FEAR, LOATHING AND A LARGE DOUBLE DOUBLE
LIVE FROM THE INSIDE OF THE GREAT WHITE NORTH™
PLANT-FORWARD NUCLEAR WARHEAD TECH™
LIVE-STREAMED PSYTRANCE RAVES NEXT TO OPEN AIR DEATH CAMPS
ALTERNATIVE INSECT MILK ADD-ONS…+ $4.50 (30/35/70% TIP OPTION)
DISCARDED JUUL™ PODS LITTERED ALONG THE BOULEVARD, CRACKING ’NEATH YOUR BOOT HEELS, WANDERING
THE DEEJAY DANCED ALONE, FONDLING KNOBS…PAUSE…EYES ROLLING BACK
ETC.
LOOSE TIMES LIVIN’ INSIDE THE ‘LOST LIBERAL DECADE ™’
BEFORE I EVEN SIT DOWN AND BEGIN: YOU SHOULD OPEN THIS ARTICLE UP IN THE SUBSTACK APP OR IN YOUR BROWSER. IT’S A LONG ONE AND IT DOES NOT FIT INTO A SINGLE EMAIL.
…Alright, I’m in the chair.
Do you know how difficult it was to just walk over to this fucking chair and sit down to begin writing?
I don’t mean physically, I mean spiritually.
I’m listening to “Electric Blend” by Sandy Bull, and there’s a red lightbulb glowing in the corner of the room. It’s screwed into a strange postmodern lamp made out of concrete that had been poured into a rejected pylon by a Serbian sculptor.
I’m in Toronto, drinking a Toronto cocktail.
Do you know what that is?
Why would you?
If you walk into a bar in Toronto today the bartender probably won’t even know what it is.
THE TORONTO COCKTAIL
2 oz Canadian rye whiskey
1/4 oz Fernet Branca
2 dashes of Angostura bitters
1/4 oz simple syrup or maple syrup (If you’re soft)
Stirred over ice and served in a chilled coupe or cocktail glass, often garnished with an orange twist.
It’s dark, bitter and chic. It tastes like a 1988 interior - black leather, a dimmed halogen bulb, chromium fixtures and hi-fidelity digital audio playback.
The origins of this cocktail lie in the early 1900s, probably during the Prohibition era. It’s essentially a Manhattan cocktail but made with Fernet Branca instead of vermouth.
Why is it called a Toronto cocktail? Well, no one seems to know for sure.
Toronto doesn’t really have enough of a “storied nighttime reputation” to justify having a cocktail named after it. It’s a sexless place. The recipe first appeared in a 1922 book called Cocktails: How To Mix Them, under the name “Fernet Cocktail.” The book said that the drink was “very much appreciated by the Canadians of Toronto.”
Fernet Branca is definitely not Canadian, and Canadian rye whiskey is used as a key ingredient in many cocktails, so it probably doesn’t have anything to do with the ingredients having any sort of local significance to the city.
Was it designed in Toronto? Apparently, during Prohibition in the United States, Canadian whiskey was widely smuggled across the border, and Toronto was a major hub in that trade.
As I write this, I’m becoming aware of the fact that I sound like a TikTok mixologist or an aspirant male food writer with a perfectly oiled rectangular beard and a forearm tattoo depicting a butcher diagram of a pig’s anatomy... and fuck me—I could continue, trying to find a way to tie this into current matters, but I have to just stop here.
I’ve been thinking about some very Canadian things.
That’s probably because, for the first time in well over a decade, I’ve found myself a registered voter inside Canada during a federal election.
We now know the verdict: THE LOST LIBERAL DECADE™ continues on.
Tariffs, taxes, and Timbits™: Canada is a strange place. Tri-coastal, 40 million people (that’s almost less than the state of California alone) spread across nearly 10 million square kilometers (it’s the second-largest landmass on Earth). Founded to function as a unified collection of resource-extraction colonies on stolen land, it expresses itself as a cultural clown show, defined by a highly contentious and complex set of tensions sustained between Indigenous communities, English and French settler narratives, and an increasingly diverse immigrant patchwork. We’re also well known for being:
“Polite”
“Cold”
“Progressive”
“Where hockey happens”
“Where Drake™ is from”
“Where Tim Hortons™ is from”
Canada was officially founded on July 1, 1867 - only 158 years ago.
We are also known for being:
“just above America”.
“America but kind.”
“America but not America.”
