It's Not A Lie.....If You Believe It

I've been staring at the following two headlines for the past hour trying to figure out a way they can co-exist in the same universe:

"Ontario Premier Says Her Government On Side Of Unions When It Comes To Good Jobs."

"Ontario Orders School Board Trustees To Cancel Pay Raises".

No....no. I'm sorry. There's just no way she could get away with this. She did not promise good paying jobs to unions and then tell trustees to retract a pay raise for themselves like 5 minutes later. Well, actually, of course she did, because Ontarians are just that gullible, which just may be how Ms. Wynne got to be Premier in the first place. If Kathleen Wynne stood in front of a bunch of voters and said, "I am not here in this room right now," I'm pretty sure they'd believe that, too!

Oh, wait a minute, it's actually worse than that. Wynne just told the trustees to cancel the raise. She didn't elaborate how she'd make them actually do it. So she's like a parent who threatens to punish her kids but never does. We knew that already, of course. This is the Premier who made a transparently false apology for the gas plant in a debate. This is the Premier who said the government would be more careful about consulting people about wind turbine development when it hasn't. This is a Premier who declared that there would be an open government initiative and then slammed the door shut on what's going on at the Ontario Power Authority. She says stuff because she knows you fools are dumb enough to believe it.

For the past two months I've watched my conservative friends on Facebook cream their jeans every time Kathleen Wynne makes a move towards corralling her out-of-control union pals. It's like watching Charlie Brown try to kick the football. "No guys, she actually said there was no more money this time! We should totally believe her!" Never mind that these are exactly the sort of people who should be able to see Wynne for the duplicitous, mendacious, disingenuous soul that she is: they want government spending to decrease, dammit, and that's all they care about.

Let's look at the hard evidence. Unions put Wynne in power and kept her there. Less-government-spending people didn't. Therefore there is precisely 0% of a reason for Kathleen Wynne to actually follow through on her half-hearted calls for less spending.  But because there are enough people who are so stupid as to actually believe her calls for less spending are genuine since she's such a nice lady who smiles a lot, we're going to be stuck in this two-step forever. Ontarians are never going to wake up to the fact that Kathleen Wynne is playing what amounts to a game of peek-a-boo with them, because she's smart enough to realize that this bluster about the deficit is just that: bluster.

Of course all the other provinces point their fingers and laugh, ignoring the fact that wherever you live right now, you've probably got a provincial government that has decided to ignore massive chunks of their own electorate. Right-leaning governments are toppling like dominoes across our country, and the ones that do have conservative credibility (B.C. and Quebec) are only that way because conservatives comprise a wing of that party that could be replaced at any time without too much damage to the government at large since the left is effectively non-existent there (for now). In those provinces they have tried to create actual conservative parties that have failed because: why? Why pay anything more than token attention to this rump of voters? Who cares about what they want?

Then you have the absolute champion of this new brand of Liberal fuddle-duddle: your friend and mine, Justin Trudeau. This week Derpy decided to take it to a new level by saying no, the fact that ISIS/ISIL are beheading and raping and running wild across the Middle East doesn't mean we should step up and help people there.

Well, why the hell not? He's already given the one finger salute to people who are opposed to marijuana legalization, pro-lifers, those who believe in a partisan Senate, Sun News, supporters of Israel, and those of us who give a whoop about the economy. Why shouldn't he toss foreign policy hawks off the island, too? Who are these Bush-lovers, anyway, and why should they have anything resembling representation in government?

Oh, but Trudeau will continue to reassure everyone that he is the Prime Minister of all Canadians, as opposed to those conservatives who are only interested in playing to their base. And we will believe him, and he knows it. He knows that the government has already won the battle for our souls, and we depend on it to show us the way.

Of course most conservatives think this is Trudeau proving he's unfit to be Prime Minister, but I beg to differ: I think Trudeau knows exactly who he's speaking to. He thinks there is a Bizarro World Ford Nation out there who wants an end to wars abroad, an end to social conservatism, and an end to austerity. He has a raft of allies who have won elections banking on the same thing.

I hope to heaven that he, and I, am wrong. But I don't think I am.