So much about the class structure of Canadian society is being exposed by everything that's happened over the last year and half of COVIDMANIA.
And it's ugly.
It was apparent right at the start. Back in March of 2020, when belief in a universally deadly plague sweeping the nation could still be nominally justified, the population was officially divided into two classes: A privileged class for whom going to work was deemed far too dangerous and everyone else for whom going to work was deemed 'essential' for the convenience of the people in the privileged class.
If you were a lawyer, a teacher, a politician, if you worked in finance or the tech industry, the risk posed to your life by simply showing up to work was considered too great by the people in power to take the chance. If you were a minimum wage earner stocking shelves at Metro or Cosco, filling the online orders and delivering food to high earning professionals working from home... you were told the risk to your life was well worth it. Just don't get too close to the customer when you make the delivery. They don't like that. And wear a mask.
The fact that there was no popular uprising right there and then from the millions of people whose lives were now officially deemed less valuable in society speaks to the placidity of this servant class in Canada.
Almost immediately, everyone in Canadian media made it clear whose side they were on. And it wasn't the side of the people most impacted by the political establishment's newly acquired taste for authoritarian rule. After all, being a mainstream journalist in Canada meant you were one of the people in the anointed work-from-home-with-full-pay class. And journalists were not shy about letting everyone know it.
They embarked on what amounted to a campaign of open hostility towards people in the servant class. They stopped even attempting to disguise their contempt. They watched as basic civil liberties were stripped from their fellow citizens. As they lost their jobs. As their businesses were closed. As their children's education and mental health were destroyed. As their insecurity and anxiety mounted. As the political establishment became increasingly comfortable dispensing with the constraints of liberal democratic principles.
Canadian journalist watched all of this. And they could barely contain their enthusiasm for it all.
In fact, the only consistent complaint from the media establishment in Canada over the last year and half has been that the authoritarianism wasn't sufficiently oppressive. Their tolerance for other people's suffering has been inexhaustible. They've filled their op eds and Twitter feeds with demands that politicians impose ever harsher measures. Any display of independence, resistance or free will from uppity peasants was met with calls for the full force of the state to be used to crush dissent.
Simon Houpt The Globe and Mail:
Jen Gerson CBC, the National Post, Maclean's:
Chris Selley, National Post:
Andrew Coyne Globe and Mail, CBC
Heather Mallick Toronto Star
Bruce Arthur, Toronto Star:
We're now more than a year and half into this madness. The original conception of this virus was of a science-fiction-come-to-life scenario in which a pathogen so deadly and unlike anything that's ever existed posed an existential threat to all human life. That fantastical conception is now untenable. In fact, it was known within weeks of the pandemic being declared that the risk to the population is extremely age-stratified. The very elderly are almost exclusively the cohort to whom this virus poses a serious health threat. And even for them the likelihood of a good outcome is high if they're in good health.
"You can be 85 and have no serious medical condition and you're going to do very very well. That should have been the entire... and still should be... the entire focus of how to prevent death. And particular in Canada which has done the worse than any other of the developed countries in protecting her elderly." - Dr. Roger Hodkinson, Chairman of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons Examination Committee in General Pathology, Ottawa.
Your chances of dying from this virus were greatly enhanced however if you were in a government run or overseen institution. We're talking about long-term care homes and hospitals. That's where the vast majority of deaths of the elderly occurred.
By the way, the governments that people trusted to care for their parents and grandparents are the same governments now assuring you the experimental pharmaceutical technology they're injecting into you and your kids is completely 'safe and effective'. Just something to think about.
Which brings us back to our wonderful Canadian journalists. To put it bluntly, they love the idea of forcing people to take drugs. I don't know why. They just do. Even when it's drugs that people don't need for their own health. Even when those drugs are an experimental pharmaceutical technology being indiscriminately administered in an unprecedented mass drugging operation. Journalists can't get enough of it. It doesn't even matter who is doing the forcing... politicians, corporations, employers... As long as someone with power is overriding the will of someone else by making it impossible to be employed or function in society without submitting to taking drugs mandated by the state.
And that's not all. Canadian journalists want to see people hurt if they do anything other than quietly comply. And they're not ashamed to say it out loud.
It's extraordinary.
