You will only make it worse

 

A curious counterintuitive thought: is it possible that reforms -- legislation, laws, things that liberal people believe -- have ended up worsening rather than improving society? Did progressive legislation end up worsening more than it helped? To paraphrase John Cage, don’t try to improve society, you’ll only make it worse. 

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Is what we have now, a divided society, with homeless encampments in every major city as well as in smaller cities, towns, and rural Canada, an increase in drug addiction and mental illness, the absence of rental units so that rents have increased and renters live in fear of both rent increases and losing where they live, the inflated cost of food a constant worry to average people, hospitals collapsing, is this what reforms have ended up producing; we plug holes in the dike and bigger new holes appear a few feet away.

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Consider our present dysfunctional, divided society, and the future dystopia, did anyone envisage this future for Canada? Things seem worse; "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; /Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world". The government and well-meaning people find the answer to social ills in more government intervention in people's lives, they want to keep us "safe", a favourite word of Justin Trudeau; Justin always wants to keep us safe, but for one group to be "safe" another group is oppressed. 

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Surely the 1950s must have been much worse than today. But were they? Remember the film The Hours in which Julianne Moore played Laura Brown, a 1950s housewife; she hated her life, she was a prisoner of that life, but reflecting on the character Julianne Moore played, we see her as a very unpleasant and selfish person, not someone to feel sorry for. We sympathized with her feeling entrapped by her life, conformity weighed heavily on society; she must have been oppressed by an angry and abusive husband as feminists have portrayed men. It was the 1950s so it must have been the way Hollywood portrayed it; Hollywood doesn't lie. But we also see that the cause of Julianne Moore`s character's anxiety was herself, she placed herself first, not her husband, not her son; nobody came first but her. What about Laura Brown's life was so bad? She had a house in suburbia, only one child, a young son who loved her, a husband who loved her and who wanted to please her, a next door neighbour who was supportive of her. And what did she do? She ran away one day, she deserted her son and husband, to the applause of many people watching the film; Laura Brown claims she chose life over death. Too bad for her son who was traumatized by her abandonment of him. (Did one or both of your parents abandon you or said they were leaving you when you were a child? Consider the depth of trauma abandonment, or death of a parent, causes in a child.) Then she lead a life of her own, maybe in a room of her own, probably reading Virginia Woolf's novels, maybe she read Mrs. Dalloway, and her son, who became a poet, committed suicide, he jumped from his loft window. His mother showed up for his memorial service. The perceived judgement, promoted by Hollywood films, is that the 1950s were deadly to the soul, to the spirit; the homogeneous society, the suburbs full of boring white people, the houses like little boxes "all in a row", were soul destroying, as Pete Seeger sang. 

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And then we turn to today's society. Christianity is laughed at, rejected, or hated; the Bible is said to be hate literature and the progressives want parts of it censored; values are laughed at; marriage as an institution is being abandoned; our prime minister and others want school boards to have more authority over children than the parents of these children; medically assisted suicide has become another part of our health care system, the Hippocratic oath and the moral authority of our physicians is of little importance; freedom of speech has been compromised or limited; we live in a cancel culture society; meanwhile, there are encampments of homeless people in every city and town, in every state and province; an increasing number of these homeless people are dying of overdoses of fentanyl, mental illness is common; legalized gambling is a source of income for a money hungry government; we can’t house our own citizens and we let in millions of immigrants, does the government do any research before acting, do they ever think anything out? Is this what we wanted when we tried to improve society, piecemeal, with endless legislation? We forgot that what you change may not necessarily improve society, it may make society worse. We forgot that when the old is discarded it will never return. It is our collective hubris writ large. 

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After eight years of Justin Trudeau's time in office Canada is in worse shape than it has ever been; this is what happens when someone is elected based on appearance and not on substance, when someone's progressive and woke values trump common sense legislation and frugal management of taxpayers' money; whatever Justin has done will eventually be discredited, it has already begun. Justin Trudeau's legacy will be that he was a wrecking ball, he is the Miley Cyrus of Canadian politics, he wrecked the country; we are now a society of debtors, a society without common values, a society where our politicians are always expedient and rarely insightful (look at them in the House of Commons, it is embarrassing, they are like braying accusatory children who have been spoiled rotten by their parents). 

