CANADA IS BROKEN:
76 per cent of rural people agree and a survey of one week of news reveals they have good reasons
Patrick Meagher
Farmers Forum
An online Leger poll of 1,554 Canadians found that we think that the country is in really bad shape and half the population is downright angry about it.
The Jan. 20-22 survey found that 67% of Canadians agree with the statement of a Canadian politician who said that “it feels like everything is broken in this country right now.” Look at rural respondents only and the number of people who think Canada is broken jumps to an astounding 76 %.
The survey also found that 50 % of Canadians are “angry” with the way Canada is being managed. That’s more than 15-million people. That’s a lot of people and we all know some of them. I am amazed at how many people have told me they’d like to smack the prime minister. The anger is not just from grumpy old men with sleep apnea. Young men and women are angry too.
It can be overwhelming to add up all government proposals, policies and actions that can infuriate and make Canada look like a country determined to fail. So, rather than attempt a list for which would require writing a book, I looked at just one week of news reported online and in print to see if people have reasons to be peeved. I looked at the first week (Feb. 5 to 11) after the Leger poll was published.
While the events might not have occurred in that first week, the reporting did. Surprisingly, or not surprisingly, very few of these stories were reported by CBC. Here’s what I found.
• A Renfrew Catholic high school student was arrested and charged with trespassing by police after he returned to school following a suspension for saying that he believes there are only two sexes, a position shared by biologists and, supposedly, the Catholic school that he attended.
• The federal government sunk $173 million into a vaccine plant in the Quebec City riding of Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos that was never built and has no plan to recover the money from the Japanese company that was supposed to build it.
• Wait times to see a physician in Canada increased by 50 per cent in 2022 and 3.8 million Canadians are waiting for surgery or a diagnostic scan.
• The U.S. national guard is handing out free bus tickets to illegal immigrants in New York City to go to an illegal entry point — Roxham Road, south of Montreal — to get into Canada and the Canadian authorities are letting up to 3,000 people per month enter illegally, then putting them up in hotels at a cost of $4,000 per month per room to the taxpayer.
• While bail is difficult to get for peaceful protestors (Freedom Convoy leader Tamara Lich spent 48 days in jail and is still waiting to be tried for mischief), all charges were dropped against a man caught on video smashing his bicycle against the side of car until he broke the window. The alleged killer of a police office in December was released on bail. The man sought in the random murder of a Toronto man in January was also released on bail.
• Former Liberal MP Frank Baylis (Pierrefonds-Dollard, Que.) retired from politics in 2019 to resume management of Baylis, his Montreal medical supply firm. The next year the company, that did not have a federal licence to manufacture ventilators, received a cash advance under a $237.3 million contract for 10,000 ventilators that were never used. A total of 9,056 of the 10,000 Baylis ventilators were warehoused as surplus by the Public Health Agency and never used in any hospital or clinic. About 350 were donated to India.
• After marijuana was legalized police-reported drug impaired driving charges more than doubled in four years to 7,454 cases in 2021.
• Chinese influence in the last federal election was so powerful that it unseated a federal Conservative MP and might have cost the Conservatives the election, Charles Burton, senior fellow at the Ottawa think tank Macdonald-Laurier Institute, testified at a House affairs committee meeting. Burton said that on the same day that a poll showed that the federal government could win a minority government, a disinformation campaign was launched against the sitting Conservative MP in a Vancouver suburb. The MP was slandered and lost his seat, Burton said. The social media impact “was enormous” and other ridings were targeted.
• The House of Commons voted 320 to 0 to audit the $91.8 million in contracts given to global consultant McKinsey & Company after it was learned that its former managing director dined at the home of Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland and introduced the prime minister to executives at a 2016 World Economic Forum conference in Switzerland.
• Forty-nine employees in the Department of Employment were fired for fraud after taking a monthly $2,000 CERB (Canada Emergency Response Benefit) cheque while still drawing a federal salary.
• Budget officer Yves Giroux told a Senate national finance committee that public servants responsible for delivering programs set their own targets so low in order to look good because the goals are easy to achieve. “Yet by their own assessment they fail to deliver on many” of their own targets, he said.
• Liberal Trade Minister Mary Ng signed a “conflict of interest” pledge after the House of Commons ethics commissioner learned that Ng awarded a sole-source $22,790 media coaching contract to a public relations firm run by her close friend with whom she went on many vacations.
• The federal government spent $120 billion of your taxpayer money to protect the environment and admitted that most of the money was wasted, as the feds said that government spending is an inefficient way to achieve its emission-reduction goals.
• The governor-general got a $40,000 pay hike during pandemic restrictions that cost thousands of people their jobs and livelihoods. The GG’s base salary is now $324,000.
This was only one week and I had to cut out some items to wrap this up at just over 1,000 words. Sadly, people have every reason to be upset. We’re constantly being provoked. So, what do we do? We can stop reading the news but it would be more useful to start pushing back. Write emails, run for the local school board or find someone who can. Find a good candidate for local politics who you can actively work for. Get involved before even more crazy and incompetent people run the show.