Andre Picard, Globe and Mail
Gary Mason, Globe and Mail
Scott Gilmore, Maclean's Magazine
Justin Ling, CBC , Maclean's
Andrew Coyne, Globe and Mail, National Post
Sharon Kirkey, National Post
Robyn Urback, Globe and Mail, CBC, National Post:
"... the requirement to get vaccinated to participate in normal life takes the decision out of individual's hands... While that might signal the start of creeping authoritarianism to those staunchly anti-vaccination, to the vaccine-hesitant – and everyone else looking hoping for better vaccine coverage across the country – it can offer invaluable mental reprieve."
Warren Kinsella, Toronto Sun
So we've established that Canadian journalists are rabidly pro lockdown regardless of the scientific validity of these measures, how destructive they are or if they're in any way justifiable as a response to the actual level of threat. They have no qualms about the political class dispensing with the principles of liberal democracy. They would have preferred even harsher authoritarian controls to have been imposed on people. Which means they would have been content to see even greater carnage wreaked on the lives of ordinary Canadians. They're giddy about the prospect of people being forced to take experimental drugs known to cause serious adverse reactions in some people and which have no mid to long term safety profile. They are calling for politicians to hurt people who still believe that citizens in a liberal democracy are entitled to decide for themselves what medications they take... a belief held by pretty much everybody until 10 minutes ago. And they are openly contemptuous and hostile towards Canadians who don't unquestioningly conform to their views on all of this.
So at this point you must be wondering about the Canadian media establishment's group-think attitude towards the latest high tech gadgetry at the top of every aspiring medical tyrant's wish list. I'm of course referring to the truly odious, CCP-level mechanism of digital social control, the vaccine passport.
Shocker: They love those too!
Let's not beat around the bush. These digital controls will permanently change the way we've lived in our country for generations. The Canada you grew up in or emigrated to will be gone. Going forward, you will have to be prepared at any moment to produce proof you are meeting the government's current requirements to be permitted to function in society.
Want to go pick up something at the mall? Well, wait a minute. Did you take the latest government mandated booster shot yet? No? Sorry. No mall for you.
Running late for that important meeting? Sorry, the app on your phone is responding red, not green. You can't get on the subway. 'But I got the latest shot yesterday!' Sorry. The app says you didn't. You'll just have to miss the meeting. I'm sure your boss will understand.
Think of the potential for control beyond merely taking whatever drugs the government demands you take once your social media, banking, mortgage, utility services, education records and employment details are linked to the system.
Don't take my word for it. Politicians in various jurisdictions around the Western World are openly telling you now that this is your future. Justin Trudeau, the 49 year old spoiled rich kid who runs Canada is campaigning for reelection by openly threatening Canadians with "consequences" if they defy his will. He's literally promising to have people fired and banned from planes and trains if they vote for him.
The grotesque, gnome-like feudal lord of the once free state of Victoria Australia has been even more explicit:
"We're going to move from a situation where, to protect the health system, we've got everybody locked down... to situation where, to protect the health system, we're going to lock out people who are not vaccinated... There's going to be a vaccinated economy. You get to participate in that if you are vaccinated." - Dan Andrews, Premier of Victoria Australia
We've already seen mainstream news reports from Australia showing workers being ordered to leave the jobsite and go straight home for failing to provide current vaccination status to marshals conducting random checks.
This is crazy stuff. The kind of thing most of us never imagined we would see in Western liberal democracies.
But the Canadian media establishment seems blithely unaware of all of this. Or totally indifferent. Mostly they seem wildly enthusiastic.
Can you guess what Canadian journalists are not so enthusiastic about? That's right! It's anyone who doesn't share their collective enthusiasm for forced vaccination and totalitarian vaccine passports.
But the thing that grinds their journalistic gears more than anything else is the sight of the people whose lives have been most impacted by a year and half of devastating, authoritarian political policies letting the elites who did it to them know exactly how they feel about it... Who do these awful people think they are? And have you heard the language some of them are using? Goodness me! These peasants truly are revolting!
Journalists in this country have been sycophantic cheerleaders for the obscenities inflicted on citizens by the political establishment for more than a year and a half.
Now the entire Canadian media establishment is clutching their pearls over a few naughty words directed at their friends in the ruling class.
The truth is that every bought and paid for journalist in Canada simply despises people who won't politely and passively submit to state authority. "Stop harassing your betters! You've been told to stay home and take your drugs! Now shut up and do it!"
