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February 2018 was a particularly bad month for made-in-Canada bozo eruptions, from the ongoing crap miasma that is the PC Party of Ontario's leadership race, to the National Lampoon-esque Trudeau family vacation to India, to the verdict in the Gerald Stanley trial (and, many would say, the trial itself).

But if we're being really honest, there was nothing special about February.  Throughout this country's history, we've had to watch through our fingers as Prime Ministers, Premiers, judges, journalists, athletes and artists, and anyone else who calls themselves a representative of our terminally apologetic nation make utter asses of themselves on the world stage.

This year, the year of Canada 150, featured enough diffidence and shame so as to barely qualify as a celebration at all, while our respectable showing at the Olympics barely registers when compared to the cringe-a-lympics of public figures falling all over themselves.  Globe and Mail articles about how our Olympians have become the new ugly Americans check any sort of national pride we might feel about our medal haul.

To be fair (and to be Canadian) there are signs that our insecurity might be on the wane, too.  Loonie Politics colleague JJ McCullough, in one of his recent WaPo pot stirrers, posits that striving towards Canadian-ness is at an all time low, and "lived experiences that transcend country" are on the rise.  He cites the popularity of the Canadian health care system among the American left, and that of Jordan Peterson and Lauren Southern among the right, and points out how American cultural movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter have taken root here.  "Legions of young Canadian men blog and meme-war about Trump with little sense that it's a foreign fight," he writes.

What a lovely theory.  However, as long as our national obsession with shame and being shamed persists, another explanation for this data exists: that Canadians are so worried about being stereotyped by those memelords as sensitive, snowflakey, insecure "f**king leafs" should they identify as Canadians, that they intentionally avoid confusing their American counterparts with the more idiosyncratic aspects of Canadian culture.

And those memelords have a point.  When you read the harrowing and nauseating account of how the PC Party of Ontario dithered and delayed when it came to Patrick Brown's resignation, fretting about the news cycle rather than trying to make a principles decision, or how national security advisor Daniel Jean sacrificed his political neutrality to try and spin a story of "rogue elements" trying to make the PM look bad overseas, and an all-too-familiar picture of the status-conscious Canadian who is so afraid of looking silly that they stumble into countless social blunders emerges.

They would probably say it's not part of their mandate, but part of the blame for our tendency to take ourselves too seriously lies with the discounting of actual satire in favour of the kind of safe, inoffensive cornball humour pushed by the likes of CBC Comedy.  Bad enough that our government comedians censor themselves at a level that you would never see on other public broadcasters such as the BBC, but you have to go to quasi-anarchists like Scott Vrooman to find someone who cracks jokes at the country's expense, and even then the humour is still rooted in an insecurity about corporations ruining our pristine reputation, rather than at the inadequate institutions themselves.

Perhaps a supremely talented artist, a Canadian Ai Weiwei, will emerge to criticize the absurd situation we find ourselves in.  For that to happen, however a disaster on the level of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake would need to take place.

Thankfully no such catastrophe has occurred, but with the two resignations of Patrick Brown and the utter cluelessness of the Prime Minister becoming more and more difficult to ignore, perhaps more Canadians will stop giving the hacks that maintain a lock on our public institutions the benefit of the doubt.  We have seen some developments towards mocking the Prime Minister's ridiculous outfits, and we have seen some fantastic political cartooning that likened the Patrick Brown situation to a real-life slasher film.

In a bit of humorous irony, the unbearable ridiculousness of Canadian public life may inspire the armchair comedian in all of us to demand better.

Photo Credit: The Indian Express

Written by Josh Lieblein

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.


The tensions between a party caucus and its leader are rarely evident in modern politics, but in the past few weeks alone, we're seeing increasing example of it bubbling to the surface.  In both provincial and federal politics of late, as we see an increasing number of leaders selected from outside of their party caucuses, and increasingly they are refusing to run for a seat as quickly as possible.  When MPs are made to blindly follow someone who has not been elected along with them, it's inevitable that there will be tensions.

