Essays in Idleness

Several of my friends would seem to have travelled farther East, even than I did on the weekend. They have congregated in Quebec City, where the (Dominion) Conservative Party is having one of its occasional conventions. The party is ahead in the polls (by more than ten points, last time I checked), and if the progressive N.D.P. can continue to split the progressive vote with the progressive Liberals, the progressive Bloc, the progressive Greens, and other progressive parties, they might sail home at the next election.

But the Conservative Party is also, like all of the “mainstream” media in Canada without a single exception, also committed to progress; although typically they would not spend quite as much of our money on it.

Party leadership (that would be a Mr Poilievre, speaking in French) has tried to focus national attention on his cheap shots, such as the cost of other party leaders’ jet aeroplane rides. Winning the next national election will require him to increase the party’s nine (of 78) Quebec seats, in most of which the competition is instead between the “séparatistes” and the “federastes.” … Bonne chance!

The Conservatives have won a plurality of votes in recent Canadian elections, and would win by a landslide if we only counted English-speaking men, but the Liberals, with the support of other progressive parties, generally squeak through to form another guvmint. Nobody minds, however, for Canadians, who are not very masculine, enjoy paying taxes, and are indifferent to free speech. We have an extremely low-intelligence electorate, especially in Ontario.

While I can’t be with them, owing to my own masculine indifference, let me take this opportunity to at least express my own policy preferences. That would be to close down all agencies of the Dominion government, except for the military ones, which I would transform (away from vegetarianism). I am particularly eager to cancel the Revenue Agency, or agencies. But I would allow a few symbolic institutions, such as the R.C.M.P. and the Geological Survey, that could be maintained with modest voluntary funding from a few wealthy citizens.

This need not excite the ambitions of our bureaucratic class, however. They would all be fired.