Since we’re probably not looking at a change in government for the next decade, all I can really do with this column of mine is chart Mark Carney’s digestion by the Ottawa blob. At this point in time, the process is in its very early stages, where the victim doesn’t even know it’s happening and everything they do just makes it worse.
He might look at an Abacus poll that shows that Canadians believe that their country has achieved shining city on a hill status as the rest of the world falls apart. Or he might conclude that he has a free hand because voters have decided that Pierre Poilievre is a whiny loser, even though they seemed to think Poilievre was the man Carney is a mere six months ago. Or he might look back on his career as an international man of mystery and believe that remaking a country like Canada in his image is something he can do in his sleep.
And so Carney, believing he has some sort of special mandate just because he performed the not-so-special feat of humiliating the Conservatives yet again, does things like invite shady characters Mohammad Bin Salman and Narendra Modi to the G7, or blows out defence spending without actually making sure the bureaucracy is capable of spending the money, or make it easier to send people on temporary visas back to where they came from.
Carney, who is still playing at being Mr. CEO, thinks he can ignore protests in Montreal over his immigration law changes. It’s Montreal! If it’s a day ending in Y, someone somewhere in that city is protesting. This is the one consistent thing we have been able to determine about the cipher-like Carney: he doesn’t suffer fools, and unless you’re another world leader or man of distinction like him, he’s not going to be moved by special pleading. That’s why he hasn’t rejected Donald Trump’s Golden Dome fantasy outright, and why he moves to sanction Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir only when everyone else is doing it too.
The staple Canadian Jewish advocacy organizations are unlikely to be successful when dealing with a man with that self-concept. I speak of writing press releases, sending and retweeting tweets, hosting bagel brunches and wine-fuelled salon parties, and most of all, crying aloud that we as a people are done for if the government doesn’t drop what it’s doing and run to protect us. It has been pointed out for quite some time now that asking governments to coddle us with things like bubble legislation doesn’t necessarily engender sympathy.
We just saw how this kind of emotional manipulation is ineffective when community leaders tried dragging him to the Nova Festival exhibit so that he would be overcome with pity for us. He was promptly accused of falling for genocide-laundering propaganda, and to his credit he didn’t fall immediately to his knees and apologize like his predecessor would have. Unfortunately the next item on Carney’s agenda was to put Gaza and the West Bank in the same category as Ukraine and Canada’s Arctic as places that need their territorial integrity protected. Now both the pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian folks are upset again! Just like under Trudeau.
At some time in the future, after a few thousand of these microaggressions, Carney will be wondering why he can’t find a friend anywhere. He’ll still be called upon to whoop the Conservatives at election time. For now, it would be more productive to present him with a list of Jewish community demands, as if we had been invited to the recent First Ministers’ meeting. If you ask Doug Ford, Mark Carney is in a giving mood so long as we don’t complicate things with messy feelings. It looks like he’ll fund pretty much any infrastructure project and call it an “investment.”
Therefore I am suggesting, until I am proven wrong by this government saying “no” to literally anything, that Jewish community groups could present professional-looking financial requests and have those requests granted. They need to pretend like it’s COVID 2.0 (because it kind of is) and anything that could qualify under “economic development” or “infrastructure” will get the green light and can be justified after the fact.
Josh Lieblein can be reached at [email protected] for your response to Doorstep Postings.