As of a few days ago, from the time of writing, we have a new Prime Minister: the unflappable, pragmatic, cerebral, technocratic, pale-skinned Anglo-Saxon first-line centreman of the globalist economic elite—Mark Joseph Carney.
The Fort Smith, Northwest Territories product was raised in Edmonton, Alberta, educated at Harvard and Oxford, became a Managing Director at Goldman Sachs, then the Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada, then the Senior Associate Deputy Minister of Finance, and then the Governor of the Bank of Canada—and then the Governor of the Bank of England.
He is a frequent speaker at the World Economic Forum, a Clash fan, a Sandinista! (1980) hater, and a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very white man.
Typically, our political narrative has been known to be a humorless, ideologically muted tug-of-war between two sides of the same centre: the Conservative Party of Canada™ and the Liberal Party of Canada™.
In recent decades, the Conservatives™ have leaned centre-right, projecting a Western Canadian–flavoured, pro-oil, anti-environmentalist, libertarian frontier identity, while the Liberals™ have maintained a façade of Progressive Neoliberalism™—a centrist-managerialist stance with woke™ branding that hides massive cuts, privatization, and a strong corporate lobbying influence behind a mask of sanctimonious, rainbow-coloured messaging that seeks to present the party and its followers as harbingers of equality, diversity, and Indigenous reconciliation.
Up until the beginning of this year, the Liberal Party of Canada™ had been in power for almost a decade under the leadership of the infamously insufferable, cloying, smug, affectatious, pompous, foppish, preening, glistering, circumlocutory, sententious, histrionic, fustian, meretricious, emollient nepo-baby pageant queen, Justin Trudeau.
Under his watch, the Liberal Party cultivated and projected an identity brand defined by a powerful aura of youthful charisma, progressive promises, and pride-flag-emoji-in-bio-line–style “inclusivity™.” It was suggested that by aligning yourself with these people, you could wear a badge that signified your allegiance to A Better, More Tolerant and Fair World™. Trudeau and his associates became a global symbol for centrist liberalism in a post-Obama world, sticking around—smiling and well-groomed—for the camera over the course of two Donnies™, a Sleepy Joe™, a global pandemic, the Drake vs. Kendrick beef™, and a ton of other shit that made your life tangibly worse over the last decade.
By the end of his tenure, however, he was a hated man. The façade he had spent nine years painting glossy rainbows over had cracked in half, and everyone could now see through his nauseating pantomime. Weren’t we promised utopia? Wasn’t life supposed to be a Corporate Memphis–styled cartoon depiction of multiculturalism come to life—with every imaginable combination of person, with every possible combination of skin color, ethnicity, ailment, sexual preference, class position, mental illness, physical disability, NHL team allegiance, and immigration status—coming together at a never-ending, TD Bank™–sponsored, mask-mandatory Pride Parade™ with birthday cake–flavored Timbits™ and vegan samosas falling from the blue skies above?
No, my friend.
This was THE LOST LIBERAL DECADE™.
Due to THE LOST LIBERAL DECADE™, Canadians are now interminably fucked. And up until just over a week ago, there was apparently only one man who could help you out: the smug, snide, smarmy, petulant, vituperative attack-dog goon and close-eyed leader of the opposition—Pierre Marcel Poilievre.
The Calgary, Alberta product studied at the University of Calgary, where he became that particularly repugnant and often hideously skinned brand of young man who is feverishly into right-wing politics. He then interned for right-wing Canadian firebrand Stockwell Day (is it possible to not be a cunt with a name like that?) before being elected as an MP at the ripe young age of 25. He served in the Stephen Harper Conservative Government™—led by that weird, white-haired mutant who looks like a racist white woman from Leaside if both of her parents had fornicated with seals before fornicating with their own siblings to produce her.
PP (as we will refer to him from now on, since his name is incredibly annoying to type, pronounce, and look at) did a bunch of other stuff behind the scenes in Ottawa before becoming the leader of the Conservative Party™ in 2022. Yes—he is a career politician. He likes to relentlessly showcase the fact that he is married to a Venezuelan immigrant, his musical tastes are “pretty eclectic”, he likes to listen to “anything as random as Led Zeppelin to Louis Armstrong, and sometimes some “faster music” when he’s working out “occasionally” and he is a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very white man.
Look at a photo him—the poor bastard’s skin is the color of half-boiled chicken, that weirdly translucent grey-pink-yellow that has purple veins running below the surface.
