Today's Canada smells like social decay

National Post, 30 June 2024

The omnipresent perfume of cannabis and urine on our streets does not make Canada more glorious and free

Canada stinks.

There is no joy in writing that as we mark our national holiday. Canadians have a duty of gratitude for living in such a blessed land; the bounty of such a peaceable dominion has been known by precious few in human history.

But Canada does stink. I mean that not metaphorically, but literally. The aroma of the country has changed.

It’s no longer pine trees and maple syrup and weak beer.

Our cities smell like cannabis and urine.

I don’t mean a dark alley somewhere in a sketchy part of town. I mean the heart of our cities. Rideau Street in Ottawa, within sight of our Parliament buildings. King Street in Toronto in sight of the bank towers, symbolic of our prosperity. I mean transit buses and light rail across the country — not only late at night, but during the daytime.

The land is pungent with the stench of social license and social decay. The omnipresent perfume of cannabis and urine on our streets does not make Canada more glorious and free.

There is also a metaphorical dimension. Not so much that Canada smells foul as that there is the scent of futility in the air.

When the Trans-Mountain pipeline was completed there were great huzzahs that we had managed to complete an infrastructure project. No matter delays or ballooning costs, the thing was done and operating. The mere fact of a project being completed is now the low standard for which beaver tails are slapped upon the water.

Then, as if to mock those Albertans who were giddy that their oil was finally moving through the pipeline to the Pacific waters, the water main in Calgary burst. Moving potable water across the city was now the challenge.

Calgary’s water pipe break is the real metaphor for Canada’s declining state. Leave aside the cause of the break — negligence, bad luck, global warming, Gary Bettman — the inability to fix it in a timely manner speaks powerfully to our inability to get things done.

Alberta boasts some of the largest earth-moving machines on the planet, a province in which “build the pipe” had become a political slogan. And yet the relatively simply engineering project of fixing a water pipe proved beyond capacity. Thankfully, the friendly folk in San Diego had an extra pipe laying around and sent it north. It’s embarrassing.

We seem to have forgotten how to do so much. The transcontinental railway may no longer be taught in schools, given the role played by archvillain Sir John A. Macdonald, but it got done in just over five years, 1881-1886. By way of comparison, Toronto’s Eglinton Crosstown LRT project began in 2011 and is still not finished. The CPR — through the Canadian shield, across the prairies, over the mountains — sometimes advanced farther in one day than the Eglington project has advanced in 13 years.

Relatively speaking, there is gloating in Ottawa as their new light rail system actually transports people, despite delays, suspensions and bewildering mistakes in construction. It’s only a success relative remarkable failure elsewhere.

Nothing daunted by the ineptitude of the Eglinton project, Metrolinx has launched the “Ontario Line”, another transit project for Toronto. Construction is underway, and the hoardings at the sites are emblazoned with the logo, “15 KM, 15 Stations.” Why not add “15 Years”? Perhaps because that is too optimistic?

Meanwhile, with a sense of pathos, the Ontario Science Centre — the “science” centre! — was shut down on an emergency basis because its roof was in danger of collapsing. Some Torontonians were suspicious of the closing. After all, the Gardiner Expressway — to the naked eye, independent of any engineering report — has been slowly disintegrating for ages.

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