For the love of G-d, Canada needs an election, not a Liberal leadership race.

There's no one in charge. Freeland is no hero. And these numpties need to go.

I write this sitting in the House of Commons, in the midst of the most terrifying days I’ve experienced in Parliament.

I say this without hyperbole, and with the same sobriety a winter plunge into glacial waters would bring. And this feeling of gut-twisting concern has only intensified as the day has worn on. If you do nothing else today, I need you to understand why.

The long and the short of it is this: functionally, there are no elected officials in charge of Canada’s federal government right now. What exists are a handful of senior unelected bureaucrats looking to a handful of unelected PMO staffers to somehow stumble through the political crisis du jour, never mind thinking about righting Canada’s broken federal governmental apparatus. At best, this lack of leadership is driving away investment, causing generational inflation and a massive societal upheaval. At worst, Canada’s enemies see this abject weakness and are taking advantage of it.

This statement is not partisan; rather, it is a fact.

The evidence that this government has been functioning without oversight and the consequences of this state of affairs is without end. Warnings of foreign interference were ignored for years, with deadly consequences for Canadian citizens. There have been multiple billion-dollar, high profile instances of procurement fraud and misappropriation - likely only the tip of the iceberg of what’s been uncovered. The Defense Minister didn’t check his emails during the fall of Afghanistan. Notorious serial killers and murderers have been released from maximum security prisons because Ministers allegedly didn’t read briefing notes. Liberal politicians interfered in the justice system. Yesterday’s budget update showed a whopping 50%, or $20 billion, overspending on an already crazy $40 billion deficit. Parliament been ground to halt by the government, who for months has contemptuously defied an order duly ordered by its Members.

And so we come to one of the most terrifying days in recent Canadian Parliamentary history.

During question period in the House of Commons yesterday, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre asked the governing Liberal party a stunning question: “Mr. Speaker, I have a question for the finance minister. Who are you?”. This question arose after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Finance Minister, Chrystia Freeland, resigned the day she was to present Canada’s long overdue federal fiscal update and after multiple other cabinet ministers had resigned in recent days and weeks.

Said differently, Canada had no finance minister for most of the day yesterday.

You’d think that there would be an order of precedence that executive authority would fall to, right? Well, there was, but the first person on the list - Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne - didn’t know about it and immediately rejected the role upon being confronted with this news. The authority then fell to disgraced former cabinet minister Randy Boissonnualt because apparently, in a stunning show of incompetency, no one in the Prime Minister’s Office thought removing his potential executive authority when he resigned was important.

So when the time came for the government to table the long overdue, massively overspent budget in the House at a pre-allocated time, there was literally no one to present it. In a moment of abject surrealness, I watched as the Liberal’s House Leader, Karina Gould, silently dropped the document as Mr. Trudeau rushed to swear-in his former groomsman and perennial political fixer Dominic LeBlanc as Finance Minister. The day ended with Mr. LeBlanc adding ultimate authority for Canada’s federal finances to his already full plate - the public safety file, tasked with fixing the Liberal’s porous border problems and inter-governmental affairs.

Now you might be thinking, this is Canada - surely someone with the power is ensuring everything is okay, right?

Wrong. Let me assure you, from my vantage point, within the Liberal government there is no one in charge. What illusion of leadership is merely the guinea-like panicked screeching of Liberal caucus members and staffers whose materiality principle of courage is the dangling carrot of a promotion into the most weak and incompetent cabinet in Canadian history.

There’s ample proof and explanations of this situation to be found. For the entirety of Trudeau’s tenure, the man has consolidated power within his Prime Minister’s Office. He’s placed an incredible amount of power in an ever-shrinking pool of political staff while neutering both his cabinet and his caucus. Most cabinet ministers now are figureheads at best, without any real power save being asked to produce many sham-wow style infomercials. Gossip in Ottawa has long held that cabinet meetings are so devoid of any real decision-making that ministers are called by PMO staff prior to meetings and given precise scripts of what to say and when. Under Trudeau, his cabinet ministers have been reduced to glorified salespeople of shitty government policy, conceived by unelected political staff and written by tenured bureaucrats - neither of whom have any direct accountability to the Canadian public.

