Honestly, I’m not even paying attention. Most of this stuff is just created by the media hype. We basically started with about 1,000 complaints to Elections Canada, which is pretty standard for a country of our size, and when the media trumped up this non-story we wound up with roughly 36 times that number. I’m actually surprised it isn’t larger based on the sheer media attention.

No, I don’t care about robocalls. Do you expect me to? First of all, if you’re impressionable enough to have your opinion changed by a recorded message, perhaps you really shouldn’t be voting at all. Secondly, to quote Brian Griffin from Family Guy, “undecided voters are the biggest idiots on the planet.” If you haven’t figured out who you’re going to vote for by the time an election has been called you probably don’t really care about what’s going on in your country in the first place.

And why should you? Politics in Canada is woefully damaged, and mainly useless to participate. I mean, what’s the greater injustice here: some disenfranchised voter who listened to a robocall and wound up going to the wrong election centre? Or the millions of votes that count for nothing every single election, regardless of whether they get put into the proper ballot box or not?

I’ll tell you which one it is. It’s the uselessness of the First Past The Post electoral system that people seem to want to hold on to like a winning ticket at a pony track. It’s great if you win the money, but if you lose… well, you get nothing. Nice try, better luck next time. Your opinion? Doesn’t matter for the next four years. Tell someone who gives a damn.

The thing that sucks about that is it’s amplified for those voters who live in ridings that never change incumbents. Imagine being the Liberal voter in Ruraltown, Alberta? Buddy can vote Liberal every four years for 80 years and he’s basically contributing nothing to the democracy. His vote, his time, his opinions, are all completely and utterly worthless and meaningless. He may as well just stay home and save the planet the 4×8 sheet of ballot paper.

Same goes for the conservative voter in Hippietown, British Columbia. You may as well just buy granola, put on the flip flops and grab a front seat to the gay pride parade. You aren’t going to see a conservative MP now, or in your life time. You might as well be a Leafs fan. It aint happening, buddy, so just forget about it.

Why would either of these individuals vote? And yet, the moment something sensible is suggested that would encourage greater democratic participation and better reflect the actual political makeup of Canada, everybody votes it down in the referendum. Thanks a lot for that, by the way. Because of that, I haven’t voted since 2008 and I don’t plan to vote again any time soon.

You see, the funny thing about the last election is that the Conservative Party, which owns 53.9 per cent of the power in the House of Commons, only had approval from 39.62 per cent of the country. Which means a two-thirds majority wanted nothing to do with the party that holds a totality of power in the country. Does that make any sense at all?

But proportional representation is only a part of my rant. Imagine if my vote did count, even though it doesn’t, and my guy actually got elected. Then what? Well, the funny thing about the way our political system works is that although we don’t give a damn about proportional representation in elections, the House of Commons has seats based on population distribution throughout Canada. Which means, of course, that the Centre of the Multiverse, Ontario, has almost all the power it could ever want.

Problem in Port Moody, British Columbia? Yeah, we’ll get to you eventually. Don’t hold your breath. Problem in Ottawa, Ontario? Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full, sir. So, really, when you elect a local politician in British Columbia, you’re really only adding a block-voting partisan to follow in lock-step with what Ottawa, the Centre of the Multiverse, wants.

Don’t think so? Hm, what happened when Bill Casey decided to act for constituents instead of his party masters? Well, my memory isn’t perfect but I seem to recall something about a bus and somebody being thrown under it. Which I’m sure really inspires other politicians to represent their local constituents.

So, to recap: Our votes are wasted, and even when they’re not, our elected representatives don’t represent what is best for us. Do you think robocalls even matters? We’re talking about a number of people who were so statistically irrelevant that they wouldn’t even show up in a margin of error poll. Compare that to the millions of votes that are tossed in the garbage every single election because their guy didn’t come in first place.

Yeah, no thanks.

