lib Dems in the UK under Nick Clegg—never end well for the junior partner.
The Liberals take the credit for any scraps of success. But Singh got his pension, and that when the electoral music stops, the NDP is left without a chair, abandoned like the naive intern who toils for free at a startup, dreaming of equity, only to be shown the door when the IPO bells ring.
“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies,” quipped Groucho Marx. Singh’s misadventure is a masterclass in this grim art.
But let us turn to the buyer’s remorse already festering in the Canadian psyche. Though perhaps not surprising in an age of vibe voters, it is astonishing that the simplistic charge of Poilievre being “Trumpy” resonated so deeply. Carney, with his elbows up and his resume polished to a blinding sheen, capitalised on this with an extraordinary stroke of luck, hitching his wagon to the rising tide of bitterness at Donald Trump’s absurd return to mercantilism and his unhinged demagogic theatre.
Poilievre, in contrast, ran a campaign as limp as a damp dishcloth. He failed to craft a clear narrative, took dreadful advice, and seemed to believe that the “I hate Trudeau” voter was synonymous with the “I love PP” voter. Margaret Thatcher once warned, “If you just set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing.”
Poilievre’s timidity proved her point. The Conservatives, in a centre-left nation like Canada, must run a perfect campaign while the Liberals need only avoid ritual seppuku. The bar for the latter is laughably low, and Carney cleared it by leaning on his bland, white, “I’ve had a job, look at me” aura of reliability.
The media honeymoon will fade, and the remorse will set in. Canadians will soon see Carney for what he is: an incompetent political neophyte, prone to faceplants, who looks at a family choosing between food and rent and scolds them about melting glaciers. His solution? Cripple the energy sector, offshore prosperity, and bury the West under green tech fairy tales cooked up at Davos.
And Jagmeet? He finally earned something: his $2.3 million pension. Should’ve asked for it in U.S. dollars, but even sellouts get paid in Canadian dollars. While his party spirals into irrelevance, he’s living proof that if you kneel long enough, someone eventually drops a taxpayer-funded bag of gold in your lap.
His legacy? Backstopping the most anti-democratic, censorious, ethically bankrupt government in modern Canadian history—and still finding time to post selfies.
And the Jews? Screwed, again. Most wised up and avoided the Libs, a party that wrapped itself in the Star of David on the way to a solidarity march, only to rip it off and hide it in their coat pocket before canvassing Arab voters in Scarborough. There, they nod solemnly: “Genocide, yes. We understand. That’s why we support the arms embargo. You’ll vote Liberal, right?”
Groucho—not Karl, the NDP’s patron saint of failure, but the funny one—put it best: “These are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others.” You could slap that on Jagmeet or Carney’s campaign bus right between “equity” and “solidarity.”
However, Carney’s victory is hollow, built on recycled Trudeauism and a disingenuous appropriation of Jim Flaherty’s legacy—an inconveniently deceased man cannot defend himself.
The intellectually stunted and wedded to the notion that debt is merely a string of irrelevant zeros, Carney's team peddles the same tired spend-your-way-out-of-trouble mantra. His campaign promises—to axe the fuel and capital gains taxes—were the only deviations from Trudeau’s playbook, and even those were less policy than posturing. The rest? A warmed-over World Economic Forum sermon, delivered with the hubris of a man who learned to pump gas yesterday and donned a hockey jersey to prove his everyman credentials.
“The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money,” Thatcher famously said, and Carney’s economic vision seems destined to test this axiom with reckless abandon.
Singh, meanwhile, deserves a special circle of ignominy. During the debates, he attacked Poilievre with the ferocity of a yapping terrier, interrupting and preening like a jackass who mistook volume for victory. He failed to see that his true enemy was Carney, who siphoned NDP votes while Poilievre barely dented the progressive base.
In the heat of battle, Singh was like a general who charges the wrong hill, exposing his flank to the real threat. The voting paradigm has inverted—boomers, with their elbows up, flocked to Carney’s promise of stability, while millennials, hungry for change, leaned toward Poilievre. Demographically, this bodes ill for Carney: his voters are dying faster than Poilievre’s, and the actuarial tables are no friend to the Liberals.
Poilievre’s campaign was not without its sins. His policies, cautious to the point of cowardice, allowed Carney to rhetorically match him without breaking a sweat.
The Conservative leader, drunk on his hubris, overestimated the depth of anti-Trudeau sentiment and underestimated the shallowness of the electorate. In an age where most voters need a calculator to compute 7x91, winning on policy differentiation is a fool’s errand. Poilievre needed to be bold, clear, and proud, but delivered tepid, vague, apologetic messages.
Yet, on a human level, he is undeniably more decent than Carney, a chauvinistic rageaholic whose ability to be both arrogant and uninspiring is a feat of perverse genius.
Carney’s personality is as thrilling as a tax seminar, and his public persona is a triumph of PR handlers who dressed him, coached him, and spirited him away whenever the waters got choppy.
The media honeymoon will fade, and the remorse will set in. Canadians will soon see Carney for what he is: an incompetent political neophyte, prone to faceplants, who looks at a family struggling to pay rent and lectures them on the existential threat of climate change. His solution? Cripple Canada’s resource base to lower global temperatures by a negligible fraction, all while promising “high-paying clean tech jobs” that exist only in the fever dreams of WEF wonks.
It’s like telling the Elephant Man that a new haircut and a sharp suit will land him a modelling contract. The jobs won’t come, and the pain will linger. As H.L. Mencken observed, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
Carney’s climate apocalypse is just such a hobgoblin. Trump is the mother of all hobgoblins, and he arrived just in time to save the day for the Libs. Carney should send that man a fruit basket, or at least a basket full of Big Macs and Diet Coke. PP likes apples but I don’t think Trump is a big fruit eater.
Can Poilievre survive as a leader after losing his seat? It’s uncertain. Michael Chong might have been a steadier hand, but if Rona Ambrose had stayed in the race, we’d likely be toasting a Conservative prime minister today. The lesson is clear: in an era of declining critical thinking, where voters can’t distinguish a Laffer curve from a latte macchiato, elections are won by out-marketing the opposition, not by out-thinking them.
Carney’s victory is a testament to this grim reality, a triumph of twaddle peddled to boomers redefining the adage that there’s no fool like an old fool.
When Canada’s per capita GDP continues its downward spiral, when we start envying our cousins in Alabama, perhaps voters will see through the con that is Mark Carney—a public relations marionette, a climate fanatic hooked on the narcotic of hubris. But for now, thanks to the boomers and their elbows-up bravado, we are stuck with him. The pain will be ours, and the remorse will be bitter.
The elbows up drunk Carney party was fun, but the hangover will be a bitch. So people, please at least turn the taps on full and flush the toilet a few times when you lean over the bowl and begin to hurl.
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