The truth is that the Yanks don't want to annex Canada, but the nation’s journos never bothered to check, leaving Carney free to stampede the herd

"The idea of America subsuming Canada is as popular and credible as moon shot denialism"

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What kind of electorate parrots the aggressive slogan “elbows up” during an election campaign and ends up performing the anatomically convoluted feat of sticking said elbows in its own, er, ears?

How else to query the conduct of the 43.7 per cent of voting Canadians who cast ballots for the federal Liberal party and thus helped elect its untested, unchallenged, unproven, zero political experience party leader as prime minister?

Mark Carney might yet turn out to be Canada’s historically greatest PM. We don’t know. Why? Because we don’t know him as a leader. Why? Because he has never led any political office from the reeve of a rural municipal council on up. On the contrary, until age 60, he scrupulously sequestered himself in bureaucracies, banking, and business – endeavours which, in daily life, sure ain’t the House of Commons.

An iron law of politics is that somewhere, somehow, something is going wrong. Every day. The prime minister’s job is to fix it. Not now, but right now. It’s not helpful if he or she doesn’t even know for the first 100 days where the bathrooms are on Parliament Hill.

Yet without that requisite knowledge, Prime Minister Carney will lead the country for at least the next four years – barring his total inexperience causing the premature crash of his minority government. (Historical context: Joe Clark, whose minority Progressive Conservatives lasted barely nine months in office from 1979 to 1980, had eight years of Parliamentary service under his belt and still kissed it all away.)

Elevating a political newbie such as Carney to the highest federal office in the land isn’t just an electoral gamble. It is wearing cement overshoes to a rookie tryout for the Cirque du Soleil after a night on the booze and betting the house on your unfettered success.

A sober populace – or at least one able to avoid being ginned up by the marketing Machiavelli’s of the federal Liberal party – would have set aside sing-song sloganeering, elevated elbows posturing and incoherent fear of various crises going bump in the night. It would have wisely recognized the benefit for Carney of an on-the-job training internship as Opposition leader.

In fairness, it isn’t necessary to comb through 6,000 years of bison bones at Alberta’s Head Smashed in Buffalo Jump UNESCO World Heritage site to realize that calm, reflective judgement is kinda tough to come by in the midst of a thundering stampede. Spooked daily by hardcore Liberal manipulators, many voting Canadians simply followed the herd off the cliff. Mid-air is a terrible place to holler “stop!”– as the immortal Wile E. Coyote has taught us for generations.

If anything, those voters were let down abysmally by the minions in the media, many of whom actually know a thing or two about how high-level political perfidy works and did less than zero to call it out. They could, instead, have done their jobs by asking pertinent questions, providing fair and balanced critical information, and identifying Liberal fear-mongering for exactly what it was. It would not have even required the professional self-discipline to overcome their collective autonomic revulsion for Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. They simply needed to deflate Carney’s propagandized image sufficiently to bring him down to earth.

How? Well, to take one powerful example, the day after Canadians voted, the Washington Post and ABC News released a poll south of the border on how Americans regard President Donald Trump’s cockamamie calls for making Canada the 51^st state. It revealed 81 per cent oppose the idea, including 71 per cent of Republicans. Only 13 per cent think it’s a purdy durn good idea-er.

For reference, that’s five per cent fewer than the 18 per cent who believe, according to a 2023 YouGov poll, that the 1969 moon landing was faked. Knock off, say, five per cent of those respondents as just taking the mickey out of the pollsters, and you see that the idea of America subsuming Canada is as popular and credible as moon shot denialism. And an old populist showman like Trump would seriously proceed on it with U.S. mid-term elections in the offing?

Here’s the far more compelling question. If the threat to our sovereignty was so grave, if the election truly took place during an “existential crisis” that only Heaven and the Liberal Party of Canada could forfend, why didn’t a major Canadian media outlet conduct such a poll of Americans to gauge support for the Trumpy trolling?

Where was the Globe and Mail in the lead-up to the campaign to help Canadians distinguish reality from self-serving Liberal party hysteria?

Where was the C-B-freaking-C with its $1.4 billion in tax subsidies when the times demanded cold, hard facts from the ground on U.S. public opinion about the actual measure of danger we faced?

Where was CTV? Where was Maclean’s? Where was the journalist collective that convinced the previous Liberal government to provide hundreds of millions of dollars so a diligent homegrown media could protect Canadian democracy?

To put it politely, they all seem to have been caught with their elbows in their, er, ears.

Which goes a long way to answering the initial question above. The evidence in this case shows the kind of populace that parrots the aggressive slogan “elbows up” during an election campaign, and ends up performing an anatomically convoluted feat on itself, is one that has been failed abominably by its major media. Regardless of whether Mark Carney succeeds wildly or fails miserably as prime minister, the whole electorate should leave itself a reminder note to never again be manipulated – stampeded – by the very journalists who pose as their democratic defenders.

(Peter Stockland is a former Editor-in-Chief of the Montreal Gazette)