This kind of thinking is being treated as normal in Canada now. That's how lost in the mania we've become. It's not good. It's not good at all.
We've all been swept along on a very fast moving conveyor belt for 18 months. It's well past the point that we need to make the conscious effort to step off, catch our breath and try to regain some kind of detached, objective perspective on what we're doing and where we're going.
No reasonable person should be opposed to that. Taking a step back and reassessing the situation is what responsible, thinking adults do. Particularly when such unprecedented and drastic changes are being implemented on the fly and with little if any serious debate or consideration of the long term consequences.
But currently, nobody is allowing themselves to even contemplate the possibility that we've gone down the wrong path. People are so deeply invested in the perfection of the official narrative that just considering they may have got this wrong represents too great a cost to their ego. So honest self-reflection is banished.
For months they have luxuriated in the conviction they were the infallibly correct and enlightened people. At the same time they've become intoxicated by self-righteousness. They've savoured the satisfaction of denouncing other people as their moral inferiors. How common has it become for people to casually pass judgement on the humanity of their fellow Canadians by labeling any 'wrong think' about masks or forced vaccination as unforgivable 'selfishness'?
It would require a good deal of self-awareness and humility to take stock of yourself this far into the process. To acknowledge that maybe the thing you've been proudly and loudly taking part in for the last year and half is starting to get out of hand and is heading in an increasingly dark direction.
Unfortunately, if people possessed that kind of self-awareness and humility it's unlikely they would have given themselves over so freely and fully to this mania in the first place.
The egos of the small, insular clique of wannabe elites who make up the Canadian media establishment are perhaps the most invested in the status quo of all. They publicly put all their chips and credibility on the government's side of the table at the start and let it ride. And not just their personal and professional credibility, but the credibility of the institution of journalism in Canada itself. As a profession, they all adopted the same position from the start. They doubled-down, then tripled-down then quadrupled-down on that position as the months passed. They carefully curated the information they projected to maintain a perception of threat to the public that justified their endorsement of increasingly authoritarian actions by the state. They excluded data, analysis and expert opinion that threatened the plausibility of that position. They participated in stoking hatred and division among Canadians. And they facilitated the agenda of the people with power in this country rather than holding them to account. In short, they're in this up to their necks. Maybe that's why they all seem so irrational and angry lately. They know that if it turns out they bet on the wrong horse it's over for them and for their entire industry.
And they're coming across as increasingly panicky.
A watershed moment in this process we've all been moving through occurred on August 26, 2021 when the biggest newspaper in Canada published this on the front page:
With that sentiment, the media establishment forever exploded the great Canadian myth. The gratingly banal yet widely embraced self-conception of a nation of preternaturally 'nice', excruciatingly dull but morally exceptional citizens died that day.
Of course, it was never true to begin with. Ironically, the national image based on the kind of trite, self-satisfied platitudes that could make even the dippiest of 60s-era hippies wretch is the legacy of Justin Trudeau's father Pierre. It was assiduously grafted onto the national psyche by the senior Trudeau's government during his long, almost unbroken reign from 1968 until the mid 1980's. Unlike his son, Pierre was actually highly intelligent. But like his son, he was a hubristic Utopian who believed he was entitled to restructure Canada in his own likeness.
But now that idealistically flattering national myth is officially dead. We've come full circle under Trudeau Jr's watch.
Sure, the vacuous platitudes will continue to be spewed. God knows Justin Trudeau alone is incapable of communicating without them. But with a media landscape in which the country's biggest newspaper can openly target a portion of the population with such unvarnished malevolence and splash it across the front page, Canadians can no longer conceive of their country as the global model of tolerance, compassion and awe-inspiring niceness we've sanctimoniously pretended to be.
Speaking of awe-inspiring...
Nine days later the Star published another bold-type, emotionally convulsive front page.
You couldn't help but shake your head in disbelief. It would be like telling your wife she looks fat in that outfit and then exclaiming "Why are you so angry?" as she stormed out of the room.
This cry of bewilderment perfectly summed up the yawning chasm separating the insular bubble in which the small clique of journalists exist and the real world occupied by ordinary Canadians. And yet journalists purport to explain that real world to those Canadians.
Without intending it, they acknowledged the total absence of self-awareness and the irrelevance that characterizes journalism in Canada today.