COVID, Convoys, And Broken In Some Unfixable Way
On Putting This Back Together
One of the things that the pandemic has done for me is in many ways clarify my mind, because the act of writing fiction has made things clear to me that never were before, that were elusive in the past, truths that I could not understand, and nuances I couldn’t pull apart. My mind was always a little fried, a little difficult to deal with, and I was running at less than full capacity for the better part of my life. And then I found my writing.
In many ways, the pre-pandemic brain I was dealing with is everyone’s brain after 2 years of restrictions, lockdowns, and chaos – everyone’s brains are a little fried, and everyone’s working without every bullet in the chamber. I’m used to that feeling, because I got used to fighting through that in the past, but now, unlike most everyone else, I’m in the best command of my mind that I’ve been in in my life, thanks to the act of writing, and specifically Salvation In The Storm. It’s saved me, in some ways, and I don’t always love that fact, but it’s true.
What’s also true is that this week, in desperate need of some form of distraction from the heartbreaking events in Kyiv, I went back to Salvation, and read it again, and ever since I did, 5 words have stayed with me, and they start to explain February 2022 better than anything else – Broken In Some Unfixable Way.
Put aside all the animus – and lord knows I have it in spades – for those who invaded and occupied downtown Ottawa this month, and just think about the country we now have. It’s a country with a west that doesn’t think Central Canada gives a fuck about it, we have a Government almost entirely dependent on Central Canadian seats to govern, and we have a country almost entirely run by Conservative Premiers with a Liberal Federal Government, two years into a national and international crisis that has largely seen these tensions kept under wraps for the common good, and now everyone’s done.
Everyone’s done with restrictions, everyone’s done with being cautious, and everyone is done with being polite to those we disagree with. Neither those who did not get vaccinated willingly nor those who rushed to be amongst the first to be jabbed have any patience for the other, and things that could and would otherwise be viewed as disagreements are now conversation enders. We have no tolerance for the other side because we are all convinced we’re right.
If you think I’m excluding myself from this, in some ways I am and in others I’m not. Do I really care about individual liberty around vaccines? No, and to pretend I do is laughable. I am of the view that you should get the shot and there’s no debate, no room for argument. That said, I also wrote about the convoy in a less-than-vitriolic way when this all started, because I appreciate that my contempt for these people is not going to accomplish anything, and letting that contempt cloud my judgement doesn’t help. Writing long-winded screeds about people you don’t like shouldn’t pass for coherent criticism these days, as much as so many try and pass it off as such.
Again, put aside what you think of the cabal that occupied Ottawa, and remember that there were just normal people who were compelled to rally there, and you get to the point where you have to wonder what made so many people who would otherwise be described as sane, rational people sign up for a protest with so many of the worst people in this country? Not everyone who occupied Ottawa was a Nazi or a fascist, and pretending they were is just a liberal fiction designed to make everyone feel better about their role in this. What’s harder is trying to figure out what happened to make everyone in this country feel a little bit fucked in the head, and what the hell to do about it. The problem is, I worry it can’t be fixed, and that’s the scariest part.
…
Broken In Some Unfixable Way. It’s a hell of a sentence, but more than that it’s a hell of a thing to believe, and to fear. It’s not logical, but it is where I am, and that says more about the last month than anything else.
You can start with who to blame, but even then, it’s a fairly underwhelming exercise. Does the Prime Minister bear some of it? Sure – at some level, the Prime Minister is responsible for his country, and whatever jurisdictional arguments can be made to deflect attention to the other guys for the failures of this or that, soft power is real, and to deny the Prime Minister has an amount of power and influence that goes beyond the list of enumerated Constitutional powers delegated for the Federal Government is something that passes for intelligent comment in some circles, but is wildly obtuse in the real world.