Mohammad Shafia, front left, Tooba Yahya, front right, and their son Hamed Shafia, back left, are escorted at the Frontenac County courthouse in Kingston, Ontario on Saturday, January 28, 2012. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette

The Shafia murder trial has returned a verdict, and to no great surprise the jury has found Mohammad Shafia, 58, his second wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 42, and their son Hamed, 21, guilty of four counts of first-degree murder. They now begin a long, and we hope a horrible, next part of their life behind bars.

Much has already been written about the Shafia honour killings, but the ugly argument about culture clash has barely been allowed to surface. Though media publish the facts of the case and invite commentary, they are quick to delete and close commenting when Canadians begin to express their feelings. In that way the truth remains largely hidden, and that’s not a good thing for Canada because we desperately need to discuss it.

What sort of people are we letting into Canada that would consider doing such a thing? Is this the sort of Canada we want in the future? And if not, why are we not doing more to stop these kinds of people from bringing their warped, twisted sense of morality with them?

A few people have said that these sorts of immigrants should leave their barbaric views at home where it belongs. But even that opinion is a relativist one. Why should the third world be subjected to this kind of misogynistic tyranny? Is it ok to murder your family members for honour provided you’re beyond the borders of Canada?

There’s an even more unsettling thought to this case. In the rare instances in which a Shafia-type family actually acts on their barbaric ideals, how many find more non-violent means to coerce their family members in complying with their dishonourable notions of honour? How many women are abused behind the smiling, glossy-coloured magazine faces depicting Canada’s multicultural mosaic?

What’s more disturbing than the fact that there are people who would do this to their own daughters, is that such people who harbour such views even want to live in Canada. One is reminded of our most infamous Canadian family of convenience, the Khadrs, who immigrated here in order to exploit our own freedoms and generosity and use it against us. The Shafias are little different than the Khadrs.

For unless you despise Canada, why would you act so contrary to its nature? Why would you even want to come to Canada, where women are free to choose their own mates and make their own decisions in life, unless you intend to somehow change it?

Nobody wants to stop and think about immigration and the shifting demographics for fear the discussion is inherently racist. We are rapidly shifting from a Christian nation of European descendants, to one that is populated by South Asians, North Africans and people from the Middle East. That is a fact that is objectively neither good nor bad. The question one should ask next is whether there are negative consequences to these changes, and if so, what are they?

Well, the most obvious one is staring us in the face. If there are Islamic zealots in our midst, is it likely that the sort of incidents like the Shafia murders would become more common as we invite immigrants from Islamic countries? Or is this merely an aberration in a statistical average in which most Muslims follow the spirit and the letter of the law?

Who knows? But what is clear is that these new cultures have, in certain parts of Canada, decided to make their customs welcome. There are examples of Muslim women creating women-only swimming classes and salons and classrooms. This segregation may have a superficially friendly explanation, but it demonstrates a disinclination to conform to Canadian customs and modern attitudes.

Some people don’t seem to care about how Canada changes, since our nation relies on immigration for population growth, and hence can only become the face of those we allow in. And if that means a new majority decides to make certain customs and traditions a Canadian staple, so be it. This would be not unlike the sort of attitude that led to entire streets in France becoming impromptu prayer mats five times a day. And if that’s the sort of Canada you want, then by all means let’s not have a discussion about any of this.

If, however, you prefer that the country retain the sorts of values inherited by our founding European, Christian forebears, it would behove us to have a frank talk about who’s arriving at Pearson International Airport every single day, and what they’re bringing with them.

Vancouver can take pride in the fact that it’s now the second most expensive city for housing in the English-speaking world. Guess who’s number one?

Vancouver displaced Sydney as the least-affordable housing market after Hong Kong among large English-speaking cities, as home prices rose faster than incomes, a study of 325 metropolitan areas worldwide showed.

The median home price here is now 10.6 times greater than the median pretax household income. Is it possible there’s a correlation here?

* * *

The UFC website was hacked today over the company’s public support for SOPA and PIPA, the unpopular anti-piracy legislation that went to defeat in Congress last week. The site was down for a few hours and redirected to the hacker’s website which featured a Hitler-type figure and a rap song about Obama.

