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Politicians pandering to electorate’s entitlement

Editor: Politics in Canada should reflect and, at its best, conciliate the nation's differences. Increasingly, it does the opposite.

Editor:

Politics in Canada should reflect and, at its best, conciliate the nation's differences. Increasingly, it does the opposite.

It distorts, amplifies and inflames conflict in a political system with few checks and balances, where politics denigrates politicians and politicians denigrate politics.

As a result, Canada's moderate majority seems to have become politically homeless and electorally irrelevant.

The election campaign is on and, given the electorate’s mindset of bottomless entitlement, the politics of Justin Trudeau’s pre-election deficit spending promises to turn Canada’s social safety net into a veritable vacation hammock.

A Liberal reversal of JFK’s famous challenge to the American voters comes to mind: “Ask not what you can do for your country, ask what your country can do for you.”

Without a change to the Canadian penchant for the economic and social welfare state there surely will be no change to the bloated size of the Liberal “nanny” state, tolerated, nay demanded, by an electorate with an insatiable appetite for government services and a seemingly unending tolerance or indifference for Liberal government mismanagement and even outright scandal such as the SNC-Lavalin affair or the 2004 Quebec sponsorship.

In the forthcoming political "slash and burn" election campaign, pitting Andrew Scheer against Trudeau busily out-spending and out-promising and out-pandering each other, we'd perhaps do well to reflect on an observation by Clive Staples Lewis (C.S.) in his Abolition of Man: "We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."

Yes, indeed, we deserve our political leaders, just as our political leaders so richly deserve us.

And so the stage is set for the sheer excitement and breathless drama of yet another Canadian election to… where?

E.W. Bopp