This is a big week for anglosphere elections: Canada today, Australia on Saturday, and, in between, England's local elections (except for the ones Sir Keir has cancelled) on Thursday. Don't worry, you sensitive types, in none of the three is there the remotest danger of a Trump or an Orbán, a Le Pen or Meloni ascending to power.
Incredible as it seems, the Aussie campaign has been even more dispiriting than the Canadian one, with the so-called "right-of-centre" leader, Peter Tweedledutton, alternating between huffing indignantly at the very suggestion that he as any policy disagreements with the leftie incumbent and fighting vainly the old ennui at having to feign the wearisome pretence of "fighting" an election for another week. Even the lame-o dinner-theatre of electoral politics requires more plausible actors than this. To channel Viscount Whitelaw in another context, Mr Dutton is going around the country stirring up apathy, and doing a very good job of it. "Consensus" of this kind is killing democracy, Down Under as in its Clinto-Bushite, Chirac-Hollande or Blairite-Cameronian variations. It's a good thing Australia has compulsory voting, because otherwise it wouldn't have any at all.
In Canada, which is in a far more parlous state than its Commonwealth cousin, turnout will be all. Also incredible as it seems, in opinion polls a consistent forty-three-ish per cent of Canadians have so enjoyed the last decade they're itching to give the Liberal Party another four years to hit the gas and floor the country off the cliff. You'll recall my old line that no change can be permitted to anything that matters. These Canadian and Australian campaigns seem to have more or less formalised the thesis.
More symbolically, three-hundred-and-fifty-five years after its Royal Charter, Hudson's Bay is closing. No, no, not the actual bay, although after a decade of Justin and an impending half-decade of the Central Wanker, whoops, sorry, Central Banker, I wouldn't entirely rule that out. For the moment, however, the vast sprawling body of water remains liquid, but the Hudson's Bay Company has decided to abandon its remaining presence on Canadian Main Streets and close its last stores, including on Toronto's Yonge Street, where my grandmother worked for many years, and on Montreal's Sainte-Catherine, for which, many decades back, I once had a bit-part in a hard-not-to-think-of-the-Bay-era commercial. Yeah, yeah, I know... the "retail ice age" and all that, although you'd think after a quarter-millennium running trading posts for fur-trappers across the frozen north, HBC would be better placed to resist that than, say, Kmart.
To add to the general sense of foreboding, the deadliest vehicle attack in Canada took place late in Vancouver on Saturday night. At the time of writing, eleven are dead with dozens more injured.
The carnage occurred at the end of Lapu Lapu Day. What's that - Victoria Day in Inuit? No, it's a Filipino celebration for a Mactan chief who fought against Magellan and the forces of colonialism in the 1520s. In other words, it's nothing to do with Canada, which is, naturally, why it's been officially recognised by British Columbia since 2023. Not much has been revealed about the perp, except that, as the coppers confirmed, they had been aware of him. That's putting it mildly. From the indefatigable Joe Warmington in The Toronto Sun:
Sources told me the man allegedly responsible for this heinous attack had not only had more than 100 interactions with police, there was one in the hours before the mayhem.
My usual coinage - just another "known wolf" - doesn't, I think, cover "more than 100 interactions": This guy didn't "slip through the net", he filled up and overflowed the net.
You can't, even in the Canadian press, ignore an incident that kills eleven people - which is eleven more than have been found in all those "mass graves" Sir John A Macdonald was running on the side. But the symbolism, on the eve of Election Day, is a bit too stark for taxpayer-funded Big Media to go all-in on. If any functioning society is a compact between past, present and future, then here in the hyper-present of today's vote Canada's past (Hudson's Bay) is dead and Canada's future (multiculti jubilations) has been mown down. As Mr Warmington puts it:
Canada is no longer recognizable. It's spinning out of control, and no one in charge seems to have any answer.
In 2021, the mammy singer led his party to just shy of thirty-three per cent of the vote - or about ten points below where Canada's ghastly media say the central banker of no fixed abode, who is even more politically cack-handed than his chum Rishi Rich, has been polling for the entire campaign. Mr Carney seems far more unfamiliar with the basic concept of "ordinary people" than, say, his noble brother-in-law, a third baron and sixth baronet. Nevertheless, absent turnout massive enough to knock a few points off that polling lead, the regional variations from the Atlantic to Quebec to the west will be enough to deny even a "winning" Tory party a majority, at which point the reality of Canada kicks in: four of its five biggest parties are left-wing.
So you might as well vote. Because, in theory or at least in romantic fantasy, on this day Canada is just about salvageable. And in 2029 it won't be.
Australia... Canada... So how about England? Well, Nigel Farage has spent the last couple of months stampeding towards the alleged "centre". Now, in the final week of the campaign, he's decided, as Carl Benjamin puts it, that he's right-wing again:
Thus, Nigel is now pledging to appoint a Minister for Deportations - which would appear to be at odds with his position just a fortnight back, when he explicitly ruled out mass deportations.
Unless, of course, in Nigel's cabinet, Minister for Deportations will be just a part-time job.
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with Mark's column for those wondering what the connection is between Ariana Grande and Evelyn Waugh. Saturday brought a pronoun-trouble edition of Steyn's weekend music show, and Rick McGinnis's movie date - Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon in The Trip. On the eve of the Canadian election, Mark was in an elegaic mood for his Sunday Song of the Week. Our marquee presentation was a rare non-fiction audio adaptation: C S Lewis on love of country.
If you were too busy jetting in to El Salvador to adopt one of those Maryland men we hear so much about, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