The CBC, Pyongyang, North Korea

May as well be a CBC news reader 

In 1936, the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission (CRBC) became the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), which was a crown corporation. The CBC had a better organizational structure, more secure funding through the use of a licence fee on receiving sets (initially set at $2.50), and less vulnerability to political pressure.^[84] When Bennett's Conservatives were governing and the Liberals were in Opposition, the Liberals accused the network of being biased towards the Conservatives. During the 1935 election campaign, the CRBC broadcast a series of 15 minutes soap operas called Mr. Sage which were critical of King and the Liberal Party. Decried as political propaganda, the incident was one factor in King's decision to replace the CRBC.^[85]

                                                --from the Wiki page for Prime Minister MacKenzie-King 

So, right from the start the CBC has been accused of being biased, but it has never been as bloated and obese as it is now, $1.5B a year government subsidy--radio, television, cable, podcasts, and internet--and a history of being accused of bias. But it has also never been as biased as it is now with its woke, progressive agenda. 

    At times, it seems the CBC is the alter-ego of Justin Trudeau and it is then that I feel the CBC is broadcasting from some hermit kingdom, Ottawa, Ontario, always oblivious to their audience and persistent in promoting their woke causes. Maybe it is Pyongyang, North Korea, Justin likes dictators like Fidel Castro or the president of China and, like Justin, the CBC have no consideration for the audience, no consideration of service to their public, no consideration to tell us anything about Canada that actually exists, in fact no respect for  Canadians, no history, no religion and no religious broadcasts, not even any  programmes on Indigenous spirituality and culture, no programmes on the history of Quebec or Quebec culture, very little about any part of Canada outside of Toronto, no cultural regional broadcasts of concerts (as you will hear on BBC Radio Three, concerts recorded in regional Quebec), nothing on the culture of Canada unless it's Toronto-centric and biased and woke and progressive, no idea of the daily life of average Canadians, no programmes about the values of Canadians, nothing about the history and people they now demean as "European settlers" just as they demean pregnant women as "pregnant people"; but if a statue of Sir John A. Macdonald or Queen Victoria is being pulled down or splattered with paint, they'll be there rooting for the protesters, promoting the cause, condemning historical figures who helped build the country so that entities like the CBC can exist, doing all they can to attack the country under their three categories of interest: diversity, gender fluidity, and climate change. Do I exaggerate? Of course I exaggerate to make my point, but I am not exaggerating too much. 

    Considering how much money they get the CBC ratings are not good. If you want "news" and not opinion, watch CTV News, Global, or one of the other networks; maybe watch PBS Newshour or listen to the BBC World Service. A lot of money is being spent on the CBC's National News on cable, every night these people are seen jet setting to remote parts of the world to report on climate change or gender fluidity; I've seen them deep sea diving to report on the coral reefs, visiting London to interview Princess Anne, at the South Pole to report on climate change, and elsewhere; it isn't cheap, it's expensive.

    And I remember Wendy Mesley, a former Montrealer and one of the CBC's finest journalists, who was forced out of the CBC; as it was reported, she mentioned the French title of a 1968 book by Pierre Vallières that alludes to the "N" word, she was trying to educate these Toronto people at the CBC, but this made them feel uncomfortable and not safe.  I remember, as well, one of the CBC's woke dramas -- all of their dramas are woke -- in which high school girls were having fits and convulsions because of some illness, as far as I could make out, it was called "conversion" (maybe this drama sailed over my head); it took a while but it seems, without actually saying it, that the "conversion" these girls were reacting to was related to their sexuality, their gender fluidity, and then they trotted out soil pollution as the cause. Go figure. Meanwhile, on the other networks, not a word about woke or progressive causes, just Hudson and Rex and Private Eyes, entertainment that entertains, not propaganda disguised as drama. The CBC has even turned Murdoch Mysteries into a woke drama; is Heartland next to go? 

    When a broadcaster, like the CBC, whether it is Pravda in Moscow or Granma in Havana, or the harridan yelling the news on North Korean television, begins with a conclusion and a premise, it is not news, it is opinion, it is biased. I know there are good reporters at the CBC, Wendy Mesley was one of them as is Andrew Nichols, David Common, and Natasha Fatah. The CBC is Toronto, GTA-centric, they seem to think that Toronto represents Canada and their progressive and woke opinions are Canadian values, but they aren't. And if you watch the evening news on cable CBC, with its woman announcer, good luck seeing even one man reporting, it is a no man zone, it has become a mostly woman news broadcast. It all speaks to an exhausted corporation that is on the downward slide.