O Canada

By Sheri Monk
Guest Columnist

I ordinarily flirt a little too much with deadlines, but this time I wasn’t playing. The political and economic climate has been changing so frequently, there was no point in writing sooner than last minute. Whatever I write will likely be dated by the time you read it, so I’m not going to get into the details of tariffs, counter tariffs and trade wars. In this context, the details don’t especially matter anyway.

Here's what does: Our MPs and MP hopefuls need to hear from us, loudly and often. They need to hear from the overwhelming majority that we are Canadian first, and that we will fight for our nation. There is no room for division and no margin for error. Regardless of their political stripes, you let them know that we are not interested in adding stars to the mix.

For too long we have allowed the deliberate division of our populace, through social media engineering. The evidence is irrefutable. Programmed bots have been seeded throughout social media for years, sowing what we are now reaping. In psychology, sabotaging relationships by creating a divide is called triangulation, and boy, has Canada ever fallen for it.

Increasingly, we were exposed to extreme views on controversial topics. The comments were made on news articles, memes and videos and they were designed to cause tension and to drive citizens further apart. What was the extreme appeared as the norm, and the vast majority of us in the middle acquiesced into what we thought was reality. It wasn’t. It was a manufactured substrate in which hate and fear could be carefully cultivated for a dark harvest later. Folks, the crop is ripe and the combine is ready.

I’ve long believed that the most dangerous government is an entrenched one. When I first came to Saskatchewan, the NDP had been in power for far too long, and when the Saskatchewan Party won, change was sorely needed. Likewise, when I arrived in Alberta, the Conservatives had been in government for my entire lifetime. The former NDP in Saskatchewan and the former Conservatives in Alberta may have had different names and colors but they behaved in exactly the same way, with too little respect for their electorate or democracy.

It's the same at a workplace. If you have a too lax of a manager, productivity declines. Likewise, it can be the same in a marriage. Over time, effort wanes when life seems easy and when things are easy, we become bored. It is the same with business. Once a company becomes too large, they are no longer accountable to their customers and the checks and balances of capitalism stagger. We are driven by rarity, by novelty, by the juicy grapes just out of reach. Those grapes though, once we finally clasp them in our needy little hands, are often full of wrath.

This is human nature. We want what we can’t have and overlook what we do. We follow the path of least resistance. Gravity weighs us down, and the more it drags on us, the less we seem to feel it.

That is why we have never diversified our economy. It was simply easier not to. In a culture that vilifies public spending, there has been little public sanction to create economic infrastructure outside of looming disaster.

Remember the BSE crisis? When we couldn’t slaughter our cattle fast enough, much less consume them all? We threw money at that wreck as if it was going out of style. But guess what? Slaughter capacity is roughly the same today. Like everything else, it is a balancing act of crisis and calm, profit and loss, supply and demand. But if we make it through this with intact borders and a functioning economy, we will need to think beyond our wallets for long-term security. There can be no doubt now about how much we have risked on the altar of the U.S. dollar.

Whatever plagues us in Canada, we can sort it out among ourselves. We have always bounced between left and right like a puck between the blue lines. (Could this even be a patriotic opinion column without at least one hockey reference?) We had Stephen Harper as our leader for many years—a conservative Albertan—and he has been vocal in his opposition to any loss of our sovereignty.

Writing this now, I find it astounding that I must invoke the influence of a conservative former prime minister just to sway others to retain our national identity, sovereignty, and borders. This should be a given—one of the few things we can believe with certainty. But if there is one thing I am learning from all this, it is that nothing can be taken for granted—least of all freedom and democracy.

I don’t know whether Canada will elect Mark Carney or Pierre Poilievre. If Carney is smart, he will call the election soon because the “dictatorship” sonnet being sung to us from the south is growing louder. And not just from random Russian bots—but from THE Russian bot, Donald Trump. What he says and how he says it mirrors the divisive language used for over a decade to weaken us. That is no coincidence. We may have been duped before, but there is no excuse now. It is staring us in the face, daring us to ignore it. Carney, I think, will see this as the existential crisis it is and deal with it accordingly in an effort to unite Canada – but I am not sure that will appease the Musk/Trump team.

If Pierre Poilievre is elected, Trump will take that as a personal victory. It will take a great deal of ass-kissing to get Trump to give up on his 51st state fantasy, and Poilievre is the only one with the stomach for it. When this country votes, Canada will be voting on the approach we take with the U.S. for the next four years. If Poilievre can massage Trump’s monstrous ego enough, we may end up with a happy-ending deal in which we lose his tariffs and keep our land.

Once the votes are counted we must stand united as Canadians behind that leader. Our politicians must continue to see a sovereign Canada united, and the Americans/Russians must see there is no longer any room for triangulating us. Our focus must be on our sovereignty first, our economy second-first, and everything else third—at least until January 2029. Let us pray it is no longer than that.

No matter who is elected, we can (hopefully) survive a four-year term without succumbing to a bot-inspired civil war. The Trump sycophants among us must be ignored like screaming toddlers while being given the opportunity to make better decisions. But if they hold office or seek office, we cannot afford mercy—they must be cast aside like the weakest links they are.

Whatever the United States used to be to us, whatever it meant, and whatever friendship we believed was there… these things are transformed today. Maybe not forever, but for now. Today we have an American KGB, drunk with power and lusting for more. Those are not our values and theirs are not our ways.

What has happened to Ukraine is criminal. We knew it was criminal when Putin invaded. When the USSR collapsed in 1991, Ukraine inherited the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world. In 1994, they agreed to return that arsenal to Russia for dismantling in exchange for security assurances. Both Russia and the U.S. signed the agreement—now both have betrayed it.
If there is one silver lining to all of this, it is that I have seen Canada more united over the past several weeks than I have seen… perhaps ever. When Quebec is willing to fight for Canada, when Indigenous leaders stand up for our the land we share, we know two things – the situation is serious, but we are closer together than we thought. There is great hope and great wisdom in that.

Our grandfathers before us bled and died for the freedom and democracy we have taken for granted all these years. They would be horrified to see what has transpired south of us. We owe it to them and to our children to ensure it goes no farther.

Sheri Monk is a freelance writer based out of Medicine Hat, AB. She can be reached at sherimonk@gmail.com