The Sixth Estate

It’s hard to know where to begin with this article from the Hill Times, which twice alludes to Immigration Minister Jason Kenney as the “Minister for Curry in a Hurry” and also quotes The Virgin Kenney snarkily telling a solidly right-wing audience at the Manning Networking Conference that if only new Canadians were allowed to vote, the Conservatives would have a much more solid majority than they do already. Another speaker suggested the Conservatives could be the environmentalist party, which sounds a bit like saying that Imperial Tobacco was really only interested in building a solid medicare system all along.

But the kicker is this line, defining the ideal Conservative voter, which is apparently now being referred to as a “bread and butter Canadian”:

They work hard, they want to enjoy their family, they want to put food on the table for them, but they don’t want to have to be bothered, or have things get in the way, that have to do with government.

And he’s absolutely right. Speaking as a bread and butter Canadian myself, I don’t want anything in my life that has to do with government. I’m sick and tired of living in what Dear Leader Stephen rightly describes as “a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term.” To show you what I mean, I want to describe to you all the ways in which government gets in the way in my own life, as an Average Bread and Butter Canadian™. Down with this sort of thing!

I wake up in the morning in a house that’s not my own. Not really. It was built according to the restrictive tenets of the building code. Thanks to government, I’m not even allowed to build what I want on my own property in this country. If I want to build an unstable home whose roof will fall in on my head in 10 years, why should the government stop me? A man’s home is his castle!

Then I take out the garbage. I don’t know about you, but to me, garbage collection is one of the worst offences of the welfare state. I have no choice about who collects my garbage. Big Brother decides that for me. I don’t even have the right to just dump my garbage in empty fields. Government gets in the way of that, too. There’s a huge empty field at the neighbourhood school just waiting to be turned into a landfill. But just drive onto that field and dump one little can of garbage on it, and see what happens!

Next, I drive my kids to school. Not in my car, of course. I want a car with no seat belts (so constraining!), and I think it’s stupid to pay for insurance that I, as a responsible driver, don’t really need anyways. But once again, big government gets in the way. Sorry, says the sad-faced, downtrodden little man at the car dealership, but thanks to big government getting in the way, they’re not even allowed to make a car without seatbelts, let alone sell me one. And drive without insurance? Not in this socialist dictatorship, says the goon with the police badge as he raps on my windshield.

Speaking of police, what’s with that? Did you get a choice about who would be your police officer? Neither did I. Big government got in the way yet again. I should be allowed to hire private security to look after me! I don’t mind telling you, the RCMP spend way, way too much time pretending that everyone should benefit from the protection of the law. If people can’t afford to buy off their own cop, why should they expect the cops to help them? That’s how the Mafia works, and I’m sure things would be just dandy if it worked for the rest of us that way, too.

But I digress. You see, I don’t even get to drive my Big Government Car on a proper road, either. Instead, I’m forced to live with these stupid Big Government Roads. Every road should be handed off to private contractors immediately. Then, we as consumers could select our routes through the city in order to privilege the good road contractors (4th Avenue is run by my friend’s brother-in-law) and punish the bad ones (5th Avenue isn’t cleaned up properly). I think SNC Lavalin would be up to the task. As things stand, all the roads are owned by the government. There’s no incentive to maintain them!

My first stop is the school. I don’t send my children to public school, of course, because I don’t hold with that communist claptrap. I send my children to private school. Of course that costs $30,000 a year, because even though I don’t like the public school system, I still want my kids to get a proper secular education. So no cheap Catholic schools for my kids. (Unlike the Virgin Kenney, I don’t believe in the Virgin Mary.)

I love my kids. That’s why it depressed me so deeply last year when one of them broke her leg and had to take a Big Government Ambulance to a Big Government Hospital. We weren’t given a choice of ambulance services, and we weren’t given a choice of emergency room. I would much rather pay the $15,000 bill myself than subject myself to the brutal totalitarianism of healthcare-by-death-panel. Fortunately I was able to get my kid out of there before Big Government euthanized her. I’m told by a well-informed source that she might not have been so lucky if we lived in Holland.

Then it’s off to work, where, once again, I still can’t get big government off my back. They tell my boss the minimum amount he’s allowed to pay me, the working conditions he has to maintain for me, the overtime he has to pay me, and even the number of hours I can work per week. Shouldn’t I be allowed to negotiate all that myself? No wonder there’s such high unemployment. Who would want to get a job when it comes with all this red tape?

I make my way back home on the Big Government roads, and stop in the store to pick up some bread and butter. (I am a Bread and Butter Canadian, after all.) I can barely even see whether it’s white bread or brown bread in the bag, unfortunately, because I can’t see past this giant, obnoxious nutrition label that some Big Government Bureaucrat thought it would be a good idea to force the breadmaker to put on the bag.

Then I go to the dairy aisle, and unfortunately, that’s where this tragic tale of woe ends. You see, there’s been a recall. My brand of butter isn’t there. Some clown in a fancy office at the Big Government Food Inspection Agency was feeling high and mighty and had the plant shut down. Now I’m only a Bread Canadian. This is the worst offence of all. Like all good Bread and Butter Canadians, I have my own biochemistry lab in the basement. If I want my food tested for listeria or E. coli, I will bloody well do it myself, thank you very much.