That said, what should Justin Trudeau have done differently? Not called the 2021 election? I mean, maybe, but minority Parliaments usually go two years and I’m never going to be too outraged by governments that decide to test the people’s will in an election – it is, after all, the ultimate act of faith in the people, to willingly risk power. Was his campaign divisive? I mean, sure, but it needed to be to boost vaccination rates – and also, to pretend Erin O’Toole’s wasn’t is as obtuse as those who pretend Trudeau is at the whim of the founders divisions of powers at all times.
It's also hard to get outraged about the damage done to this country by the election campaign when the country basically delivered a status quo result to 2019 – so, unless you think the country’s deep divisions over COVID started before anyone had heard of COVID, it’s hard to make an argument that the campaign divided the country when the country found itself divided on the same lines it had been this whole time – western alienation, Liberal elitism, and Quebec grievance.
Where you can find more to blame is in O’Toole’s willingness to be everything to everybody at all times, but even that doesn’t get you anywhere to solving the problem. That O’Toole – who ran in the 2017 campaign as a moderate and felt genuinely uncomfortable saying the batshit crazy right wing shit he sometimes felt he had to – was willing to say everything to everybody is clearly bad, but it’s also a sign of where his party, and the broader right, is – and where it isn’t, which is to say anywhere near ready to govern this country.
The reason all of this feels unfixable is because whether it’s Pierre Poilievre or Leslyn Lewis or anyone else with an actual chance in a Conservative leadership election, there’s no chance in hell the Tory membership will elect a bridge-builder. For all their complaints that Trudeau is divisive, they’re the people who are convinced there’s some global conspiracy to reset the world afoot, and that the Liberals are all pawns of the Davos elite, so clearly they’re not going to meet the Liberals halfway. Do the Liberals have any desire to reach out to these people? Not really, such as they are packed into provinces and ridings where the Liberals have the same chance of winning as I do of marrying a woman one day, but even if the next Liberal leader, whichever downtown Toronto-based Deputy Prime Minister it may be, wants to fix this, you need two to tango, and right now there’s none.
Does it matter? Maybe not – the history of Quebec’s fight over independence is that division can heal even when it doesn’t seem like it will. Many viewed the large march for Quebec independence to be nearing an end even after the 1995 referendum loss, because it was assumed that given how close they got, at some point the Rubicon would be breached. Now? Independence is dead, and the only people who can’t or won’t accept this are the oldest of the old guard. It’s dead because nobody young cares, and the hard lines that existed in the Quebec that drove my parents out of Montreal have become so blurred and so faint as to functionally not exist.
Why it does matter is that that process took somewhere between 8 and 16 years, depending on whether the process ended with the election of the Quebec Liberals again in 2003 or the death of the Duceppe Bloc in 2011, and I’m not sure we have that much time. This time, the tension’s national, and even international, and we have the worst influences of social media and disinformation fucking up the path forward. In Quebec, there was a path forward because the rest of Canada came together to show their love for Quebec, and then the Quebec Liberals got the man who saved the province in the referendum to be their leader. Jean Charest was able to understand the people on the other side because many of them were his friends and neighbours in Sherbrooke, and he was able to take the air out of the fight. Love or loathe Trudeau or Skippy, neither of them are that guy, and there’s nobody coming over the horizon who can do it.
The only thing that gives me any amount of optimism is remembering where I was when I started this pandemic, and where I was when I started writing, and the wholly different person I am today. I am, for the first time in my life, actually happy, and in many ways I had no reason to believe I would ever get to the place I am now because of just how toxic my mind was. Well, that and the fact that the last time I wrote about something being broken in some unfixable way, it turned out it could be fixed.
At some point, it’s on us to make things a little less toxic, to ratchet down the tension as opposed to playing it up, and to try and remember the humanity of everyone else. There’s no silver bullet, no politician will do it for us, and so, at some point, the conversation needs to be had about the fact that this isn’t sustainable.
I deeply want to be wrong about what I’m about to say, and as an egomaniacal asshole who wants to be right always, that’s hard for me to write. But, after two years of chaos, it’s really hard to escape the conclusion Canada’s broken in some unfixable way, and right now, I don’t know how it gets better.