8=========================D
Through the development and propagation of his own brand of cross-eyed, slack-jawed, meme-core, Manosphere™ populism, PP has injected Canadian right-wing politics with what many argue was a much-needed shot in the arm of “angry young male energy™.”
By borrowing tactics from Donnie™ down south and xeroxing sentiments pasted onto the walls of the same piss-soaked, post-/b/ right-wing web spaces that gave rise to other poultry-skinned, chauvinist hoser mouthpieces like Dr. Jordan B. Peterson™ and Stefan Molyneux, the Conservative Party of Canada™ under PP’s leadership has fashioned for themselves an identity brand that many have referred to as:
MMAPLE MAGA™.
With his ex-lover—a warthog of a woman named Jenni Byrne—behind the wheel as his right-hand accomplice and chief strategist, PP and his Conservatives™ put the pedal to the metal with their full-on embrace of U.S.-flavored culture wars and Donnie™-style populism, framing every issue as a battle against the pestilential plague of “wokeism™” attacking academic institutions, the CBC (which he has continuously vowed to defund), and “urban elites™.”
Their communications and marketing approach inundated Canadians with an onslaught of insensate, asinine sloganeering. They restricted traditional media access, breaking with Canadian political tradition when they barred journalists from traveling with PP on campaign buses and planes, limited questions to a handful of “news outlets” like True North and Rebel News (lol), and regularly criticized media experts and journalists.
Etc. etc.
When confronted with sticky questions, PP seemed unable—or at the very least unwilling—to respond with anything outside of his well-thumbed rolodex of $2 slogans, things like:
“AXE THE TAX™”
“BUILD THE HOMES™”
“FIX THE BUDGET™”
“FREEDOM, NOT FEAR™”
“FREE THE ZYN™”
“STOP THE CRIME™”
“SPIKE THE HIKE™”
“BOOTS NOT SUITS™”
“WE WON’T EAT BUGS™”
“THE LOST LIBERAL DECADE™”
I don’t think I saw PP reply to a single question in the two months leading up to Election Day™ in this country without uttering the words “THE LOST LIBERAL DECADE™” somewhere inside his answer.
“THE LOST LIBERAL DECADE™” was one of his most-employed rhetorical weapons—a punchy barb meant to refer to the low GDP growth, stagnant wages, and declining productivity that accompanied rising housing prices and policy paralysis over the last decade in Canada. This narrative of National Decline™ was the central theme of the Conservative Party™’s ham-fisted, dumbfuck populist communications blitzkrieg that posited the Liberals™ as a corrupted, nefarious, and incompetent elite establishment structure that JUST HAD TO BE STOPPED by the only people qualified to do the job: “Pierre Poilievre’s Common Sense Conservatives™.”
Were they wrong about the Liberal Party and Justin Trudeau?
No. Not fully, at least—he is a cunt.
Can (should?) you blame the vast, complex, and terrifying developments that have led to a palpable reduction in quality of life across the entirety of the Western world over the last ten years on the “woke politics™” of a Canadian ex-drama teacher (who once dressed up as Aladdin in blackface) and his political cohorts in Ottawa, Ontario?
No. Not fully, at least—they are all cunts.
Did it work?
No. Not fully, at least.
PP’s Conservative Party of Canada™ did not win the election, and PP actually lost his riding to a Liberal. They blew a double-digit lead in the polls and have been accused of “campaign malpractice.”
Where I grew up, we would say to this: “DDDDRRRRRYYYYY.”
To say that the Conservatives™ “lost” would not be entirely accurate. The result of this election does not suggest that Canada “rejected an emergent right-wing wave.” Quite the opposite, actually. The Cons™ secured 41.3% of the popular vote (the highest percentage they’ve achieved since the party’s formation in 2003) and increased their seat count by 25, arriving at around 144 seats at the time of writing (votes are still being counted).
This election has largely been framed as “The Liberals™ vs. The Conservatives™ on the topic of Donald Trump™”. Many political pundits, journalists, analysts, and observers suggested that PP’s freedom-core, “Diet Trump™” style populism proved to be a major turn-off for voters in light of Donnie’s™ tariff threats and annexation desires.
I don’t think this is completely true.