No idea what the retaliation might be from the UFC, but they have fought hard against piracy of their live pay-per-view events and downloading of their material, as well as removing copyrighted material from YouTube. The internet terrorist organization anonymous has promised reprisals against large social media organizations in the coming days.

* * *

This is how I feel when driving. Every single day.

There was a segment on CBC National News yesterday about a mother of a Grade 2 French Immersion student with a peanut allergy who had been bullied in a rather unusual manner. No, he hadn’t been pushed, pulled or otherwise tormented in the way we might remember from our own time in grade school. This bully used a form of psychological warfare against the nut allergy victim.

According to the story, the bully went up to the peanut sufferer and whispered in his ear that he had rubbed nut residue on his clothing. The boy went home in a panic and told his mother what had transpired. The mother became alarmed and alerted the proper authorities. They conducted an investigation and confirmed the bully had said these horrible things, but there was no evidence nut residue had actually been rubbed on the unfortunate child.

And that’s about it. Other than an interview from some psychologist who opined that the incident was one of “assault” and a CBC reporter reminding us the child couldn’t be charged with said assault because he’s all of eight-years-old, that was the entire news report.

What’s amazing isn’t just the fact this story made the news, since the CBC has a proclivity for dredging the mundane. But the idea that a Grade 2 student making an idle threat about nut residue, that may or may not have existed in the first place being worthy of some kind of alarm-raising outcry, is disturbing.

Is this what the world has come to in the modern day of bubble wrap parenting? That some peanut allergy kid with a high level of gullibility has been “assaulted” because he was forced to endure the uncertainty of whether his clothing might be infected? I must say, I don’t have a great degree of confidence in the child’s intelligence since the invisible nut residue didn’t generate an allergic reaction before he had time to run home to mommy.

The post-bullying world we live in is cultivating these gullible momma’s boys by the millions. Whereas in my day one might handle this incident by bloodying the offender’s nose, we’re now teaching our children to be paranoid snitches. Now that the schoolyard fight has been removed from the equation, running to teacher or mommy is really the only option anyway.

It’s not that I’m insensitive to the genuine danger of peanut allergies. It’s the typical overreaction to the smallest incidents that is a symptom of a generation of parents who are micromanaging children’s behaviour to the point where we’re actually depriving them of solving their own problems.

In our desperation to avoid having our children experience the same horrible things we did, we rob them of an essential human experience. No, Johnny, don’t hit Simon. Work out your differences verbally. Well, it’s impossible for 8-year-olds to articulate emotions and desires, which is why children used to have a variety of methods to assert dominance in the nuanced power structure of prepubescent interpersonal relationships.

For those lacking wit or craft, there was the fist. For those lacking strength, there was deviousness and manipulation (the peanut allergy bully). And for those lacking both, there was charisma. We’ve reduced this now to a one-size-fits-all method in which we expect the power structure to be neutral, making everybody into the same nervous, paranoid easy marks that they are.

If you have a pack of dogs, you accept the fact that one dog will assert a level of dominance and each subordinate dog will find a place in the order. It’s only at the dog park that you see humans attempt to assert a neutral and artificial concept of equality. Children are a lot like dogs, since they lack the capacity for mature reasoning, empathy and respect, so they find other ways to create a hierarchy.

And adults, neurotic as we are, have destroyed that, all because we’re militantly fearful of having our children experience anything unpleasant. (Ironically, the segment preceding this one on the CBC was all about having children wear helmets while sledding).

There are genuine cases of bullying that still exist, though they’re rare and exist at the more mature grades. When a child decides to terrorize a large group of kids physically or emotionally, it’s something that should be addressed. But I haven’t seen any child like that in primary school. What I’ve seen is a fanatical attempt to push adult values on undeveloped minds by academics who obviously don’t remember what it was like to be a child.

