Month: January 2023

It’s that sense of identity as so thoroughly mobile and the fact that it can be successfully engineered to win that is so deeply unsettling.

If you sat across the table from him on a date, you would run away before your drinks arrived.

If you were his employer, you would fire him before he had his coat off.

And yet, try as you might, you simply cannot un-elect him.

By now, you know I am talking about none other than the odious George Santos. New York’s latest, as he puts it, “embodiment of the American dream.”

Problem is: it ain’t no dream. It is somewhere between a detached-from-reality fantasy and a nightmare.

It’s one thing for literary fabulists like Gatsby, Ripley, and Draper to construct their own creations for their own purposes. It is quite another for someone who is seeking a position that has at its essence, at its core, a covenant of public trust, to try the same. Disturbingly, this creation, evidently politically calculated to secure victory in New York’s 3rd congressional district, worked.

I won’t recite the litany of Santos’s well-publicized falsehoods but suffice it to say that most revolve around the details of his identity. And let’s be clear: his lies are not minor embellishments but whole-cloth constructions.

It’s that sense of identity as so thoroughly mobile, so readily fungible, and the fact that it can be successfully engineered to win that is so deeply unsettling. The old, now demonstrably naïve, expectation was that people go into politics for honourable reasons, to fight for someone or something. Santos’s case underlines the danger of that assumption, and shows that people do, in fact, go into politics for all the wrong reasons and, what’s worse, win.

Worryingly, successful liars often inspire and embolden imitators. To be sure, Santos’s situation is, at best, a relative success, he’s been caught but not criminally charged, made tepid apologies but not resigned. Indeed, a sharper downfall might still await him. And yet, there is an emerging sense of an attention-seeking, near nihilistic, air lurking underneath, that all he ever wished for was his name to be on the front page, good or horrifically bad. And so it is.

I tell young people as often as I can that motivation is for amateurs, discipline is for professionals. That credo’s power rests in its reminder that it’s our actions over time that define us. We can be motivated to do both very good and very bad things temporarily. But it’s the discipline of what we do every day that tells us and others who we truly are.

I say this to young people because they are most frequently confronted by that temptation: to take the short view and corresponding shortcut, to tell the easy lie about who they are or what they’ve accomplished.

But, of course, that temptation does not exist for young people alone. Nor does it exist in a vacuum.

So what motivated Santos to lie so spectacularly? It’s easy to say he’s an unqualified loser. It’s harder to turn inwards and look at our own culture to ask what type of person our political climate is selecting for.

I’ll try.

Who is willing to face the culture of toxicity and harassment (especially pronounced for women and visible minorities) our leaders face? Who is willing to confront the inevitable mudslinging campaign? And who is willing to work a profoundly demanding job for only a fraction of what they could command in the private sector?

There are still many good people, I’ll go so far as to say most, who remain in politics for whom such questions are not questions at all. Their strength of character and conviction simply drowns out the concern.

Yet make no mistake, George Santos is a wake-up call. Sure, there’s been many like him and there will be more to come. But unless we meaningfully improve our political climate, the issue is his astonishing level of deceit won’t be the exception but will become the rule.

This article first appeared in the Toronto Star on January 17, 2023.

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Throughout our country, we must not allow our politics to continue being — as Orwell described it — “the choice between the lesser of two evils.”

 

A federal election in 2023?

Though far from a certainty, more and more, it feels like one. Federal minority governments have seldom endured more than a few years and the current Liberal-NDP agreement is unlikely to be an exception to this rule.

If the plug is pulled and the current Parliament Hill tone continues, the election will be waged on decidedly pessimistic terms. Take, for example, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent exchange played out over the closing weeks of 2022.

To great effect, Poilievre has repeatedly asserted that “it feels like everything is broken in this country” — a message that resonates strongly with Canadians. At a year-end Liberal holiday party, Trudeau countered that “Canada is not broken.”

While Canada is far from broken, it’s time we acknowledged that there are significant cracks in the land and the current government’s continued approach of ignoring the legitimate concerns of families battling record inflation and a housing crisis can’t continue.

As Poilievre tells it, Justin Trudeau’s excessive spending, runaway deficits and second-rate commitment to infrastructure mean that a continued Liberal reign poses no less than an existential threat to our nation.

Trudeau’s challenge is that circumstances beyond his control — namely brutal economic conditions — make defending against Poilievre’s charges harder and harder. He is left, as many long-term governments are, selling a hypothetical alternative narrative of another kind of doom and gloom.

And so, Trudeau paints a sloppy picture of a Poilievre-inspired hellscape where you pay for groceries with Ethereum and carbon costs less than an FTX token.