This problem has only become more pronounced as Trudeau’s poll numbers have dropped, and many of his senior staff have left for the greener pastures of lobbying firms, leaving fewer and fewer staff to manage a set of useless ministers selected due to regional representation and any DEI metrics as opposed to actual capacity for decision making. This means that now, most decisions of the operations of the entire government of a G7 country are overseen by one person - Katie Telford, Mr. Trudeau’s Chief of Staff and most trusted confidant.

This is an obviously unsustainable situation with the highest impact of failure possible, which everyone in the Liberal caucus and cabinet is complicit in because NONE OF THEM HAVE EVER CHALLENGED IT.

Canada’s house is on fire, and there are no firefighters to be found in the Liberal government - only the arsonists themselves remain. And that’s why all those giving plaudits to ex-Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland and promoting an idea that the dangerous numpties in the Liberal apparatchik can right the ship with a leadership race need to quickly disabuse themselves of the notion that things will change with a change in Liberal leader. The party has rotted to the core; they are all complicit in getting us to this point, and their futures must be determined by the Canadian people, not Katie Telford.

Which brings us to the revisionist history being spouted about Ms. Freeland’s legacy. She is no courageous heroine. She only wrote her bombshell letter after Mr. Trudeau fired her: courage doesn’t count when you have nothing to lose. In fact, as recently as a week ago, she was gleefully spouting her now iconic brand of inane word salad, supporting the budget update that she had written. Freeland has been the second in command of all of the piss poor decisions this government has made and has been one of its most ardent cheerleaders - including allowing the federal deficit to balloon to a grief-inducing $60 billion. I wouldn’t be surprised if Freeland only found the courage to write that letter at the advice of her book publisher, who would have found themselves with a massive pile of “Chrystia” biographies rendered unsellable by the subject’s incompetence.

And only now - stripped of car and driver and the prospect of losing their seats - are she and others who have long dined out at the Trudeau trough finding their voices. They care nothing about righting the ship, they only care about their future political prospects. The same can be said for those who are external to the Liberal caucus but are dependent on this government’s irresponsible largess for power, access, and graft. Only now are they breathlessly bleating about “massive internal pressure” for Trudeau to resign and that all can be solved with a leadership race, particularly if Trudeau’s successor is Mark Carney.

The reality is that all of these people - without exception - are part of the problem that created the centralization of power and neutering of cabinet and Parliament, which has left Canada in its present naked and exposed condition. They are the ones who neutered their party by removing simple mechanisms to remove a failed leader. The entire caucus keeps blindly voting confidence in their leadership. None of them talk about the need to change this culture because none of them would personally benefit from doing so or have the capacity or courage to effect that change. This culture of dangerous, weak mediocrity has calcified past the point of no return in which a Liberal leadership change could save the nation. They do not form a majority in the House and have no mandate to see Canada through the dangerous waters in which we now reside.

For all these reasons, they must face the public in a general election. Allowing the Liberal party to prorogue (suspend) Parliament while they shuffle the deck chairs will only prolong the systems of stupidity and malaise that are destroying virtually every institution that makes Canada a free and just nation. From immigration to the functioning of Parliament to the justice system to finance, there seems to be nothing that this minority Liberal government’s reverse-Midas touch has not turned to abject shit.

It is not an overstatement to say that hostile foreign actors and agents love this state of affairs, we see the evidence of this in our streets right now. God forbid what may happen if this terrifying mess of incompetence is allowed to go on for another year by naïve or self-interested people in the media, civil society, business, and the Liberal caucus itself.

For the love of our country, we need an election, not a Liberal leadership race, now.