The first time I realized anti-bullying had overreached its authority was when my six-year-old son was suspended from school for chasing a girl threatening to kiss her. He was suspended for sexual harrassment. The sick and perverted part of this is that the principal was inserting an adult desire that was impossible for my child to possess. He didn’t want to kiss the girl for sexual reasons. He didn’t even want to kiss her. He just enjoyed the way the threat made the girl fearful and exploited it to the fullest benefit.

As we grow up we learn all sorts of interesting and important ways to manipulate people. And let’s face it, the kids who learn how to push the buttons and get other children to do what they want aren’t the bullies. They end up being your bosses and your corporate owners. The passive, fearful child who runs to authority for protection will learn nothing. Except that solving problems with other people requires going to a person with greater power.

I don’t really believe bullying is as large a problem as we’ve made it out to be. What we have is a new generation of parents who want their children to grow up in a tolerant, pain-free, emotionless world. It’s a fantasy that doesn’t exist, so they’ve created rules and guidelines and PAC committees to enforce their delusions. All to the detriment of the next generation.

By now many people are likely aware of the comments made by NDP leadership hopeful Thomas Mulcair about his pride in being a dual French and Canadian citizen, mainly because of the ensuing comments from Prime Minister Stephen Harper. In his most classically irreverent “just visiting” manner possible, Harper indiscreetly took a shot at Mulcair by stating his Canadianness greatly exceeds that of Mulcair’s.

“Just to be clear, these cases have come up in the past, and obviously it’s for Mr. Mulcair to use his political judgment in this case. In my case, as I say, I’m very clear. I’m a Canadian and only a Canadian.”

On the surface it might seem innocent enough. He was asked a question by the media, who are wont to stir the pot whenever the opportunity arises, and the Conservative leader obliged to take the spoon and furiously stir. But as we’ve learned over the years that the highly intelligent Harper has been a politician in this country, nothing he says or does can really be described as innocent.

This is a man for whom the word “relax” has no meaning. Scarcely a year since winning a majority government in Ottawa, the Conservatives have been busy running attack ads on enemies who are largely powerless, frustrating them in the House of the Commons at every opportunity, and continuing to the fundraise, presumably in the hopes that when the next election comes along they can destroy all traces of political opposition in Canada.

Harper is a shrewd and remarkable man, for he’s able to play on divisive issues with unparalleled talent. He deftly turned aside support for Michael Ignatieff by preying on issues largely irrelevant to his competence. He suggested Ignatieff was too aloof, an erudite intellectual taken to long absences from Canada, a country he could hardly understand or have any love for.

And it worked, in part because it did bother Canadians to think that Ignatieff had spent so many years outside of Canada. There was a genuine agreement that he had returned to Canada not for public service, but to lead the country. While some would rightly say that’s a laudable thing, others would say it was presumptuous and elitist.

But let’s not lose sight of the issue here. Harper criticizes a great deal of things in Canada that he makes no real attempt to change. The best example of this might be the Senate. But he does this purely for political gain. So when he was asked for his opinion on Mulcair, realizing the man could become the next NDP leader presented the irresistible chance to plant a seed of doubt in the minds of Canadians, and the groundwork for a smear campaign at a later date.

Having said that, Harper doesn’t say or do something unless he’s relatively convinced it’s going to resonate with Canadians. And to tell truth, the fact Canada has dual citizenship allowances is something that bothers a lot of people. Note that Harper would never seek to challenge the law itself, removing the right to hold two citizenships, since that doesn’t serve his political aims.

At the heart of every citizen of a country is a patriot, and we like to believe we love our country. Those Canadians who immigrated here from other countries were never forced to give up their old loyalties and swear allegiance to one land. Some believe that’s a strength, but I think many people, the people who might vote for Stephen Harper, find it a little bothersome. Not so much for the ordinary citizen, since our country is made up of many naturalized citizens, but for those who would lead us and speak for us.

There’s a reason that a rule exists that the President of the United States must be born on American soil to serve in office. It’s because people believe that loyalties can be divided, particularly if a person was born and grew up in another country. The idea that the leader serves only one people is a comforting one.

