The beclowning of 'Eagle Strong Man'
. . .Along with a directly related and unreported spectacle the "best newspaper in Canada" is making of itself in Americaland. Also more doomcasting. Buckle up.
Some quick updates
The Walking Dead: Raincoast edition.
I ended up losing internet access for nearly half of last week owing to that bombogenesis thing, the “bomb cyclone” that roared out of the Pacific and made such an apocalyptic mess of everything up and down the coast.
The once-in-a-decade event knocked over an old-growth fir that cut a neighbour’s house right in half, no lie. No injuries, I’m happy to report. Power came back Thursday around noon.
Thanks to a modest backup power source and intermittent internet access while the trees were getting blown down, I managed to put together that mid-week magazine of a newsletter (‘If there is hope, it lies in the proles’) that ended up (I think) in everyone’s inbox sometime last Wednesday.
All that was why I didn’t file to the National Post last week. In the meantime a couple of very difficult projects going back to last August are showing signs that they should be coming together, finally, any day now. And there are other files on my desk that are suddenly getting thicker. Which is why I’m not filing to the National Post this week, either, and also why you’re now reading another mid-week magazine type of newsletter.
A prologue of sorts
We’ll start with what I’ve got my eye on at the moment and then I’ll come to the courageous Navajo journalist and activist Jacqueline Keeler, author of Standoff: Standing Rock, the Bundy Movement, and the American Story of Sacred Lands, and a Canadian-content crossborder defamation she’s having to put up with.
Keeler is perhaps the leading American authority on “Pretendians,” the syndrome that apparently afflicts the Not-Cree, Not-Metis-Either Randy Eagle Strong Man Boissonnault. He’s that unfortunate scandal-sponge who served in Justin Trudeau’s cabinet as Employment, Workforce Development and Official Languages minister until it all became just too dang embarrassing last week.
The heavy lifting on the Boissonnault story was undertaken by the National Post parliamentary reporter Christopher Nardi, who explains how it all came together here. The latest development is that humiliated federal officials have had to suspend all business with the company Boissonnault co-founded after it was determined that the firm was procuring federal contracts while pretending to be “wholly” Indigenous-owned.
A closely-related shy-making interlude:
Madison Fleischer, the Liberal Party candidate in the upcoming Surrey - Langley federal byelection nailbiter, may not be Metis after all.
After what it called a disappointing meeting with Fleischer last week, the Waceya Métis Society announced that it was distancing itself from Fleischer’s claims of Métis identity: “We ask that Madison take the necessary steps to properly research and verify her Indigenous heritage before making any further public assertions.”
You may be asking yourself, For the love of God what is it with these people? But let’s be generious and leave Fleischer out of it for now. I don’t know why she’s suddenly scrubbing references to her claimed identity from various webpages, but sometimes, a person’s Indigeneity, for perfectly genuine reasons, can raise very thorny and sad questions.
Simple rule: Don’t make stuff up and call it the “truth.”
It’s those kinds of thorny and sad questions that Jacqueline Keeler is especially skilled in asking. For her meticulous fact-checking trouble, Keeler has found herself menaced by the same Canadian vanity media enterprise I had a nasty public confrontation with a couple of years ago, owing to my own deligence in the matter of fact-checking the news media during The Year of the Graves.
It’s owing to the same slovenliness of that same hipster media enterprise Canadaland that Keeler is being similiarly traduced. Down in Americaland the National Public Radio network’s Code Switch program stupidly allowed itself to be taken in by it, and rather than do the responsible thing, NPR is pretending there’s nothing’s wrong. Deeper background on Canadaland here: Hoo Boy. Deep Downtown Crazytown.
The Canadaland-Keeler business is a hell of a story. It’s another teachable moment in the ongoing collapse of the disciplines of journalism (and of academia) that have always been necessary to the telling of true stories in our shared culture, the production of knowledge, and the maintenance of social cohesion. It’s not just a “legacy media” thing. It’s even more pronounced in the simulacra replacing the “old” media. And it’s not just a “left-wing” thing.
It’s all very sordid. Details below, for paying subscribers. In the meantime. . .
It’s Way Worse Than I Thought
Real Story subscribers will know that I tend to be stubbornly optimistic, but at the same time I’m reluctant to engage in soothsaying because after all, nobody really knows what will happen even tomorrow. Still, I’ve been going out on a bit of a limb over the past few weeks, as in: Notes on the coming disturbances. As in this bit:
I give it two years, tops, before things really start coming unglued. The Conservatives will have swept into office, expectations will have been raised, and I have no cause to believe that Pierre Poilievre will be able to put things back together again, try as he might.
When I wrote that, I was working from basic arithmetic derived from various public databases that pretty well all other journalists have been relying on. In the National Post a couple of weeks ago I put it this way: Because of Canada’s open-borders calamity, there are already roughly three million non-citizens in this country, there aren’t enough jobs to go around and the structurally paralyzed home construction sector will remain incapable of providing roofs over everybody’s heads.
To be precise, we were looking at roughly 2.8 million “temporary” residents of this country who can’t be accomodated in either a fair-wage market or an affordable housing market, not including up to 500,000 people working illegally in Canada that aren’t in any federal database. On top of that, the Immigration Refugee Board is faced with a sudden surge of 200,000 asylum claims filed from within Canada and an adjudication wait time of 44 months for each of them.
Turns out it’s way worse.
According to documents Marc Miller’s Ministry of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship recently filed with Parliament, there are 4.9 million people with visas that are set to expire over the next 12 months. Miller says he’s just counting on everyone to behave and leave the country when they’re expected to. That’s the plan.
Factor that in with American president-elect Donald Trump’s promise to slap a 25-per-cent tarriff on southbound Canadian exports (yikes) unless and until Canada gets its act together on the border. Bear in mind that the number of people sneaking into the United States from the Canadian side has been doubling every year for several years now, and to make matters even worse, Canada is becoming a net exporter of fentanyl and an America-bound transit route for terrorists.
Between last fall and this summer, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers apprehended 19,498 southbound illegal migrants. That’s a far fewer than the migrants crossing into the U.S. from Mexico, but 358 individuals on the U.S. terror watchlist were nabbed on their way south from Canada in fiscal year 2024 compared to only 155 watchlist targets apprehended on the U.S. southern border.
Long story short: It’s not like all those non-citizens in Canada are going to be happy when they’re finally told, sorry, the Liberal government sold you a lie, ripped you off, and now you have to leave. So things are going to get very, very nasty. With Trump’s determination to embark on an unprecedented mass deportation project of his own, riddle me this:
How would Trudeau respond if millions of deportees from America started heading to the Canadian border? Would a Liberal government tell the Americans, okay, we’ll take your deportees, just cut us some slack on tarriffs?
Anyway, there we have it. It turns out I wasn’t peering deeply enough into the abyss of Justin Trudeau’s postnational immigration-policy lunacy, the problem is twice as big as everybody thought it was, and I was being far too optimistic when I said it would take two years, tops, before things really start coming unglued. They’re already coming unglued, and Trump’s deportations haven’t even started yet. More below the paywall. . .