Welcome to the 'Age of Disorder'
Memory-hole everything that brought us here. We're all transactional now. Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Marc Carney: One Big Happy Family.
Who controls the past controls the future: Who controls the present controls the past. - George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four, of course.
I do not recognize dialectics, but, as you say, dialectics recognizes me. - American philosopher James Burnham, the “first neoconservative,” in an open letter to Leon Trotsky, February, 1940.
Here’s a puzzle for you. What connects George Orwell and James Burnham in a way that persuasively explains both the emergence of the techno-oligarchy around the White House along with what by all appearances is a strange new cordiality that binds Xi, Putin, Trump, and Carney? Trust me. You’ll see. I’ll resolve the riddle for paying customers below.
These things are also connected:
The emerging civil war among MAGA Republicans. The floor-crossing fraying at the edges of Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative caucus in Ottawa. The collapse of Conservative coherence west of the Rockies into a crazyhouse of apocalytic “land claims” catastrophism. The tendency among New Democrats to Stalinism with a kindly human face. The rapid advance of the Liberal government into a Beijing-style managerial-caste autocracy. . .
I don’t want to get too bogged down here, and of course for the 80 percent of us who have concluded that owning a home is now a privilege reserved for the rich, and for the half of us now living quite literally paycheque to paycheque even while sometimes working two or three jobs at a time, a lot of this stuff will seem irrelevant to their predicament.
It happens to be directly relevant, but besides, keeping an eye on this sort of thing is kind of my job. I realize it’s a lot to take in, in a single Real Story newsletter. It’s not my fault that everything is happening all at once, everywhere, all the time, but I’m not going to ask you to take it all in, in one go, I promise. So lets get to it.
“Complete Depopulation of Ostriches.”
That’s the unlikely headline on top of the lead story on page 1, above the fold, in the print edition of Friday’s National Post. If it helps, you can think of the Great Universal Ostrich Farms gun barrage as the Canadian version of the horrible end to the Ruby Ridge standoff in Idaho in 1992, or the bloody 1993 seige of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, except with giant flightless birds.
I’m going to move on from this in short order, but I’m beginning this Weekend Real Story with the grisly climax of the ostrich standoff in Edgewood, British Columbia because it’s emblematic of the general descent into bedlam, weirdness and willed amnesia that is shaping up as the defining feature of the current historical moment.
Very briefly, the story, as you might imagine, is about a flock of ostriches. The flock’s “complete depopulation” at a farm owned by a group of pleasantly eccentric scofflaws last Thursday night was undertaken by marksmen contracted by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
The sound of gunfire echoed through the darkness of the Kootenay Mountains for several hours, and in the end, by morning, the gruesome spectacle of roughly 300 dead ostriches in an impromptu enclosure of high walls made of haybales concluded the year-long melodrama.
Along the way, the Edgewood intrigues attracted the interventions of militant antivivisectionists, antivaxxers, World Health Organization conspiracy theorists, the Trump administration weirdos Robert Kennedy Jr. and Mehmet Oz, a smattering of libertarians, baldness-cure enthusiasts, and Green Party leader Elizabeth May.
The whole thing attracted quite a lot of the usual chinstroking analyses from the necropolis where “the Left” used to be as well.
To get the background out of the way:
The Edgewood Farm case against the CFIA was fought all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada,and last week the Supremes rejected challenges to the CFIA’s zero-tolerance approach to flocks infected with avian flu, thus greenlighting last Thursday night’s shooting spree.
The thing is, some of the ostriches had been infected by a viciously pathogenic H5N1 strain that has killed tens of thousands of migratory birds over the past five years along with several hundred Bald Eagles, about 20 California condors, tens of thousands of cape cormorants in South Africa and nearly 60,000 pelicans in Peru.
The strain’s immediate ancestor emerged in geese in the Chinese province of Guangdong in the 1990s. Its recent diffusion across the American landscape and the consequent mass cullings at chicken factory-farms are what explains the unprecedented hikes in egg prices in the United States. Epidemiologists say that if we’re not careful the strain could mutate, jump to humans as these viruses tend to do, and end up worse than Covid. Put those three things together and, hey presto, the genie is out of the bottle and away we go on a bumpy ride to Crazytown.
Anyway, onward to this weekend’s main attractions.
I’ll start by picking up here from my piece in the National Post last Thursday that ran under the headline China couldn’t be more pleased to have Carney as prime minister, with the subhead ‘And now we’re all supposed to forget about everything we’ve had to put up with’.
What’s there isn’t there, what isn’t there is what stands out
I’d set out to file to the Post an analysis of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s first federal budget from a national security and foreign-policy perspective, which is to say from the perspective of Canada’s precarious place in this strange new world we’ve found ourselves in.
What I thought was most noteworthy was what wasn’t in the budget. And since I filed, it’s turned out that I’m not alone in noticing some weird omissions, and there are strangely blank spaces that I didn’t notice, too, which I’ll get into below.
National security? What’s that?
“The old world,” Carney told summiteering Asian leaders in Korea a couple of weeks ago, “is gone.” And true enough, there has been what Carney calls a dramatic “rupture” in Canada-U.S. trade relations. His budget document describes a new “Age of Disorder,” and true enough, the global economic order that has been backstopped and underwritten mostly by the United States over the past 75 years or so has had its guardrails yanked out by the current American president.
In response to this, Carney proposes that Canada should take on a staggering amount of debt, double Canada’s exports to non-American customers over the next decade and spend $81 billion by 2030 to meet the new NATO target for annual military spending of five per cent of gross domestic product. We’ll be setting up our very own military-industrial complex with the Defence Investment Agency, too, with a focus on technology, the Arctic and recruitment.
Canada’s military doesn’t have a problem with recruitment, by the way. Over the past three years 192,000 Canadians have applied to serve this country but the bureaucracy was capable of processing only one of 13 applicants. It’s not that the rest were all unqualified. Roughly half the applicants either gave up waiting to hear back after two months had passed, or just stopped responding to recruiters. So let’s fix that, shall we?
Here’s an odd blank spot: Remember the great continental “Golden Dome” that President Donald Trump was dangling in front of us at the discount price of $61 billion, or even for free if we agreed to become the 51st American state? There’s not even a mention of any of that in the budget, which does make some sense, since the Golden Dome might not even be a thing.
Wesley Wark, the University of Toronto professor emeritus and senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation says it’s peculiar, when you think about it, with half the new federal spending of $141 billion over the next five years going to defence, that the 400-page budget document contains only 17 pages under the heading “Protecting Canada’s Security and Sovereignty.”
Another strange bit: Back in May, 2024, the Liberal government promised to develop a National Security Strategy for the first time in two decades. It’s not there in the budget. But what you can find on Public Safety’s web pages about national security is a list of 12 priorities. The first two are “anti-hate initiatives” and “bias sensitivity, diversity and identity in national security.” Foreign interference comes in at number ten.
It gets weirder. . .