But even that isn’t the point of the Harper-Mulcair milieu. Stephen Harper isn’t Canadian by choice as he suggests. He was born here, just as I was, and so naturally he’s a Canadian and only a Canadian. What else could he possibly be? It’s meaningless for Harper to state an obvious fact. It would be more impressive if he had been born in Kenya and then renounced his Kenyan citizenship and stated his one true loyalty is Canada.

For Mulcair, there’s no genuine fear that his loyalties are divided. The term “Canadian of convenience” doesn’t apply to him. It applies to those citizens who might live abroad, but still return to Canada once in a while to keep their affairs in order, perhaps take advantage of health care or some other universal service. Or the ones who become Canadian suddenly when their country is besieged by war or natural disaster. Then they become Canadians in a hurry.

If anything, Mulcair is a Frenchman of convenience, becoming a dual citizen for the same reason many Canadians do. They keep some of the perks and benefits of membership. Hey, if you could get a free passport to the United Kingdom, wouldn’t you take one?

In the end, both politicians were just playing politics. Mulcair was appealing to his multicultural NDP base, while Harper was appealing to his. And citizens, dual citizens or otherwise shouldn’t really care one way or another.

An article in the National Post today highlights an issue in North America that grows larger by the day. It’s called sex-selective abortion, or otherwise known as gendercide, one of the reasons that large portions of Asia are imbalancing the natural male to female ratio by killing female fetuses. And the immigrants from countries that practice this atrocity constitute the two largest ethnic groups coming here: Chinese and Indians.

We’ve known about gendercide for a while now, but largely ignored it because the practice was being done outside of Canada. Things that happen beyond our borders bother us less than when they happen in our own backyard. But the idea that Asians are coming here to perform sex-specific abortions isn’t just something that can be ignored. Particularly when it begins to affect us because of our need and craven desire to treat all cultures equally.

Canadians, as much as we are changing each and every year, have traditionally had no history of sex-selective abortion. When technology came along that enabled us to determine the sex of a fetus, we accepted the technology as a boon to society, not as a tool to end the life of girls. And while it can be said that abortion has a solid history of practice in Canada, it has never been due to cultural hangups about the relative value of women in our society.

The concept of murdering women is morally repugnant in Canada, and so should be the concept of aborting female fetuses. It should make us feel the same revulsion we have for the Taliban murdering girls or enslaving them behind shrouds. Gendercide could very well be the 2010′s version of the outcry of gender apartheid a decade ago in Afghanistan and other parts of the world that do not accept the concept of egalitarianism.

But what I cannot accept is a notion that all Canadians should be treated with the same sort of inherent mistrust when it comes to ultrasounds. We’ve already been through this with terrorism. Where one specific demographic has had a prolific history of terrorism, we have taken to suspecting the 99.99 per cent of Canadians who are not terrorists. The lengths to which we have been inconvenienced in order to provide a preposterous appearance of not racially profiling has resulted in the most inefficient, intrusive and invasive way of travelling possible.

Similarly, a large percentage of Canadians have no chance of being sex-selective abortionists. However, it’s fair to say that this percentage changes on a daily basis as thousands of new Asian immigrants come to North America every single day, some of them harbouring backwards cultural hangups that are incompatible with our own culture. It is within the identified demographics from the article of people from India, China, Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines that we should be looking to target this problem.

There’s nothing racist or discriminatory about this. There is no rational reason for refusing to tell Canadians who are not of Asian descent the sex of the fetus since it’s reasonable to expect the fetus isn’t in danger. A blanket ban on all Canadian women is the same useless and failed approach used against terrorism, and all it’s going to do is piss everybody off.

There may be another way. Perhaps when a parent is apprised of the sex of a fetus, that doctor is legally obliged to inform abortion clinics of the decision with the name of the mother. Or perhaps a mother could sign a legal document swearing they will not abort the child after learning the sex. Although based on Canada’s nebulous abortion laws, or lack thereof, I could foresee the clinic going ahead with the abortion anyway. After all, these places are designed to put the woman’s choice ahead of all other issues, even if that choice is culturally reinforced by a patriarchal society that dominates and subjugates women.

