The Substance Problem

The Substance Problem

Increasingly, the Western World’s central issue is the lack of people of substance to put in charge.

The Western World has a substance problem.

No, I’m not talking about drugs here, although we certainly have a lot of issues there. What I’m talking about is the lack of substance in the people we elect to run things.

Once upon a time, we got leaders like Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and John F Kennedy. You know, the sort of people whose statues we’re now quite keen to pull down. These leaders said things that made you think. They did things that changed the world. They read books and wrote them too. Not like Bill Clinton “writes” books, but actually write them, in a room, by yourself, without the aid of a See-and-Say or anyone under the desk (ahem).

Now, this is not to say that the West didn’t have some real duds in command. I can name many. Louis XVI. George IV. Others without roman numerals and hemophilia, like Neville Chamberlin or Mackenzie King, Canada’s WWII Prime Minister, who spent most of his free time communicating with his dead momma on a Ouija board.

But in the olden days, people seemed to know these leaders did not measure up. They chopped Louis XVI’s head off, for instance. Neville Chamberlin got the old heave-ho when it became obvious that Hitler was not a nice man with a puppy and candy. There was a standard, you see.

Today, I would argue, there is no standard. In a world of entirely subjective reality, in which we deliberately target our most effective leaders for their now unfashionable beliefs, or simply ignore the inconvenient things others were saying (like Martin Luther King, for example), there is no yardstick against which to measure.

Hence, the world is now run by, to put it indelicately, a bunch of twats.

This is not their fault; it’s our fault. We want to be lied to. We want social programs without tax bills. Public safety without cops. Free health care, without putting down the burger and fries. Decades of peace and prosperity have produced a fat, happy, indolent electorate, ready and willing to be bribed into somnolence by their own money.

I’ve suspected for a long time now that intelligence is no longer adaptive in an evolutionary sense. In pre-history, intelligent people sired more offspring because they were smart enough not to be-bop down to the watering hole with their heads up their asses, therefore not getting eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger. Thus, did our brains get bigger.

But something went wrong along the way. Having solved the basic problems, at least in the West, of food, shelter, and not dying of tetanus at the age of thirteen, we started to obsess about other things. These other things included being liked, not offending people, and lying because the truth is unpopular. We all do it. And we vote for people who do it too.

Exhibit “A”: Canada’s Prime Minister/King/Maximum Leader, Justin Trudeau.

When Trudeau the Younger first emerged on the political scene in the early 2000’s, he was widely written off as a lightweight. Which, in fact, he was and still is. But Justin, and more importantly, the people behind him, especially Gerald Butts, his long-time and now supposedly retired advisor, had correctly read the zeitgeist.

Canada was ready for a lightweight with a storied name and fabulous hair.

When Justin beat out such Liberal luminaries as Bob Rae (used to be a Socialist, but then the Liberals became Socialists with an actual chance of winning an election), Stephane Dion, a staunch nationalist in two different countries, and Michael Ignatieff, a man who actually writes his own books, to lead the Liberal Party, Stephen Harper and his governing Conservatives thought they’d died and gone to heaven.

He was a college dropout and former snowboard instructor who had “dude” written all over him. Though popular in Ontario and the Maritimes, his father was loathed in the West and a subject of Gallic shrugs in Quebec. So far, his Parliamentary highlight had been trouncing an out-of-shape Conservative in a boxing match. He had done exactly nothing to suggest he was a man of gravitas.

He was exactly what Canada wanted. Harper was dour and competent; Trudeau was flashy and huggable. Harper, one suspected, was not exactly a social media addict. Trudeau was the King of Selfies. While the Conservatives ran ads quite rightly suggesting “Justin Trudeau: Just Not Ready,” Trudeau photobombed weddings and made noble promises.