Over the weekend, the Bloc Québécois House Leader, Gabriel Ste-Marie relinquished his post because he has been unable to work with party leader Martine Ouellet, who doesn't have a seat (and who currently sits as an independent member of the Quebec National Assembly).  Ouellet apparently believes that her MPs should be pushing for independence in Ottawa, whereas many of the MPs are more focused on representing Quebec's interests in the House of Commons, and the difference became irreconcilable for Ste-Marie.  Ouellet is also known for not being able to make compromises and concessions, which makes it even more difficult to lead a party when she is absent from Ottawa for much of the time.

Prior to this, the Patrick Brown omnishambles has laid bare tensions within the Ontario Progressive Conservative caucus with his ouster and the subsequent exposing of the "rot" within the party's structure.  When Maclean's posted the contents of the conference call that caucus members were on the night that the allegations against Brown were first aired, there was a definite sense of disconnect between those MPPs in the caucus looking to protect the party rather than just the leader's reputation, and they were prepared to be cold-blooded to do so something that is almost unthinkable in the age where caucus members are expected to line up behind the leader and nod vigorously at everything he or she says.  Supporters of Brown have since denigrated the caucus members as being "ungrateful" and "traitors," and castigated them as "elites" who have apparently betrayed the grassroots members who elected Brown, as though those caucus members were not elected in their own right.

There is a famous misquote that commentators like to trot out about Pierre Trudeau allegedly saying that MPs were nobodies fifty yards from the Hill.  (In reality, his quote was about the opposition only having the forum in Parliament to talk, and "When they get home, when they get out of Parliament, when they are 50 yards from Parliament Hill, they are no longer honourable members they are just nobodies.")  Regardless of the veracity of the quote, it has become received wisdom, but when one looks at the dynamics that play out in Parliament under the current power structures, it becomes increasingly clear that MPs are treated far more like "nobodies" while they're on the Hill by their own leader than they are in their home ridings.

Our leadership selection system has upended the proper functioning of our political system.  The elected members of the legislature have ceased becoming the check on the powers exercised by Cabinet, and are instead cheerleading squads for their leaders.  The continued bastardization of the rules of debate have turned the House of Commons into a forum for reading assigned speeches into the void rather than engaging in meaningful debate, and Question Period is about gathering media clips, with the spotlight being on the leaders to do get the best lines every day.  MPs and MPPs are expected to be compliant drones for the leader, and even the media will encourage this particular viewpoint when they start concern trolling that MPs who exert the slightest bit of independence are a sign that the leader could be losing his or her grip on their party.

Mind you, that's if the leaders have a seat, which increasingly they don't.  Leadership contests are increasingly about bringing in an outsider with fresh ideas and a fresh face to mould the party around themselves with witness how in the current Ontario PC leadership race, there is not a single member of caucus among the candidates, and each of them are quickly repudiating the platform put together by the previous leader (which was branded with his face) as though it was something that belonged to him alone rather than the party and its membership.  And while that leadership contest is coming close enough to an election that there is the reasonable possibility that whoever the leader is could win their seat and be in the legislature for the following parliament, that's not always the case.

Ouellet has refused to run for a federal seat despite several opportunities to do so, and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh similarly refuses his own run until 2019, leaving Guy Caron to be the party's de facto leader in his absence, and caucus unanimity isn't always on display there either.  Former leadership rival Charlie Angus has tweeted (and deleted) shade directed at Singh on more than one occasion.  And even Conservatives have been grumbling privately about some of the choices made by Andrew Scheer when it comes to how he's running things, particularly some of his strategic choices.

It all boils down to the power imbalance that now exists in parties.  If we want MPs to take back their power, for them to do the jobs of accountability that they are supposed to do, and if we want meaningful work for them, it means we need to start diminishing the power of party leaders once again.  Doing that means returning to a means of selecting them that aren't broken, that don't encourage warlordism and cults of personality.  It means re-empowering MPs (and MPPs) to select and fire their leaders so that it's those elected representatives who have the power.  MPs should be somebodies on the Hill, and they can't be so long as the leaders have assumed all of the power.  It's time to return it to where it belongs.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.