Posts in National Post
Canadian self-reliance

In my latest National Post column I talk about how odd it is that instead of Canadians mistrusting government, we now allow it to mistrust us. It doesn’t believe we can shop by ourselves, ride a bicycle or get in a boat safely, defend ourselves, speak freely without speech codes or build a deck without rules about the height of our railings. And instead of insisting that we know what we’re doing, too often we let it tell us what to do. In doing so we are losing our heritage. Servile incompetence is not a Canadian value. This country was built by self-reliant people who kept their governments in check, and it’s high time we went back to that arrangement.

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Your problem is in the mail, Mr. Trudeau

In the National Post:

The Canada Post Corporation just delivered a problem right to Justin Trudeau’s door. But there’s also an opportunity inside the package.

The problem is that Canada Post has suspended plans to move from home delivery to community mailboxes in much of urban Canada, daring Trudeau to follow through on his pledge to reconsider and by implication reverse the change. The opportunity is that he can really rethink mail delivery in Canada instead of surging cheerfully back to the future.

Early in the election, Trudeau hid behind the all-purpose objection of inadequate consultation and promised a moratorium on community mailboxes pending comprehensive review, which could mean anything, or nothing, and take forever if necessary. By platform time the Liberals went further, promising “We will save home mail delivery. We will stop Stephen Harper’s plan to end door-to-door mail delivery in Canada and undertake a new review of Canada Post.”

The reflexive personalization and demonization of “Stephen Harper’s plan” was an unfortunate nasty undercurrent in an allegedly sunny campaign. But it’s also completely beside the point in this case. Canada Post is a Crown Corporation supposedly insulated from “political” interference, so it wasn’t Harper’s plan in the first place. It was a reaction to losing business relentlessly thanks to that darn Internet.

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