The warning signs of a lack of substance should’ve been obvious to anyone paying attention. The resume sparser than the crowd at Jeffrey Epstein’s funeral. The breezy, off-the-cuff promises damn the price tag. The ever-so-modulated, don’t-jump-off-the-bridge voice. The unpleasant blasts from the past, like rumours of blackface videos (So far, we’re at three; he’s said he doesn’t actually know how many times he’s done the Al Jolson routine. Perhaps he could’ve put that on his resume.), and a CBC French interview in which he suggested that Quebecois were just plain better than other Canadians. They are, of course, to the tune of 13 billion dollars in transfer payments every year.

He was glib, dismissive, and frankly didn’t seem that well-read. I’ve always wanted to get him to name five books he’s read in the past year that didn’t have Waldo in them. His current Heritage Minister, Stephane Guilbeault, a man who doesn’t actually seem to know what’s in the bills he seeks to ram through Parliament, looks an awful lot like Waldo. Coincidence?

But none of that mattered. Canadians were tired of a drab, serious leader. They sought a return to an illusory past where Canada was some sort of moral compass and honest broker. As the walls in Canada’s largest chain of bookstores, Indigo insist, “The World Needs More Canada.”

We would heal our troubled relationship with our Indigenous peoples, and ensure they had safe drinking water. We would withdraw our fighter jets from the fight against ISIS (one wonders who the constituency there is) and instead focus on peacekeeping. We would legalize marijuana. We would treat our veterans better. We would “fix” our electoral system (probably ensuring perpetual Liberal dominance, but okay). We would bring in open, transparent government.

Harper lost. To a lot of low-information voters (Trudeau’s bread and butter) he seemed…well, mean. Canadians don’t like mean. In fact, it’s the First Deadly Sin of the Great White North. That, and saying bad things about Celine Dion. One of the main reasons, I think, why Canadians hated Donald Trump so much (another leader of minimal substance) was that he was mean. We really don’t like mean. We probably would’ve sat out World War II, but Hitler was just plain mean.

And so, the six-year reign of error that is the Justinian Era began. In 2015 he won a handsome majority. In 2019, though, the seas got rougher for Gilligan Trudeau and Skipper Butts. He lost the popular vote by 1% to the Conservatives yet held on to a slim majority. Luckily, Jagmeet Singh, the Socialist NDP leader, must’ve owed Trudeau some money, because he’s been as assertive as a cocker spaniel ever since.

Trudeau rules by fiat, breaking almost every promise he’s made. Fix our relationship with Indigenous people? Hardly. Six years on, and you still can’t get a glass of tap water that won’t kill you in Attawapiskat, and the highest-ranking Indigenous cabinet member in history, Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould, sits as an independent after refusing to end an investigation into a notoriously corrupt construction firm in Trudeau’s home riding. Jody Wilson-Raybould is a person of substance, but in a perfect illustration of our current dilemma, she has recently announced she is leaving politics to the “toxic atmosphere” in Parliament. We can find good people; we just make it too damned hard for them. PS: Trudeau says he’s a feminist. The other cabinet minister to bite the dust over SNC-Lavalin was Jane Philpott, another woman who took a stand. Guess he likes women, just ones who clap and keep their mouths shut.

Our new focus on peacekeeping has resulted in exactly one (1) peacekeeping mission, since terminated. “Canada’s Back!” Meanwhile, Trudeau ensured an Admiral who sidestepped Canada’s geologic-time-scale defense procurement process in order to actually get a new ship built within his lifetime was humiliated and prosecuted for it. Trudeau the Feminist and his defense minister, Harjit Sajjan, Architect of Victory in Afghanistan, have kept sexual harassment allegations against senior defense staff on the backest of all back burners.

Pot is legal, yes. Probably because it’s the only way you can make sense of anything Justin says. But billions in tax revenue, along with the revenue from tobacco, still flow out the back door as a result of black-market pot and contraband smokes.

