This is my favourite tweet in a long while.
It is from Chrystia Freeland.
She is Canada’s finance minister. She is also deputy prime minister.
Amazingly — there are no “idle hands” in Ms. Freeland’s workshop — she is also on the board of trustees of the World Economic Forum.
As the saying goes, great skills require many offices.
But, to the tweet.
A touch of background, first. Everybody knows that gasoline prices have gone up — again. Carbon tax, you know. Everybody also knows, and this is even more — shall I say — taxing, that grocery prices have made a great leap as well.
Now it is not just gasoline and groceries. Which would be bad enough. The cost of home mortgages, the greatest hurdle for so many, have also jumped as rates have soared.
It is not just gasoline and groceries
For the middle class, and, lest we forget, “all those working hard to join it” (as our prime minister puts it), these combined factors are very worrisome.
In fact, for those who have not yet joined the middle class, who are least able to take the various hits that inflation, taxes and strange energy policies have brought on, these factors have crossed the line from mere worrisome to anxiety-producing.
We have various names for such people.
Some call them ordinary Canadians. Some call them the working class. A portion are known as senior citizens. Single parents also frequently fall under this designation.
What all of them share — in a negative sense — is that they rarely go to great green conferences held at far-off luxury resorts. They are never on CBC or CTV or Global television political panels. (This is one of their few reprieves from the hard life.)
Indeed, they are the “talked about” and “the talked-down-to” rather than the talkers themselves.
They are the 'talked about' rather than the talkers
Most of them do not have limousine drivers. They drive themselves and pay for their own gasoline.
(Justifiably impatient Readers: “Where’s the damn tweet, you nuisance? Me: “I’m getting there.”)
Mostly, they are people who coast along as best they can on the little they have managed to earn, are scrupulous about their household budgets, and more than anything really feel the pinch that these new times have brought upon them.
They are the targets of the Liberal budget’s great gift of a one-time payout of $200 to $500 toward their groceries. Two hundred to five hundred bucks! May I say WOW in capital letters? That works out to $3.85 to $9.61 a week! Bring on the tenderloin and truffles.
Five hundred dollars — perhaps enough for a meal for three consultants and a cabinet minister at the Chateau Laurier? Enough to cover a few hours of an untendered contract for “communications advice” from Trade Minister Mary Ng’s friend Amanda Alvaro? For just 12 times that amount you may rent the top suite of a London hotel for a whole night.
So here’s my favourite tweet:
“Millions of Canadian families will use the new Grocery Rebate to help cover the costs of the nutritious food they need—including from places like Galleria, one of our wonderful local grocery stores here in #UniRose!”
Millions, eh? And why would there be such a extremely high number? Could it be that the Liberals’ financial policies, their grim fantasy of windmills and solar panels over energy we already have, have deprived Canada of revenues and employment that would have left those “millions” in a much better position than now they are?
Could it be that the useless, futile, stupid carbon tax, together with madcap public spending and deficits, has inevitably driven up the cost of the most basic necessities for ordinary Canadians?
It is our pious, woke government that has made things more expensive, built up a federal debt that demands huge payments, and driven up the cost of the groceries it now shamelessly brags it is subsidizing in Freeland’s condescending tweet.
It’s the “we have your back” theme again from the very politicians who left that back exposed in this first place.
Here’s what it comes to.
Dig the hole for people to drop into.
Then brag about sending down the rope to bring them half-way up again. Then send out a tweet of self-congratulation for “relieving” the pain your policies have caused.
National Post
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