HANNAFORD: It's not the government we don't trust, it's the Trudeau Liberals

How very like the Trudeau Liberals to conflate a public mistrust of themselves, with a general mistrust of the institutions of government itself. No gentlemen and ladies, it's not government institutions we don't trust, it's the elected Trudeau Liberals giving them their orders that we don't trust.It is of course an oft-commented fault of the Liberal Party to assume that whatever is in the best interests of the party, is in the best interests of Canada. This has been so for as long as I can remember, which is back to the time of the present prime minister’s father. Conservatives mock the Liberals when they talk about ‘Canada’s Natural Governing Party.’ Rank-and-file Liberals still don’t get the joke.As if to make the point, here’s a report from the Department of Public Safety that says, “Our internal discussions and feedback from stakeholders indicate a troubling erosion of trust in our democratic institutions. Identifying the key factors contributing to this decline and implementing effective strategies to rebuild trust are imperative.”Stakeholders, eh? Who would they be? The social justice warriors to whom the Trudeau Liberals give money, perhaps? Bet nobody asked you what you thought.And what could possibly be the key factors? The report doesn’t say but as revealed earlier today by the Western Standard, a companion memo from the Privy Council Office pointed fingers at “online disinformation that’s the direct threat to the trust and confidence people have in our democratic systems."And it isn’t just the harmful content itself but also “the underlying behaviors and actors” involved in its propagation.Ah. Perhaps that includes people who have “unacceptable ideas.”No. It’s not the institutions that aren’t trusted. It is this Trudeau-led Liberal government that habitually messages rather than informs, and leaves the truth to be stumbled upon.The proof points on this are enough to fill a book. But here’s a few to give you the flavour.In fact, today’s latest increase in the carbon tax is a perfect example. What we were told is that to combat climate change, Canadians must generate less C02. Therefore, the wise and far-sighted Government of Canada has instituted a progressive tax on carbon dioxide pollution to discourage the polluters. A lot of people don’t buy the climate-change argument to begin with. But even some of those who do, are uneasy about calling carbon dioxide as a pollutant. They know it’s plant food; we’d be stuck without it. In fact, higher levels of atmospheric CO2 are greening the planet. And greening, as opposed to desertification, is a good thing.Ah! There, there, that’s disinformation coming out of Alberta! See? See?Well no. It’s actually NASA saying that. They may be right, they may be wrong, but they’re not doing disinformation. And, they’d be more likely to know than Justin Trudeau or Steven Guilbeault, wouldn’t they?And by the way, if we’re all breathing the same atmosphere, wouldn’t it make sense for Canada to export natural gas to countries burning coal? Yes it would, but evidently not to the Trudeau Liberals. One can speculate about their reasons: Is it that certain individuals just crave a warm round of applause from their chosen peers at Davos for making Canada the one country in the world that reached net-zero emissions? Or is it just an anti-Western Canada thing, to keep Alberta and Saskatchewan from becoming too powerful?Doesn’t matter. There’s the stated reason, and the real reason. But if you ‘stumble’ on the ‘real reason,’ they’ll tell you that’s disinformation.It’s like when the prime minister said vaccines were safe and effective, and we were to trust the science, and all the provinces jumped on board and said the same thing.Then it turned out things weren’t quite so tightly defined. First, people pointed out that what they said was 'vaccine,' wasn't. So ‘vaccine’ was redefined to justify the messaging.Then, it seemed like people were getting sick anyway, so the narrative was adjusted; you might get sick, but it wouldn’t be so bad, you see? And when it turned out that people were actually suffering adverse effects from vaccination, they didn’t know what to say.The issue in all of that is not that governments didn’t try to do the best they knew how. It is that once the leaders decided they knew best, they regarded anything else as disinformation. And some of it wasn’t.People still trust some government institutions. What they don’t trust is devious twits with undeclared agendas. People such as Mr. Trudeau, who will say there’s no business case for Canadian gas exports to Europe, when the Yanks are gearing up to do it. A man who will disdain any knowledge of monetary policy as beneath him, even as he runs up as much debt in three years as this country took on in the previous one hundred and fifty. A prime minister who will lower the country's flag for six months on the strength of some unexamined ground penetrating radar allegations. Somebody who will bully his attorney general to fix a political problem and who instead of dealing with allegations of foreign electoral interference, buries the issue ever deeper in distant enquiries. Oh, and somebody who calls patriotic, flag-waving Canadians 'misogynists and racists.'Such a man as that, we shouldn't trust, not least because of contemplated legislation that he intends to limit the spread of what he thinks is 'disinformation.'The institutions of government themselves? They're largely incompetent and inefficient. But they are generally not malicious. All they need is new leadership. And that's coming.

HANNAFORD: It's not the government we don't trust, it's the Trudeau Liberals

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