Treat our veterans better? Hmm, which side of the war are you talking about? It depends. For Canadian veterans, asking for completely reasonable things like artificial limbs and help in not killing themselves, the famous town hall answer Justin gave was “You’re just asking for more than we can give right now.” But not if you’re Omar Khadr. He wasn’t on our side, mind you, but I guess you could call him an “Afghan Vet.” Omar, who at the age of 15, scion of an almost completely terrorist family whose dad was bailed out of Pakistani jail by a prior Liberal PM, killed a US Army medic and wounded another while fighting for Al Qaeda. He got a ten-million-dollar settlement, no questions asked, after being locked up in Guantanamo Bay. I bet a lot of Canadian vets would like to own the strip mall that he bought. Oh well.

Electoral reform died on the operating table, which is actually probably a good thing. Even though my party won the popular vote yet lost the election last time, unlike American Democrats in 2016, I’m not going to spend four years whining about it. It’s the best system we’ve got. And since Justin has whatever is the opposite of the Midas touch, please, please, just leave it alone. As test pilots say, “Better is the enemy of good enough.”

Open, transparent government? I’m really glad I am not eating anything right now, because this is the point at which I’d start choking, and there’s nobody around to Heimlich me. Justin has ruthlessly sidelined ministers who opposed his cronyism, prorogued Parliament (an atrocity for Harper, no biggie for Justin), ensured handsome speaking fees for family members from the phony charity WE Foundation, engaged in the politically-motivated prosecution of Admiral Norman, and is now currently suing Parliament in order to keep the actions of two Chinese scientists removed from Canada’s only BL-4 virus lab in Winnipeg, who happened to take a lovely parting gift of Ebola with them. Perhaps he’s unclear on the meaning of “transparent.” I said he wasn’t very well read.

He rules like a dictator now, emboldened by COVID-19. He hasn’t had a Governor-General to check his decisions in months. Now, facing an imbroglio over unmarked graves at residential schools, he appoints a unilingual Indigenous woman as the next GG. Before this, it was a bilingual position, or you’re a bigot, but hey, didn’t Mark Twain say, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of people who don’t like Justin Trudeau?” Or something like that.

He rams through legislation to curtail online free speech, aided by the now-very-easy-to-find Waldo. He sometimes shows up for Parliament, but doesn’t answer questions, except to utter innocuous, zero-information platitudes. A lapdog media, bought off by subsidies, allows him to get away with five-question social-distanced “press conferences” containing fewer facts than an episode of TMZ. He condemns “white supremacy” and outlaws the dangerous-as-a-poodle Proud Boys as hideous terrorists yet allows Quebec to put civil servants into the street if they wear a turban. He dooms the West’s energy industry yet encourages the endless import of Saudi oil. Big feminists there, I tells ya.

Hypocrisy is the essence of the man. But I don’t think he’s evil. No, here’s the rub. He may just be dumb.

Justin wears an earpiece in the House of Commons, despite being fluently bilingual, and lack of language proficiency is the reason people usually need this. Is Gerry Butts on the other end? It would seem that some help is needed. He doesn’t seem to understand certain basic facts about our system. Facts like, the Prime Minster is not supposed to tell the RCMP what to do. A Governor General is an essential part of our system. Quebec is not allowed to unilaterally change the constitution. I often harp on these pages about the population’s historical and civic illiteracy; but here’s the country’s chief executive illustrating a lack of knowledge that would make a Ryerson undergrad blush.

The worst part? He’s going to be re-elected. That’s the worst part.

He’s going to be re-elected because he does exactly the same things that have won him two prior elections. He makes big promises he has no intention of keeping, but he does it with that ever-so-sincere smile. He hands out freshly printed money with abandon, something he’s currently doing all across the country (I smell an election). He talks, but does not really say anything, an ideal trait for a society in which you are not really allowed to say anything.

In a world where people of substance cannot say anything, expect the rise of the man who can say anything. Justin Trudeau is Hitler’s Big Lie Theory made flesh-and-blood. He is Chauncey Gardner without the bowler hat, Vince the Sham Wow Guy with slightly lower volume.

In short, he is the perfect “leader” for our times. Substance is so last year.