It's so strange.  Here we are in the midst of The Worst Canadian Election Ever (until the next election, which will inevitably be worse) where all the parties have huge financial holes in their platforms, where the promises either cannot or should not be fulfilled, and everyone is massively unpopular and we only have "front-runners" because someone is somehow less unpopular than everyone else.

And yet we (well, some of us, anyway) are so, so annoyingly hopeful that Andrea Horwath and the NDP will be able to hope their way out of the mess we're in!  Well, at least we were until she ruled out road tolls, which will probably cost her three or four downtown Toronto ridings.

There's no doubt that this refusal to accept the rotten state of our politics and "reject cynicism" has its upsides, in that it prevents bully strongmen and women from seizing power directly, but it also means that we get taken in by more than the fair share of con men and women (who seize power indirectly).  It also means that our politicians and public figures are absolute crap when it comes to salesmanship, because they are orders of magnitude worse than the con men and women when it comes to seizing power indirectly.

It really shouldn't come as a surprise to people that there is an element of attention seeking and hucksterism in every successful public persona, but whenever you read some Canadian talking head snobbing it up about how we are far too smart to be hustled by unsavoury entertainers, the implication is that it's another one of those things that doesn't, or shouldn't happen here.

But here's the trick I've discovered.  Centrist Canadian libs invest so much energy into pretending that the power of Education will protect them against Doug Ford that they allow themselves to be hustled by the Liberals.

Case in point: this piece of Wynne hagiography by John Barber, where he utterly refuses to admit any impediments to the marriage of the current Premier and the province that she was "too good for".

This is how supposedly "wise" Canadians are able to be seduced by our current Prime Minister and his risible ministrations to the Americans against identity politics while he practices those same politics at home in earnest.

It should be said the Americans who are absolutely dead set against Trump are letting their guards down as well, and allowing themselves to be soothed by the comforting words of their Woke Canadian Boyfriend.  But at least they have the excuse of being so ignorant of actual Canadian affairs that you can't really expect them to know better.

Even so, they are still street-smart enough to treat Trudeau as nothing more than an entertaining distraction, while Canadians like Stephen LeDrew slobber embarrassingly on Tucker Carlson's show, claiming that the PM's pretensions to open borders entitles us to the deed to the Statue Of Liberty.

Despite the machinations of Gerald Butts and the Canada2020 crowd, this is how the red Kool-Aid drinkers actually come off to the rest of the world, who are a lot better at spotting phonies than the empty suits at Air Canada, for one example.  Our national airline may have been hoodwinked by an enterprising young Starbucks barista from the States who wanted to meet his Canadian girlfriend but didn't have the funds, so he aimed for 535,000 retweets which would earn him a free flight to Newfoundland.  AC fell for this transparent ploy so hard that they not only donated their retweets to help him make 530K, but they yanked the chains of Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir (whom they sponsor) and got them to lend their name to this charade.

And if you think that a $500 plane ticket is small potatoes, there was also the news this week that Patrick Brown, who conned PC's into ignoring his obvious flaws once upon a time, is releasing a book about his "sensational political assassination the likes of which haven't been seen since Julius Caesar", and that Jon Kay is proceeding apace with his plot to create a Canadian knockoff of the Intellectual Dark Web.

So as we stumble uncertainly towards June 7th, let us hope that we can be strategic with our skepticism as we are with our vote, and not heap all of it on Doug Ford when there are so many other deserving targets.

Photo Credit: Toronto Star

Written by Josh Lieblein