Regardless of how it’s achieved, the idea that “policy would require the understanding and willingness of women of all ethnicities” is insulting to the vast majority of ethnicities that don’t practice this barbarism. In the same way that the politically correct are careful not to offend anybody by painting too broadly with the same broad brush, it’s extremely offensive to be equally suspected of wanting to abort your child for cultural issues that aren’t your own.

Ironically, although this issue is less about abortion itself and more about cultural gendercide, social conservatives might find themselves tempted to support a politically correct blanket ban until seven months, knowing that the greater goal of preventing as many abortions as possible is more important than the inconvenience it might serve to non-Asians.

But that sort of thinking has to be rejected. No matter where you stand on the abortion issue, the more morally repugnant act is surely the selection of an entire gender for eradication. This is a disgusting, offensive extermination of girls in the womb based on the belief that boys are more valuable in a society than girls. It must be stopped, and that cannot happen by simply closing our eyes and treating the problem as a generic one like the common cold.

I drive roughly 140 kilometres a day to work round-trip. I also have a car that’s entering 15 years of service. Needless to say it isn’t great on the fuel efficiency, which means I’m forced to go to the gas station frequently, sometimes on concurrent days. I don’t enjoy spending hundreds on gasoline every month, but it’s a reality which I’ve come to accept.

While I’m driving these 140 kilometres every day I have a great deal of time to listen to the radio. Most of the time it’s music, but inbetween songs there are the ads. I tune most of these out, but one in particular got my attention the other day. It went something like this: If you’re in the market for a luxury hybrid SUV at z price that’s more than reasonable, we’ve got vehicles starting from as low as $38,000.

A luxury hybrid SUV. What the hell does that even mean? What’s the point of having a hybrid SUV? So you can be at once selfish and selfless? So your car can be one those sight-obstructing eyesores on the highway, but not at the expense of mother nature? So you can sit on heated leather seats while you save the planet?

After all the political gobbledegook about global warming and the crying and shrieking about excess and waste and the need for better fuel efficiency and a change of our lifestyles from consumption to sustainability, the best they can come up with is a carbon tax on my fuel purchases and a hybrid no working man can afford. Thanks, guys. Nice work. Why don’t you offer home energy retrofits for $110,000 to save 40 cents a week on electricity while you’re at it. Oh, you already are? Carry on then.

After all the blustering and blubbering from the environmental movement, where is the working man’s affordable hybrid? The bare bones, stripped down, basic, no-frills version I can afford so I, too, can feel smug about my contribution to the planet’s well-being? Does it start at the ultra-low price of half my annual salary?

The thing is that I think we all know the charade is over. Nobody cares about energy efficiency beyond how it relates to the bottom dollar. Not unless you can afford to care about it. But it isn’t as though there’s some kind of magic fuel source or alternative mode of transportation sitting there, waiting for schleps like me to take advantage. No, we’re basically being incentivized against using gasoline without a viable alternative. I’m not going to bicycle 140 kilometres to work, and I’m certainly not going to be able to afford that more than reasonable luxury hybrid SUV. Which means I’ll continue to fork over hundreds in gasoline expenses every month, of which the government gets their public transportation and carbon taxes.

People don’t want your bare bones, stripped down, basic economy car hybrid anyway. That much is clear by the return of the market demand for F150s and SUVs again. So, without a free market demand for small cars equipped with hybrid technology, the car companies are smearing lipstick on their oversized SUVs and calling them environmentally friendly. Despite all the hemming and hawing about needing to change people’s habits by pushing them to buy more fuel efficient cars, all that’s really been done is some minor tweaking and catering to the mainstream.

If the governments of the day were really serious about radically changing the automotive industry overnight, they’d incentivize hybrids to the working class by offering subsidies on the economy models. But we all know how that turned out south of the border. It didn’t, because there wasn’t any demand for it. Government interference in the market resulted in a push for people to buy something nobody wanted to buy. So instead you wound up with dealers selling electric powered golf carts under the subsidization program and getting away with it.