Over the last 7–8 years, I have sensed—and experienced firsthand, a sophisticated and coordinated campaign by the right-wing political forces in this country to convert what had long been a deep-sleeping, non-political mass of millions into an activated militia of suddenly-politically-passionate-but-still-illiterate-knuckledragging-double-double-sipping deadwits. There is very clearly a large, rabid, and active subset of the Canadian population that would proudly call themselves MAPLE MAGA™ if asked.
I often drive one hour north of the city of Toronto to visit my mother and find myself lined up at red lights behind F-150s with “FUCK TRUDEAU™” stickers and “WE ARE THE FRINGE™”flags sticking out the windows next to “GO LEAFS™ GO” banners.
Another phrase I constantly see stickered on truck windows these days is “DIRTY HANDS CLEAN MONEY™”, written in script.
The reason the Conservatives™ blew their chance at running this country isn’t that they “laid MAPLE MAGA™ on too thick.”
The reason the Conservatives™ lost this election is because they tried to run a MAGA™-style campaign with a fucking loser as their frontman.
MAGA™ is MAGA™ because Donald Trump™ is a rockstar, a celebrity, a comic troll—and Donald Trump™ is why MAGA™ wins, not the other way around.
MAPLE MAGA™ lost this election because it was a pale, impotent, and futile emulation of an American media phenomenon—starring an absolutely sexless, godless, humorless, bloodless career politician loser playing the lead role.
Spoiler Alert: he falls flat on his face at the end of the first season, but his glasses don’t break—because he was advised a few episodes earlier to stop wearing them by his hog-of-an-ex-lover-turned-script-writer-handler, in order to look like a stud.
Does it get more Canadian than this?
Let’s use his full name this time for effect: Pierre Poilievre is a fucking loser.
He lost this election because he and his handlers could not concoct or sell a compelling vision of what life in Canada could feel like under his leadership—the leadership of a sour, cantankerous, Albertan career-politician dickhead whose eyes are about twice as close together as they should be.
Either that, or he sold it too well—and everyone rejected it.
But that would be giving “everyone” the benefit of the doubt, and I’m not willing to do that.
Are you?
Politics is about more than policy and ideology—it’s about atmosphere, feeling, and culture.
Politics has retreated so far from reality into the realm of the symbolic that the form of politics—campaigns, commentary, debates, outrage cycles, media appearances, advertisements, viral memes, infographics, campaign marketing tactics and branding—seemingly has more influence on the texture of life for a populace than any actual policies or outcomes.
Contemporary politics defines the textures and contours of your reality through performance, repetition, and spectacle more than it does through governance or ideology.
Politics exists simply to reproduce politics as such.
THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE™.
PP’s Conservatives™ cultivated an identity brand that borrowed aesthetics from the margins, crafted a tone of voice that scraped its inspiration from the gutters, and tried to run plays from the populist playbooks used in the major leagues by championship-winning teams—only without having a rockstar quarterback themselves. The ambient atmosphere they conjured around their campaign was repugnant in its cheapness, offensive in its assumption of intellectual flaccidness among its audience, and appalling in its utter lack of humor, humanity, or self-awareness.
On the other side of the spectrum, as Luke Savage aptly put it, much of the appeal of Mark Carney’s Liberals™ rested in “the technocratic promise to make politics go away for a while”—by calmly presenting the possibility of a more familiar-feeling, centre-right government “whose idea of nation-building amounts to a business-friendly program of publicly-financed private development, tax cuts, and a more polite version of austerity.”
Carney’s Liberals™ effectively sold Canadians a vision of what life could feel like under his leadership: a refurbished, pre-woke™, pre-Aladdin™, technocratic Timbit Neoliberalism™, where Experts™ make the tough decisions based on Expertise™, quietly, in the background. A calmer, “non-American” Canada where the general mood could go back to being gentle and polite—like an early summer breeze kissing a Great Lake at the cottage on May Two-Four weekend.
And yet, it’s interesting to note that in an election cycle obsessed with Canadian distinctiveness from the United States, we ended up with a government whose parliamentary makeup now mirrors the American two-party system more closely than ever, with drastically reduced representation from the auxiliary political voices—NDP, Bloc Québécois, Greens—that once helped to define us against the American model.
This season of Canuck Political Theatre™ played out largely in the form of memes, reels, tweets, shorts, infographics, and comment-section brawls on stages and inside frames built, owned, and operated by the same Big American dopamine casinos and content distribution monopolies that brought you Donnie’s America™, Donnie’s America: The Return™, and Sleepy Joe’s Last Stand™, not to mention the first, ongoing live-streamed genocide and other major, family-friendly blockbuster events.
