The political class and the media establishment are essentially a single entity in Canada. It is a coalition between a small group of people with political power and a small group of people who control the means of shaping public perception. Like many political coalitions, the two parties in the Political/Media Coalition (PMC) have a history of being adversaries. But over years of close interaction they have gradually come to an understanding that their interests are better served by cooperating.
Sure, there is still the façade of the old adversarial dynamic: Questions are asked. Criticism is leveled. But only within a very narrow band of mutually agreed upon parameters. Mostly it amounts to dinner theatre put on for the Canadian public who now fund both sides of the Coalition with their tax dollars.
Here’s how it works: A politically safe, status-quo concept is agreed upon and adopted by everyone in the political and media establishments regardless of the issue. It could be catastrophic man-made climate change, systemic racism, COVID-19 or any number of other hot-button topics. We are then presented with the theatre of dissent and debate as Conservatives and their allies in the media criticize Liberals and their allies in the media over the management of the status-quo concept. And vice versa.
But the validity of the central premise itself is never questioned.
In other words, we are given the illusion of meaningful opposition and effective scrutiny of the issues. Genuinely meaningful scrutiny would have to at least include if not emphasize a critical examination of the central premise upon which the entire project is based. But it doesn’t happen. Opposition and scrutiny are permitted only within the context of an official narrative which is unreservedly endorsed by all the players.
Take carbon taxes for example. The original argument for their implementation was that they would allow us to control the temperature of the planet. I know. It sounds laughable when you just come out and state it like that. But that was the point. If carbon dioxide reduction schemes can’t do that to any meaningful degree, then the foundational justification for their implementation is nullified.
In short, if the policy will have no meaningful effect on the alleged problem then it should be abandoned.
But questions like how?... or why?... or by how much?… disappeared from the discussion almost immediately. The premise of government imposed reduction of carbon dioxide emissions as a required policy initiative was simply adopted as the status quo position by everyone in the political and media establishments. It became an end in itself: Reduction for the sake of reduction. Debate was confined to questions about whether a given climate policy fulfills Paris Climate Accord commitments, or whether the policy goes far enough, or complaints about the speed with which a policy has been implemented.
But questioning the efficacy of the policy to achieve the ultimate goal for which it was proposed vanished completely and forever. Asking “By how much can we reduce emissions?” usurped the one truly pertinent question: “By how much will any of these disruptive state interventions control the temperature of the Earth?”
We are presently seeing this sham process of strictly controlled questioning, scrutiny and debate applied to every aspect of COVID-19.
For instance, the entirety of the political/media establishment in Canada is currently obsessed with vaccines. It’s one of the half dozen or so subjects the PMC has designated as officially sanctioned topics for public discussion.
The status quo premise that has been adopted by the media and the political class is that a COVID-19 mRNA ‘vaccine’ must be procured and widely distributed to everyone in Canada as quickly as possible. The current public discourse is entirely consumed with criticism of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s bungling of that process.
Below is a random sample of the kind of discussion and debate we’re hearing. The first example is a press release from the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Erin O’Toole. The second is a tweet by conservative journalist Brian Lilley:
“Today is another disappointing day for Canadians who know that without vaccines, there is no recovery. The Liberals need to be honest with Canadians on what they’re doing to secure the vital tools needed today to fight COVID-19 and secure our future.” - Erin O'Toole
“Don’t worry! PM @JustinTrudeau announced we will make vaccines in Canada this summer and by summer he really means the end of 2021.”- Brian Lilley
There is no doubt that Trudeau’s government has demonstrated striking ineptitude in accomplishing the stated goal of procuring and distributing these ‘vaccines’. And it should come as a shock to no one that they’ve been characteristically slippery when pressed to account for it. So the criticism of his handling of this file is not unjustified.
However, the necessity of pursuing the process in the first place has never been questioned let alone examined.
Specifically, there has been no conversation at all about the wisdom of holding the population at ransom over the chaotic, mass roll-out of a rushed, expensive, experimental gene technology to treat a virus we now know represents less of a threat to most people than seasonal influenza.
But of course, anyone who dares step outside the official group-think is immediately excoriated by the rest of the establishment. They have broken the rules of their elite little club and exposed the pantomime which is passed off as serious debate. As a result, courageous, intellectually honest thinkers are defamed as loons, labeled conspiracy theorists, denounced as morally corrupt and expelled from official public discourse.
Here is an example of the Canadian media specifically calling for this very practice:
“It might be understood that political parties can play an important role in keeping a country's political debate on the tracks by shunning the most extreme views and aiming to appeal to the broadest swath of voters. “ – Aaron Wherry, CBC
This is an alleged ‘journalist’ at Canada’s taxpayer funded state broadcast corporation actually calling for political elites to force the narrowing of the ‘country’s political debate’. He wants across the board conformity to politically safe, officially sanctioned narratives that he patronizingly says will ‘appeal’ to Canadians. Views that wander outside the anodyne official group-think are to be labeled ‘extreme’ and shunned.
And we’ve seen this happen. MPP Roman Baber was recently expelled from the Progressive Conservative Party in Ontario by Premier Doug Ford for publicly addressing the questionable scientific justification and devastating impact on citizens of Ford’s harsh lockdown measures. Bringing this compassionate, data-driven and widely shared point of view to the table was characterized by the ‘conservative’ Premier as “putting people at risk by spreading misinformation and undermining the efforts of frontline healthcare workers.”
Unsurprisingly, members of the media wing of the PMC gushed in support of the Premier’s actions:
‘Doug Ford deserves credit for expelling MPP, but Roman Baber’s cherry-picked data and unscientific opinions have support’ - Bruce Arthur, Columnist Toronto Star
This kind of malicious slander and public ‘shunning’ is how principled people are punished for trying to expand the discussion beyond the controlled narratives favoured by the political/media establishment in Canada.