In my latest Loonie Politics column I argue that despite his recent byelection wins and high standing in the polls, Mark Carney is in fact already a failure because across the board his policies are achieving feeble or disastrous results, and even in Canadian politics reality matters eventually.
“Modern criticism has come to mean this: that nobody knows what an artist is trying to do, and therefore nobody knows whether he has done it.”
G.K. Chesterton in New York American 30/12/1933, quoted in “Art Criticism” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024)
“Reading accounts of the CPR’s history today can make you laugh at how much more ambitious the builders of that age were. Small groups of surveyors trekked through mountainous passes, relied on Indigenous guides, worked far from any familiar settlements, and made decisions that, by modern standards, were acted on with astonishing speed. I write these words from Peterborough, Ont., which is supposed to be a stop on a future high-speed rail line linking Toronto to Quebec City. For decades, governments have talked about building this corridor. In different forms, Pierre Trudeau promised it, as did Jean Chrétien. Stephen Harper vacillated, and then Justin Trudeau assured us it would be built. The younger Trudeau even established Crown corporations to plan and study it. One of his last actions in February 2025 was to announce that the line was now definitely going to happen. How did he prove this? By announcing funding to study and plan the route — not to build it. As of now, the proposal, still without construction funding, is to begin building in 2029. That’s a lot of promises: zero building. Or consider Toronto’s now-infamous Eglinton Crosstown. First imagined as a subway expansion in the 1970s, construction even began before being cancelled. The plan was later resurrected as a light-rail line, interrupted during the Rob Ford era, and construction finally began in 2011. It was supposed to open in 2020. As of early January 2026, it still isn’t open. In other words, Toronto has taken longer to build and open a 19-kilometre light-rail line than Macdonald’s Canada took to build nearly 3,500 kilometres of transcontinental railway across rugged terrain and mountains. Build Canada indeed.”
Christopher Dummitt in National Post Jan. 11, 2026
“As might be expected from [C.S.] Lewis, he gave his lecture a Latin title: ‘De Descriptione Temporum,’ which might be rendered into English as ‘A Description of Time.’ He had long argued that the rigid way of describing the Renaissance as a sudden break with the past was simply incorrect. In fact, all of the great divisions of time lacked clear landmarks to set them apart. Change takes place over a period of many centuries, with one exception. He argued that a change between the period of Jane Austen and when he was speaking in 1954 was unlike any other change in culture throughout world history. He noted the recent symposium on T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘A Cooking Egg’ in which seven leading scholars could not agree on what the poem means. He noted the un-Christianizing of the West, which had accelerated since Austen’s time. He noted the way in which politics had become ‘the organization of mass excitement,’ or what Punch called ‘Govertisement.’ Finally, he noted that with the success of the machine, the culture had moved to viewing what is new is good and what is old is bad. The result was that education has shifted from the development of character to the acquisition of technical skill and the assimilation of data. In his inaugural lecture, Lewis painted a picture of a world in which people had lost the ability to make value judgments because of the disappearance of values.”
Harry Lee Poe The Completion of C.S. Lewis
The late Francois Furet, a French historian of totalitarianism, “copiously illustrates this thesis: that people believe what they want to believe, as long as it is possible to believe it; and that they generally return to believing it, once the crisis has passed. For how else can we explain the dogged loyalty to radical socialism, in the face of repeated butcheries?”
David Warren in Ottawa Citizen May 28, 2000 [the trouble being that if “people” do it and the author is a person presumably he does it too and truth collapses]
“All successful people learn that success is buried on the other side of frustration.”
Anthony Robbins Unlimited Power
“Miley Cyrus said her ninth studio album, “Something Beautiful,” is her attempt to reimagine what “beautiful” means: her beloved grandmother’s death, for instance, or the emotion of rage.”
New York Times email teaser June 6, 2025, joining in transvaluing all values
“And then there are the really mega-freaky publications like Weekly World News that are so deranged parakeets will actually hold their shit in until something else is placed in the bottom of their cage.”
Dennis Miller The Rants [violating my normal rule against dirty words but they do have a place].