The spectacle of a Canadian election cycle focused on resisting annexation threats from the President of the United States that almost entirely unfolds within, is mediated by, and ultimately belongs to the war-tech infrastructure of the American empire.
Does it get more Canadian than this?
What the future holds for Canadian–U.S. relations is still anyone’s guess. But what has been made unmistakably clear during this election cycle is that—alongside the total retreat of politics into the symbolic, the Big American Tech™ takeover of all communications terrain, and the collapse of truth— Canada has already ceded an alarming amount of psychic, discursive, and cultural territory to outside forces.
The discourse that surrounds us is shallow and polluted. Our conversations are trite. Our opinions are scripted and relayed back to us through a pornography of scrolling images and hot-take captions.
Media illiteracy is endemic.
Many cannot speak the language of the image, cannot negotiate with symbols, cannot identify embedded biases or parse the construction and distribution of consent.
Where do we locate the power structures in this vast image-world?
Where is the reality studio located?
Who owns the equipment?
Who hired the delivery man?
What type of subject is rendered through the instantaneous capture, reprocessing, and manipulation of our innermost desires?
Are politics now simply raw material for the construction of an Identity Brand™—the composite of stances, alliances and aesthetics designed to render the individual as a marketable, algorithmically viable entity in the digital attention economy?
What is the role of an opinion inside Identity Capitalism™?
Where did you get yours?
Who is your opinion dealer?
What do they cut their product with?
Who is their supplier?
Who pays their internet bill?
Aesthetics are the language of feeling.
What does aesthetic warfare look like?
Have you ever been inside a Tim Hortons “Urban Café™” location? They opened one up just one block west of where I am writing from in Greektown.
What is a Tim Hortons Urban Café?
Well, if you’re reading this, you probably know what Tim Hortons is – Canada’s best known, ubiquitous coffee and fast-food chain. Like Dunkin’ Donuts or Starbucks, they are everywhere.
Much like McDonald’s™ is to the United States of America, Tim Hortons™ is a mass-market business that positions itself as a symbolic reflection of Canadian National Values™.
Tim Hortons doesn’t just sell Double Doubles and Timbits™; they sell you the Canadian Experience™.
The franchise is named after its co-founder, a Canadian hockey player who opened the first location in 1964 in Hamilton, Ontario. After Horton’s death in 1974, his business partner, Ron Joyce, assumed operations and expanded the company into a multi-billion dollar franchise. The company merged with The Wendy’s Company™ in the mid-1990s and operated it under their flagship subsidiary until 2006. In 2014, Burger King™ merged with Tim Hortons™ under the flagship of 3G Capital™ to form Restaurant Brands International™ (RBI™), a company headquartered in Toronto for tax purposes, but majority owned and controlled by a Brazilian equity firm.
This company – 3G Capital™ – is supposedly known for their aggressive cost-cutting, profit-maximizing strategies, tactics they definitely employed after the Timmie’s™ merger when they implemented massive staff cuts, cheapened ingredients, and attacked workers' rights.
In recent years, Tim Hortons franchise owners and their partners have been accused of heavily abusing the controversial and flawed Temporary Foreign Worker Program in Canada, paying immigrant workers below the legal wage, demanding kickbacks, housing them in overcrowded conditions, creating a culture of abuse and intimidation, and threatening deportation to anyone who spoke up.
“They’re taking our jobs!”
In January 2018, when minimum wage in Ontario sharply jumped from $11.60 to $14.00 an hour, Restaurant Brands International™ neglected to help their franchisees offset the wage hike, refusing to reduce the supply costs they charged Tim Hortons™ franchisees, and forbidding them from raising prices to help cope with the wage increases. Tim Hortons™ franchise owners responded by cutting employee benefits such as paid breaks and healthcare benefits. One Tim Hortons franchise owner posted a staff memo for his employees that stated, “If you have issues or concerns about these changes, I encourage you to contact (Liberal™ Premier) Kathleen Wynne directly to tell her you will not be voting Liberal™ in the upcoming election.”
Nice!!!