Look, I don’t care if I can’t afford a hybrid, and I’ll even stop whining about the commercials. Just so long as we drop all the pretenses about wanting to save the environment and scrap the carbon tax. Scrap these bogus and half-hearted efforts to make the appearance of caring, and just make gasoline as affordable as possible for people like me who wince when we pull into a gas station.

If and when a cheaper, alternative fuel source and car comes along for the masses, then you can start taxing gasoline into oblivion.

An image the CBC isn’t likely to show you. Omar Khadr during his younger, more happy days as a terrorist apprentice building IEDs to kill and main people.
Photo: U.S. DEFENCE OPERATIONS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

I can’t think of anything more appropriate to sum up this slobbering suckupfest to the life and times of a murderer, terrorist and a war criminal, than the following screenshot:

Whatever truth that the commenter imparted to gain the “thumbs up” from the 76 per cent of people who voted was apparently not truthful enough for the CBC, who not only deleted the comment, but appears to have deleted all and any comments that were approved of by the majority of the readers. Because you know what they say at the CBC, the customer is always wrong.

These, apparently, were allowed to stay. Probably because they reaffirm the main basis of truth the CBC operates under, which is that Canada is inhabited by a land of racists:

Well, uh, you see, Neoriel, the reason this young man is being villified, as it were, is that he’s an admitted murderer, a terrorist and a war criminal. Glad I could clear that up for you.

I figured I’d said enough about Keynesian economics in the last blog entry, but a train of thought has since been weaving through my brain, and so I should probably let it out.

It isn’t just that the idea of spending money to stave off recessions are a contemporary madness, or that politicians manipulate them in order to avoid becoming unpopular during the inevitable ebb and flow of market forces. Nor is it that Keynesian economics always leaves us farther behind than we were before, necessitating larger and larger government assistance programs and funds to bring us back out of our deeper holes. No, it’s much worse than that.

I heard on the radio today that every conceivable cost of living will be going up again this year at a greater rate than inflation. How we’re expected to pay for it is beyond me. Everything from payroll employment insurance and pension plan taxes to the perpetually pointless carbon tax to car insurance premiums, home heating costs and of course health insurance “premiums”. That lie your parents told you about health care being free in this country isn’t true any more than it is when Occupy Wall Street activists tell Americans how great we have it up here.

No, what’s worse than Keynesian economics is the political disease that necessitates it, a contemporaneous concept borne in the early part of the twentieth century in conjunction with, and that’s no coincidence, the mass media. That political disease is the concept that the government is somehow responsible for your perpetual well-being, care, consideration, welfare, concern and overall happiness. And in so pursuing this impossibly utopian mandate, every single politician has failed to manage it.

What requires a city, a province or a country to mindlessly devalue a currency, spend beyond its fiscally allotted means, irresponsibly raise taxes beyond sustainable levels and meddle in the free market? Why, the politician’s promise of course. Why else would we need to waste $300 billion a year on things nobody needed in 1867 when Canada was a fledgling nation of the British empire? To make Canadians happy, of course.

And how does one make Canadians happy? To attend their every possible need. That means going beyond just the basics of health care, education and law and order, but of course the creation of heritage, economic development, government regulatory boards and bodies, each with their own taxes and fees on top of their per-use service costs.

It isn’t, nor should it ever have been, the job of a politician to create a job for a free citizen of Canada. And at one point in the existence of my family’s habitation in Canada, it wasn’t. Lose your job? Well, you better sweep a chimney, dig a ditch, or shovel behind a horse, or else you and your family would, in short order, be occupying a tent outside, and it didn’t come with a safe injection nurse and a library either.

People who complain about the government not keeping its election promises about employment opportunities and an inability to find work in their field are perhaps the finest idiots this side of the historical record of Christopher Columbus. Do they not realize we are the descendants of people who not only left their homes in England, Scotland and France to find work, they spent two weeks on an ocean voyage for the opportunity to inhabit a barren wasteland? People who can’t be bothered to search more than 10 minutes from their home for a job outside their degree in psychology so they can collect 11 months of employment insurance, are the very reason for the problems we experience.

