The most apt adjective to describe the Liberal ‘budget’ – and I use that term advisedly – is meretricious, a term that means doing something superficially attractive, but devoid of real substance. Its etymology is from meretrix, Latin for a ‘prostitute’, selling – or buying – something that one should not. And what the Liberals are buying – and we are selling – are votes, and concomitant power, which leads to wealth and privilege.
This is, as commentators have it, a ‘pre-election’ budget, which is a polite way of saying they are spreading billions in ill-gotten gains on projects that will offer some segments of the population temporary relief and pleasure – millennials for housing, debt relief for Indigenous, infrastructure projects – but it will all soon be dissipated, as the debt ratchets up into uncharted territory. The Liberals seem to have lost all sense of proportion and ‘economics’ in any rational sense of that term, and most Canadians are going right along, enjoying the melons of Egypt before we venture into the brutal fiscal desert of Sinai. We are burdening our children, and our children’s children to the umpteenth generation, with an unsustainable economic burden, all for the pleasure and comfort of the moment, and most even right-minded Catholics follow right along. There has to be an end to the insanity. How high can the debt climb before collapse is imminent, or something gives?
This budget is not unconnected to the SNC-Lavalin ‘affair’, about which I have not commented thus far. After all, the back-room shenanigans of Trudeau are no worse than Chretien’s sponsorship ‘shawinagins’, McGuinty’s billion dollar gas-plants, Mulroney’s cash-stuffed brown-paper bags, and that’s only what’s risen to the surface of the fetid swamp. Honesty, integrity and fiscal prudence are not terms that come to mind when thinking of politicians – an activity which I wish I could avoid more than I do, besides general prayers of intercession for those ‘in high places’, so to speak. Like children, they should occasionally be seen, but rarely heard, and we hear far too much of them.
The problem with Trudeau Junior, it seems, is that he got caught with his feminist pants down, revealing his sad, tattered, mercenary boxers underneath. The high-powered lady-folk with whom he surrounded himself, smarter and more independent than he, are resigning one by one, perhaps to seek hegemonic revenge at a cold and fitting time.
Would one expect anything else of Justin Trudeau, a man who vehemently supports the murder of the unborn as a quasi-sacrament of the aforementioned feminism he so firmly espouses? Why worry about the flowing red ink of this Potemkin budget, when we are drowning in the red blood of the aborted, and, in increasing numbers, the sick and elderly? Budget be damned, especially if the nation already is, or at least heading in that general direction. Woe to you, Canada…
Barring a miracle – and, on a note of hope, paraphrasing Thomas More, there have been precedents -we’re quite frankly doomed. Expect not salvation from Mr. Scheer, who seems over his head, his Conservatives impotently banging on their desks, hooting and hollering and stomping out during the budget speech, crying ‘let her speak!’, and now engaging in a filibuster, a la Jimmy Stewart, reminiscent of a more innocent era with bygone issues that seem so quaint by comparison.
What could Ms. Wilson-Raybaud now say that we do not already know? That the system is corrupt? That Trudeau coerced her to look the other way, to grease a few palms, to go easy on SNC execs to save jobs and Liberal votes?
Who cares? It’s way past that, and the inaptly named and increasingly dictatorial ‘Liberals’ have wedded themselves to a host of deeply evil ideologies that have been metastasizing and festering for some time – from fully-funded abortion-on-demand, to medically-assisted murder, suicide, transgenderism and the mutilating surgeries, travesties of marriage, legalized drug use – of which they are all so ironically proud. The SNC scandal is simply one symptom of a much more malignant disease. Anyone who wears the Liberal brand now is compromised.
I have some small degree of sympathy for Mr. Scheer and his hapless minority Tories, for this mess may be over anyone’s head. We have allowed the ‘Liberal’ ideology, like some noxious vapour, to infect our schools and the minds of our children, from kindergarten to post-doctoral fellowships, our media, our entire customs and mores.
But you won’t hear much about these deep and real issues fro the Conservatives – nor from Church, for that matter – and Scheer refuses to ‘touch’ the abortion issue, and any others sensitive topics that would rock the boat and decrease his chances of getting elected. But by the law of diminishing returns, those chance paradoxically keep getting lower the more they – we – refuse to engage in what really should be discussed, in parliament, and from the housetops. Witness his confirmation that the bogey of ‘Islamophobia’ is to be condemned. I wonder if he would care to define that term, before he touts it about.
We have, in a word, lost the culture war, the front that Pope Saint John Paul II emphasized in many of his writings. Most Canadians are far more like Justin Trudeau than they are like Thomas More, of whom few of them have ever even heard, which bodes not well.
We do what we can – including what we do here at Catholic Insight – but at some point soon, we’re going to need a lot more than parliamentary delay tactics and huffy walk-outs. The ‘Liberals’ still get exactly what they want, while we cower and quiver. We may require, like the Greek plays of old when things seem insoluble, a deus ex machina, a veritable divine Hercules to clear out the Augean stables, a force of nature – or, rather, of super-nature – to root out the rot.
For we must eventually face what must be faced, and may as well pre-empt the inevitable. The house cleaning – la deluge, to adopt a Louis XVI phrase – will entail a lot of sacrificial pain, to put it mildly – I hope not as fractious as the revolution of post-Bourbon France – but a revolution of some kind, so that good may become once again good, and evil, evil. Anything else, I fear, will now be too little, too late.