|
Woe Canada! My
amazement with the sad fate that has befallen our wonderful neighbors
to the north has sharply increased as I become increasingly acquainted
with their society and government.
On
April 15th, after reading about twenty articles for my blog
concerning our tax day, I vicariously discovered that the Canadian
people are only freed from the outrageous yoke of their government on June
28th 2004 (meaning that June 28th is the day in
which they stop working to feed their bureaucrats and begin working to
feed themselves). In
contrast, our tax freedom day fell on April 11th.
I thought immediately of that old line from P.J.
O’Rourke: “If you think health care is expensive now, wait
until you see what it costs when it's free.” As
I’ve noted in the past, both of my maternal grandparents were
Canadian citizens and I still have family living there.
On a personal level, most of the individuals I’ve known, even
Toronto fans, have been of the highest quality so I am absolutely
incredulous at the way their voters nanny hug the quasi-socialism
offered in their ballot boxes. This
year I purchased the NHL Center Ice package and it has given me access
to about a gazillion hockey games while also providing me with
intimate access to the CBC. Certainly
the coverage and commentary offered by “Hockey Night in Canada” is
top-shelf, but the commercials which interrupt the broadcasts are
disconcerting to say the least. The
commercials offered an East German glimpse into a culture dominated by
government. For some
reason, my CBC source came from Prince Edward Island and the telecasts
were rife with ads about PEI agencies.
At this point, I am uncertain as to whether it was the CBC
squandering countless minutes of precious airtime to benefit these
agencies or if it was the agencies who were squandering their precious
tax dollars for the benefit of the CBC, but, whatever the financial
relationship, it was all clearly a waste of the public’s dollars.
One
of the commercials was absolutely hysterical and was repeated
countless times over the course of the first round of the playoffs.
Its goal was to showcase the value of the Prince Edward Island
authorities. The ad
depicts government employees in various action shots as they enacted
roles that could have been played by private corporations for about an
eighth of the cost. The
showstopper moment came at the end of the ad when one worker was
observed diligently looking up something in a card catalogue.
A card catalogue? What
a riot! How many more
millions will it take for them to get computers?
That they would proudly display a card catalogue in 2004 tells
us much about the isolation and inefficiency of government.
Canadians give them half of what they own and produce and they
respond by staying devoted to the best technology the 1920s had to
offer. Rather than update
their systems they’d rather pour resources into quaint television
commercials. For
me, the lowest point came during the ubiquitous “vote for The
Greatest Canadian” spots.
For this act of largesse, the CBC even set up a special website
and financed a toll-free phone number.
They undoubtedly figured, “Hey, why not?
It’s not our money anyway.”
I
have no idea why the public would continue to finance the CBC if
they’re going to misappropriate funds in such a fashion.
They should auction off their best shows (like “Hockey Night
in Canada”) to private interests and close the entire boondoggle.
However, all of these larger concerns are immaterial for the
moment because the substance of these commercials is something that
needs to be discussed. I
saw the same ad forty times for this contest and each time it
displayed two policemen in a squad car arguing over who was the
grandest Canuck in history. One
of them, and I’m not making this up, actually endorsed Margaret
Atwood. Yes, the same
Margaret Atwood who is loved and treasured by radical
feminists and the writer of the anti-male treatise, The
Handmaid’s Tale. Why
would any man, particularly a police officer, be endeared to her
works? Even if the ad is
supposed to be funny, the humor comes at the expense of common sense
and reveals just how accepted far leftists are within their society.
This particular novelist has described herself as a being a
“red Torry.” In her
definition of this term, red stands for what you think it stands for,
and the author has creatively defined Torry as those who regard the
powerful as being responsible to their community (as if there are any
public officials who would go on the record as saying they have no
responsibility to their community).
From
Margaret Atwood, the focus can easily shift to anti-Americanism.
I was surprised to see a well-crafted commercial from Molson
portraying a man touring various locales and stating that he refuses
to drink American beer for the same reasons that he doesn’t buy
Jamaican snowshoes or Arabian snowmobiles.
Obviously the implication is that we have no talent whatsoever
for brewing beer and to even consider imbibing one of our products
would be as absurd as asking a Canadian health care official to give
one of their citizens a MRI within six months time.
I
thought this particular advertisement was silly for a couple of
reasons. First, I happen
to know something about Canadian beers and the one they’re pushing
here, Molson Canadian, is a mundane product that is the favorite of
few yeastheads. Had they
been talking about superior creations like Molson Export they would
have had a more persuasive argument.
Second, their famous national products are certainly strong
overall but specific American beers like Sam Adams, Anchor Steam,
Redhook ESB, or any of the Bells offerings are their betters (in my
bloated and sudsy opinion). It
is unfortunate but the playoffs have revealed to me that Canada now
has government, as opposed to hockey, as its real national pastime. |
