Let the bells ring out, everyone have a Merry Sankofa!
Well, I don’t know how your Christmas is going, but mine couldn’t be better. Couldn’t be better if Santa loaned me the reindeer for a jaunt to the sunny zones — after, of course, his own blessed and joyful romps on the roofs and down the chimneys of all the world’s houses.
How could you say that, I hear the perceptive reader ask, when you are in Toronto, where the malls are a scene of menace, shoppers and their children harassed, and where some school boards (righteous cowards) forbid even the saying of “Christmas” (“winter holiday” is their desperate, bloodless substitute). Banning Christmas and all its wonderful trappings — particularly the Christmas tree — falls under the ever-dropping guillotine of inclusion.
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I do look forward to these same diversity-worshipping school boards shunning Ramadan or Diwali when these days hit the calendar.
Even the most well-known public venue in the city, Yonge-Dundas Square, by some tyrannical whim of the woke city council, is to be renamed after what we have been told is some Ghanaian wisdom word — Sankofa. I may be mischievous here, but it strikes me as too close to a certain, naturally decaffeinated — as are the minds that made the switch — coffee brand. All hail progressivism.
None of these weakens my full joy in Christmas 2023.
The first and undoubtedly the greatest uplift comes, and this can be no surprise to any Canadian, from our very own political Santa Claus — the prime minister himself. In a quite touching year-end interview with a long-time friend, he gave adamant assurance that he’s in for the long haul. That this temporary, and to his advisers and himself most bizarre, huge rise in the polls for Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre troubles him not an iota.
He sees the difficulties of our times: the international crises — in Israel, for example, where he has been a full beacon of wise comment and even generously offered most-needed advice to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — the terrible ravages of inflation, the desperate need for housing, the huge influx of immigrants — legal and illegal — placing strains on all public services and the draining war in Ukraine.
“I come to bring you tidings of great joy.” These words were first given air by an angel to some poor shepherds attending their flock. And they irresistibly echoed in my mind when I heard Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pledge he’s going to run again. That he had a great deal more to do, and that in a time of so many fretful crises, he simply could not desert Canada and deprive the country of his immense skills, his infinitely subtle understanding of all areas and interests of our country and his unparalleled standing as a leader on the international scene.
His own words say it best: “There’s no question in my mind that this is the time where everything is in the balance everywhere around the world.” And the clincher sentence — I see Poilievre flinching in woe and fear, his dream evaporating as the words rolled out — “I couldn’t be the person I am and walk away from this fight right now.” There you have it. Rational self-assessment. Duty. Courage.
If, after this early Yule proclamation, bonfires and fireworks didn’t blossom in the night skies from Signal Hill to the most remote recesses of the Arctic — they should have, and certainly as the words travel and meet the eager ears of millions of Canadians who were nursing the fear that Trudeau’s time might be up — they will.
But Canadians have other prompts for a joyous Christmas. Santa Trudeau, like his namesake, has his elves. None more personable, none with quite the portfolio of accomplishment and unasked charity — he once put solar panels on Alberta Premier Ralph Klein’s house and it wasn’t even Christmas — than his straw-banning, industry-killing environment minister, Steven Guilbeault.
Trudeau has been lucky in being able to attract such incomparable talent to his cabinet. Guilbeault, besides being a world-saver, is also the cabinet’s most highly equipped futurologist. He not only can tell the future — he is writing its laws. Poor Nostradamus could only look into the future. He could not order it around.
Guilbeault is the anti-Henry Ford of our era, having made it a law that come 2035, the internal combustion engine will no longer despoil the highways and byways of Canada. It will be electric vehicles … or you will walk. This pledge brings with it immense comfort, for it more than implies Guilbeault and his leader may well be there in 2035 — Liberal governments being eternal — to make good on the promise.
He has another plan to reduce what he calls “carbon emissions.” It’s only by rumour I hear this, but it is a bold stroke: declare Alberta and Saskatchewan rebel provinces and dismiss them from Confederation — a smaller Canada means less emissions, QED.
The other elves are on the same timeline. Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly figures she’ll have the two-state solution for the Middle East — Israel and Hamas forged in a new embrace of brotherhood — by 2037. And Seamus O’Regan has plans for many million-dollar job subsidies exclusively for the neglected cohort — young white males. Expected date: 2040. It is, he says, the last long mile in inclusion.
How could one not be jolly? It’s better than having your very own “Drummer Boy.”
Trudeau staying. Guilbeault shutting down the oil and gas industry, banning standard motor cars, many more journeys to climate-conscious China and the United Arab Emirates, upgrading paper straws so they do not stick to your lips. Joly fixing the Middle East. O’Regan catering finally to the last minority, white heterosexual males. How could one not be jubilant this Christmas?
Let the bells ring out, everyone have a Merry Sankofa.
The Liberals may have thoroughly, incandescently botched the last eight years but you just wait — in 2035 and the years beyond, Canada will be the light on every nation’s Christmas tree — or some stick that, by then, will have replaced the settler-colonialist forest foliage of a very outdated Canada.
National Post
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