One doesn’t need much intelligence to form a picture of how thin the film is between our two “nations” – pesky, sometimes frustrating, Canada and our hugely-important U.S. trading “partner.”
PM Trudeau and Ontario Premier, Doug Ford, “fiddled” like Nero and will now possibly be seen as only having acted after this “offer to help” that, unveiled, might translate as: “If you don’t figure this out fast, we will…” forced them. I can see this crisis, worsened by the lack of a timely response by our above leaders, producing a shift to harsher Canadian governments run by the planet’s all-powerful “zero-point-oh-oh-oh-one-per-cent,” a precious few – mostly foreign – who run the Planet and are much less concerned about the average citizen than about their personal wealth. Hmmm… maybe we already are?
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I also expect that (following the current, fast-growing and sad losses endured by important major industries, innocent farmers and many already struggling trade-dependent business owners) greater capitalist “wins” will, in the long term, be made by the planet’s super-wealthy – who would, with their loved ones, fit inside just one of those trailers currently lined up at Windsor, Ontario or Coutts, Alberta.
Two possible examples of likely winners: the auto industry (in producing new, docile, driverless commercial vehicles and the construction industry in building more routes and mechanisms for goods to flow between the US and whatever remains of us, their neighbours.
And, perhaps the saddest human loss is our inability to appreciate that forcing a trucker, who spends most of the time in his/her cab, to either get vaccinated or fired is, in virtue of its uncertain worth, divisive, harsh and out of proportion to the good that it might do, in view of our lack of understanding of both human nature and the virus. It misses the big picture on which I hope I’ve shed a little light.
mightyturk 