In the natural order of things, and one can agree upon this whether one believes in Darwin’s theory or not, the fittest survive while the weak are cast off from the earth. Unfortunately, humans are far too civilized to adhere to this basic philosophical truth. We embrace the idea of protecting and nourishing the weak, building entire civilizations around limiting ourselves to how much we can achieve with the burden of millions of people who aren’t helping. And not only are they not helping, they’re literally standing there watching us while they’re not helping, and blaming us for being such daft boors for trying to get things accomplished.

In feudal times it used to be a good job if one could win a spot in the sovereign’s household, wiping mouths and cleaning toilets from sunrise to sunset for some bread and water long enough to keep one’s head from being chopped off on a wooden block. Now, not only do we have a lifestyle so luxurious, so comfortable and utterly free of care, that we have to invent reasons to complain about it. I can’t find a job… that pays me enough to buy the flat screen TV I want. I can’t afford groceries… with mint chocolate chip ice cream. Aye, but you do make sure your iPhone is fully charged, eh?

Sometimes the absurdity of it all just gets to me. We’re in another financial crisis of our manufacture, and everyone is once again contemplating how the politicians of the globe should fix it. Well, one possible solution would be for them not to fix it. That fixing it has been the problem for a long time, and that by not fixing it, it might very well fix itself. After all, the government doesn’t create jobs, it just takes the credit for them.

The raison d’etre of today’s government is to find reasons it should exist. As Stephen Taylor once wrote about scrapping the long-form census, if the government doesn’t know how many Urdu-speaking disabled taxi cab drivers there are in Ottawa, it cannot create policies, programs and government departments dedicated to helping Urdu-speaking disabled taxi cab drivers in Ottawa. The absence of such a program is a benefit to every Canadian.

If we all found more reasons why government shouldn’t exist, instead of why it should, we shouldn’t have a need for a $300 billion annual budget in Ottawa, nor the donation of half our earned income toward that purpose. We shouldn’t need 330 politicians in the House of Commons hemming and hawing about jobs and employment insurance and whether, Mr. Speaker, the honourable member for Thornhill is a piece of excrement for blocking taxpayer-funded trips to Durban to speculate about invisible gasses making us all hot and bothered.

And we certainly shouldn’t need to ask those politicians to come up with solutions that have been self-evident to every creature that emerged from egg or womb since time immemorial.

UPDATE

By the by, writing this reminded me of Kate McMillan’s National Post column from 2008, now disappeared by the Posts’ unreliable archives, but saved by Kate herself. Have a read.

They come out with these articles every first working day of January, reminding us wage slaves of how little we make in comparison to the big corporate CEOs and executives who presumably do little to earn their millions:

The 100 highest paid chief executives whose companies are listed on the S&P/TSX composite index made an average of $8.38 million in 2010, according to figures pulled from circulars by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, a left-leaning think-tank.
That’s 189 times higher than the $44,366 an average Canadian made working full time in 2010, the report says.

Hm, yes. The CCPA says. That’s impressive, I say.

But let’s put it in perspective. The GDP purchasing power party basis for the average Afghan is $900 per year, which takes the average Canadian 39.6 hours to earn. So, by the time your first or second week back to work is finished, you’ll have outearned your Afghan counterpart for the year.

Not that that’s entirely fair, since Afghanistan is 214th on the list of the world’s richest nations. So, since we’re comparing averages, let’s compare the poor average Canadian schlep to the average global inhabitant still utilizing the GDP PPP basis.

That number is about US$7,178 by 2009 estimates. That means by the time March rolls around and Canadians are grumbling about getting a week in Mexico away from the seemingly endless cold and snow and frost, the average wage slave has outearned his global citizen with fully 10 months left in the year.

It’s a far cry from $8.38 million, but I’d say your $44,366 earner in Canada is doing just peachy.