There’s a great little movie whose greatness I’m appreciating anew these days. This is the haunting masterpiece called Blood Simple, the stunning 1983 debut movie by Joel and Ethan Coen. I’m thinking of one line of dialogue that to me poetically encapsulates what has happened to the entire political and governmental system of my country, Canada. The jealous husband played by Dan Hedaya speaking to the private detective, played by the wonderful M. Emmet Walsh, says that in Greece they would cut off the head of the bearer of bad news; Walsh’s detective takes his leave with, “Give me a call when you wanna cut off my head. I can always crawl around without it.”
That’s Canada now, that’s our Prime Minister’s Office, the unconstitutional executive organization which over the previous three decades culminating in just the last few years has become the permanent autocracy over all our political parties and our Parliament. It’s a snake without a head but its headlessness has made it horribly immortal.
When Steven Harper was the iron boss of the Prime Minister’s Office he used that power to stamp down the last vestige of Parliamentary independence and prove once and for all that the moderating power of our Senate and our Governor General’s Office is null and even our Parliament has no real power against a majority government. Harper was the first PM in our history to be censured by Parliament and it meant nothing at all because, as Prime Minister, he and his PMO are unassailably the dictator of Canada and our political system has nothing to moderate that but polite traditions which a ruthless pol like Harper can just run right over.
I was outraged and I was not alone in that feeling. The next election saw Harper tossed out of office and the Liberal Party humiliated Harper’s Conservative Party at the polls. I voted Liberal because I hoped that the son of Pierre Trudeau would respect our parliamentary traditions and return some power to Parliament.
Oh what a fool I was. Harper changed our government permanently. The absolute power of the Prime Minister’s Office was demonstrated and that lesson was a revelation; there in the PMO was revealed a shining ring of power for those of autocratic mind to seize and hold. I believe I commented in letters I sent to one senator that I feared the next Prime Minister would capitalize on that lesson unless the PMO were abolished or sharply curtailed. I had no idea how weak our democracy has become.
Justin Trudeau announced that unlike the dictatorial Harper he would run the government by “consensus”. Nobody who hasn’t sat through the feckless meetings of a housing co-op run by “consensus” can really understand what that means in practice. “Consensus” means that group decisions must be unanimous. It means that the decision process is stymied by endless squabbling and so decisions are made behind the scenes by a coterie of bullies. So it has come about for our country. We might have thought cutting off the head of the PMO would kill that snake.
Oh no! We have a man nominally in absolute power who has no more brains than a Halloween pumpkin. And that means the PMO and the ruling party crawls around without a head. But not without an agenda. Now we see what absolute government means. The absolute power of a dictator always devolves to a coterie behind the throne and there it makes itself immortal. So it is proving for Canada.
Those of autocratic mind who really hold the reins of absolute power, the really big bullies, are not Canadians. They aren’t loyal to any country. They have found the key to making Canada into their private experimental "Social Justice” laboratory for developing the Great Green Reset. And the Covid revolution is the bomb to clear away all old structures in the way of Progress.
Did you know that our Centre for Disease Control is merged with the US CDC, the virtual fiefdom of one man, Anthony Fauci? And that means our Medical Officers of Health are taking their marching orders from Fauci and Fauci is a lesser lord subordinate to Bill Gates. That’s why we are perpetually locked down and masked up. And thanks to the fecklessness of our democracy, thanks to the immortal PMO, we’ll have the same autocracy no matter who we elect. If the transnational Powers That Be decide it we’ll take our injection and muzzle our little kids and be Compliant to anything They want.
I notice that the opposition parties in our federal parliament are not really opposing the government at all. The Conservative Party is weak and green and all about cutting ‘emissions’ of the gas we used to exhale freely before we got masked up. The PMO has absolute control of everything published by our media (I can prove that. It’s a matter of Parliamentary record). This is a dictatorship and the covert institutional structures to maintain and extend that absolute power are consolidating themselves by the day, bet on it. Our provincial governments are drinking the heady booze of absolute power too. Once you taste it you gotta have more.
I was a Pierre Trudeau kid. I still admire him. I was a Liberal all my life. But Liberalism brought us to this dictatorship by a series of unintended consequences; Pierre started it by increasing the power of the PMO, running things by Orders in Council. It was always the agenda to change Canada in a good way, according to the smart ideas that smart Liberals always have. Now there is no off-ramp on the highway to Great Green Reset. You are now entering Stepford. Smile.
I treasure my ticket out of here. To reference another Coen brothers movie, this is no country for old men.