Put a pox on both their houses on this one. Better than cartoonish imaginings, our politics requires, now more than in a long time, great causes and long-term objectives.

Nothing places this fact into more apparent relief than immigration.

The Liberal’s target of welcoming 465,000 permanent residents in 2023, 485,000 in 2024, and 500,000 in 2025 is an important objective. Laudable for its human compassion and much needed for the future strength of our economy.

That said, we need to be ready to welcome these newcomers with, among other things, affordable housing and reliable, accessible health-care. The Trudeau government still needs to provide something close to a realistic plan. So far, its approach has been painfully insufficient.

Of course, grand visions amount to very little if they are unaccompanied by concrete plans and dedicated action. Historically, there is no better marriage of these two criteria than the revolutionary New Deal. During a rousing speech to the Democratic National Convention in 1936, the man behind it, President Franklin Roosevelt, asserted, “This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.” He spoke these words while his nation was still caught in the grasp of the world’s most significant economic collapse, five years before it entered its most crucial conflict.

As we awaken in 2023, our challenge — Canadians and our political leaders alike — will be to rally around many of the same appointments: one grand vision, concrete plans, and a dedication to action.

Backward glances into the trials of COVID-19 will do us little good. Instead, meeting such a challenge requires us to rethink and revamp our social, technological, and economic policies. It demands that we ask and answer existential questions: Should we expand our global influence or turn inward? Do we still need a monarchy? Which industries will define our future? What, as a nation, is our greatest priority?

Throughout our country, we must not allow our politics to continue being — as Orwell described it — “the choice between the lesser of two evils.” Canadians deserve a grand vision. Unfortunately, we’ve suffered without it for far too long.

This article first appeared in the Toronto Star on January 5, 2023.

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The warmth of this year’s festive period was undeniably dampened by horrific incidents of violent crime that rattled Canadians to their core. A shocking mass shooting at a condo building in Vaughan, an appalling tale of young girls allegedly stabbing an unhoused man to death in downtown Toronto, and a spate of increasing random attacks on the TTC combined to produce a most dispiriting and tragic holiday news cycle.

But no matter the time of year in which these violent acts unfold, their occurrence and nature point to a deeper truth, one often buried or obscured but made all too clear in recent weeks: Canada has a serious crime problem.

For despite what we might wish to believe, it’s evident that crime has been allowed to fester and grow — with the result that real systemic issues are now threatening the safety of Canadians.

For three consecutive years, homicides and violent crimes have risen in Canada. Reports from law enforcement across the country show organized crime is primarily responsible, with almost a quarter of murders in 2021 being gang related. Furthermore, marginalized Canadians are consistently and disproportionately impacted by violent crime.

And rather than adequately face these difficult issues, our politicians have been asleep at the switch.

Look, dealing with this issue is not easy. And it is made harder because Canadians are far too self-congratulatory when it comes to our national safety. Set in our supposedly idyllic, tolerant haven of the Great White North, we often look down on the maniacal gun situation south of the border, thinking we are immune. Or we gaze patronizingly across at Europe, believing organized crime cannot infiltrate our country to the same extent.

This view is wrong. Our homicide rate is roughly double that of the U.K. or France. It’s four times worse than Italy’s. A Canadian was murdered every 11 hours in 2021; for many, as it was for me, that will be a shocking revelation. It shows we have rested on our laurels for far too long. As a result, we’ve allowed both random acts of crime and organized, structural crime to thrive. It’s time for Canada to shake off our complacency and begin to treat our crime problem with the seriousness it deserves.

Guns are clearly the place to start. Efforts in this area have been woeful, most recently illustrated by the government’s bungled handgun legislation — so poorly executed it has managed to alienate a variety of groups including First Nations, both opposition parties and Liberal backbenchers.

I agree with freezing handgun sales, but the overwhelming priority should be halting the flow of firearms at our borders. Sure, Americans have insane gun laws, but we are not unaffected by them. When handguns were involved in a Canadian crime in 2021, 85 per cent of the time the weapon came from the United States.

The Liberals would do well to be humbled by their attempts to broaden gun bans and now focus primarily on strengthening protections at our border. In 2023, I would like to see a federal non-partisan task force ferociously dedicated to tackling that and other systemic flaws that have allowed crime to intensify, such as money laundering, a deepening mental health crisis and inadequate community supports.

It shouldn’t take another mass murder to crystallize for Canadians the depth of this problem. Nor should it take another horrific act for politicians of all stripes to honour the oaths they have sworn, and act swiftly to take the action everyone knows is needed.

This article first appeared in the Toronto Star on December 31, 2022.

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