Sorry, I got sidetracked: A Tim Hortons “Urban Café™” location seems to be the franchise’s attempt at an “upscale, modernized café experience.” When I entered, the first thing I saw was a young homeless man from my neighborhood asleep at a table underneath a pair of signs that say:
TIMS™ COFFEE PROMISE:
WE ETHICALLY SOURCE 100% PREMIUM ARABICA BEANS & EXPERTLY ROAST THEM TO PERFECTION
WE FRESHLY BREW EACH COFFEE
HANDCRAFT EACH LATTE
& SERVE EVERY CUP WITH CARE
WE ARE PROUD TO BE CANADA’S FAVOURITE COFFEE
Across from this table, on the left-hand side, is a self-serve kiosk. I don’t like to serve myself, so I walk over to the main counter area and notice that they have a big, red, expensive espresso machine. They are advertising Matcha-based drinks, Nitrogen-infused Cold Brew™, Single-Origin Espresso™, and a variety of specialty donut flavors like Matcha Fruit Loop™, Maple Bacon, and Send A Kid To Camp™ Cookies.
As an intrigued, arrogant ex-barista, I ask the young lady at the counter for a double shot of Single-Origin Espresso™ and a maple dip donut.
Bewildered, she makes a face: “WUT?”
She shoots a look to her co-worker to the left. I don’t think she knew what I was asking for, so I reiterate my order to her co-worker, who bounces it back in Hindi to her.
She points to the Canadian-flag-colored espresso machine. “Ahh, yes! I’m sorry, but we have not been trained to use this machine.”
Me: “No problem! I’ll just take a large Double Double™ then.”
I don’t know why—I drink my coffee black—but I guess, “When in Rome™,” ya dig?
As I wait for my coffee to be made, I look down at the ground and notice a Canadian $1 coin (or, as we call it colloquially, a Loonie™) embedded into the floor beneath my boots.
It has some text below it that reads:
AT THE 2002 OLYMPIC GAMES™, A LOONIE WAS PLACED UNDER CENTER ICE, HELPING BRING HOME GOLD TO THE CANADIAN MEN’S AND WOMEN’S HOCKEY TEAMS.
TAKE A SIP AND MAKE A WISH.
TIM HORTON’S™.
On a wall behind me, there is a series of Canadian™ decals: a moose that says “BE BRAVE” on its body, pine trees, a feather, arrows, a fox, a bear, a teepee, snowy mountains, an acorn, chopped wood, another moose, and inspirational phrases like “RUN WILD” and “STAND TALL.”
I look to my right and see a massive cartoon of a Canadian goose wearing hockey equipment, large circular glasses, and a Tim Hortons™ hockey jersey stickered onto the wall.
I really need to get the fuck out of here.
My coffee is finally ready and handed to me in a cup that is almost 12 inches long, with a cardboard sleeve on it that says “ALWAYS 20 MINUTES FRESH.”
We both forgot about the donut.
TIM HORTONS™: A small, independent Canadian donut shop that, over the course of a few decades, expands from its Humble Canadian Beginnings™ into a multi-billion dollar behemoth and increasingly vacant, rotting shell of its former self and founding concept. It merges with one American mega-corporation before merging with a different one under the majority ownership of a foreign-owned private equity firm, which further hollows it out in the holy name of Profit Maximization™. They continue to squeeze franchisees, cut staff, diminish an already-fucking-garbage-quality product, abuse the Canadian immigration system, and exploit imported workers—all while continuing to position their brand as the defining beacon of Canadian Culture™ by deeply embedding it into our National Identity™ through cheap sloganeering, shallow marketing schemes, and an aesthetic that agonizingly and embarrassingly propagates a cringe-inducing semiotic nationalist propaganda loaded with clichéd, digestible tropes.
Does it get more Canadian than this?
I’m not sure.
Who cares?
Keep on rockin’ in the free world and…
doot doodle doot do…
…
…
…
It’s called “The Toronto” because Toronto is a world city and world cities have cocktails. Toronto is a world city.
"Politics is about more than policy and ideology—it’s about atmosphere, feeling, and culture."
abso-lutely—but then what does the NDP stand for in this climate? why are there no storytellers in the pool of leftist politics in canada that can conjure a feeling? any feeling, would be good, really! why did this die with jack layton (RIP)?
the failure of imagination on the left while canadian political leaders in the Lib and PC two-party system get increasingly cynical and/or built by the expert-class is something to be discussed.
without any kind of counter-narrative to be energized by, there is no organizing principle with which people can have a hope to modify this system. how can the NDP expect to motivate a new generation of political voices without having someone better than a 6/10 on the mic to take them there?
it's a nasty, self-fulfilling prophesy.