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Prime Minister Carney said of Poilievre yesterday, 

"It's easy to be negative when you've never fixed anything. It's easy to be negative when you've never built anything. It's easy to be negative when you're a career politician who has never accomplished anything." 

Taylor Noakes, agrees that Poilievre has accomplished nothing during his twenty years in Parliament:

"This isn't as much a political party as it is a ChatGPT-based slogan-generating algorithm speaking through the mouth of everyone's least favourite muppet. . . . The Conservatives have essentially made 'Fuck Trudeau' their ideology, and the average Conservative voter has made it their core identity. ... The Conservative Party have placed strict limits on who is allowed to ask him questions, and have further tried to prevent journalists from talking to party supporters and local candidates. ... According to a report by LaPress, Poilievre seems to have the loosest grasp on facts and the truth, as the publication found that he lied, embellished or misled far more than any of the other candidates during last week's debate. ... He has voted against the environment and climate 400 times ... against the Canadian Dental Care Plan, $10 a day daycare, the National School Food Program, the Canada Child Benefit, and raising the federal minimum wage ... against a proposed first-home savings account and a proposal to build four million new homes."

The Rise of Unreason

The Ontario Health Coalition put out a press release a couple weeks ago about the sharp increase in people infected with measles here. There were 816 cases from October 2024 to April, then 155 new cases from April 3-11. Our immunization rates are lower than most of Europe -- only 70% of kids have typical childhood vaccinations. Vaccination rates were reduced dramatically in 2020. "This is a Public Health failure that must be addressed with the utmost urgency." 

David Fisman recently wrote about it: 

Balancing Individual Rights and Community Health Requires Knowledge of History

Ontario is in the midst of a measles outbreak, and our Chief Medical Officer of Health (CMOH) is taking a “you do you” approach. No mandates. No strong guidance. Just a gentle suggestion that people make informed decisions…if they choose to. It’s a startling response given public health’s long history of collective action, and at times, authoritarianism. 

That authoritarianism wasn’t a bug of early public health. It was a feature. Modern public health emphasizes individual rights, but those rights can come into tension with the community’s right to health, especially during outbreaks of communicable diseases. Institutional public health grew out of fear. 

Yalom on Approaching Meaning

About 45 years ago, psychiatrist Irvin Yalom estimated that a good 30-50% of all cases of depression might actually be a crisis of meaninglessness, an existential sickness, and these cases require a different method of treatment. We experience this lack of purpose as boredom, apathy, or emptiness. We are "not told by instinct what one must do, or any longer by tradition what one should do. Nor does one know what one wants to do," so we feel lost and directionless. Instead of addressing meaninglessness as the problem, though, we've been merely addressing the symptoms of it: addictions, compulsions, obsessions, malaise. In today's context, it might suggest that even social media issues could be problems with a lack of meaning. 

The last sentences of his lengthy tome, Existential Psychotherapy, sum up his solution: "The question of meaning in life is, as the Buddha taught, not edifying. One must immerse oneself in the river of life and let the question drift away." How he lands here is an intriguing path through a slew of philosophers and psychiatrists. Even without symptoms of a problem, attention to meaning is necessary as it gives birth to values, which become principles to live by as we place behaviours into our own hierarchy of acceptability. 

"One creates oneself by a series of ongoing decisions. But one cannot make each and every decision de novo throughout one's life; certain superordinate decisions must be made that provide an organizing principle for subsequent decisions." 

Yalom doesn't, however, suggest coming up with a list of values that can become meaningful to us, but that we immerse ourselves in life to become more aware of which values we already have. 

WHAT'S THE POINT? IT'S FOR US TO DECIDE

According to Yalom, we've hit this crisis point in meaninglessness because we have the leisure to think and because our work is no longer clearly purposeful, both of which are relatively recent experiences for such a large proportion of civilization. It's no longer just the philosophers of the day asking, What's it all for? What's the point of it all? He takes the existential position that it's up to us to figure it out. 

Orange Monday or MAGA Monday?

Time will tell which name will go down in history books. But April 7, 2025 will be up there with Black Monday (October 19, 1987) and Black Thursday (October 18, 1929).

Trump wants everyone to just calm down, already, in his own ever-weirdly worded way. But he said this just before millions of Americans died of Covid, too. 

So, Tariffs, Amiright?

Round of tariffs for all, except Russia.

I have a friend in the states who isn't worried about any of this stuff. "Big businesses will stop it," she says. She expects 3-6 months of wavering, max, then corporations will push back enough that things will settle down. It's all just posturing. She has a lot of faith in the markets and in this administration's willingness to be pushed. But okay. Maybe.

I suggested the tariff threats have already changed everything, and she was surprised to hear about American products being taken off the shelves or indicated in some way to help us avoid purchasing them, and that travel between our countries is down 70%. We don't want American stuff anymore, and we'll avoid it as much as we can. 

One analogy that rings true: 

"Imagine one of your friends points a loaded handgun at your face, and then immediately goes, 'nah man, just joking lol'. No matter how short a time that was, you're still not gonna ever trust that motherfucker again. It will have permanently altered your relationship. Anyway, tariffs on penguins."