Bruce Dowbiggin
Climate & Covid: How The Certainty of Elites Destroyed A Decade
It probably wasn’t meant as an epitaph for the years since 2008, but a speech from the recent movie Conclave might serve all the same. In the film, a British Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) must be deacon to the Conclave electing a new pope. He is hesitant to accept the responsibility in times of intolerance. His homily explains why.
“Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. .. If there were only certainty and no doubt there would be no mystery. And therefore no need for faith. Let us pray God will find us a pope who doubts.” (Spoiler alerts forbid further plot developments.)
Cardinal Lawrence might well have been describing the deadening effects of certainty since the election of Barack Obama (2008) and Justin Trudeau (2015). Under the guise of enlightenment Obama and then Trudeau have employed certainty as a battering ram. Those who expressed doubt were eliminated. Those bending a knee were spared— for now. Those at the top got great Taylor Swift tickets.
While artfully claiming disinformation/ misinformation as dire threats to humanity they used censorship to eliminate opposing views to their radical progressive agendas. The two most prominent of those agendas were, of course, the toxic twins of Climate and Covid.
While the global warming… oops, climate-change hustle had been around for some time it was only under the auspices of Obama and then Trudeau that it gained its ability to punish dissent. Who can forget Obama’s sneering admonition to doubters that 97 percent of scientists were onside with Al Gore and Greta Thunberg because The Science Was Settled? This was certainty on steroids.
In short order, newspapers banned letters to the editor disputing the manipulative programs of the UN and the IPCC (among the many drawing hundreds of millions in public funds). Opposing climate voices disappeared from CBC television panels. To dispute controversial claims was an invitation to disastrous law fare, as Canadian journalist Mark Steyn discovered. Our piece The Right To Criticize Climate Change Has Cost Mark Steyn Almost Everything highlights the decade-plus ordeal he suffered in D.C. courts for pointing out the fraudulence of Michael Mann’s hockey-stick oeuvre.
All for disputing the certainty of the science behind a global scheme to move billions from the first world to developing nations. (Which is then reportedly laundered back to the U.S.) Were Steyn’s case an exception we might grant his oppressors leeway. But the certainty principal of Obama and Trudeau on climate cost thousands of scientists their livelihoods, bankrupted others and blackened their life’s work. To no effect on climate itself.
In Canada, Trudeau named a convicted criminal and ruthless zealot as his climate minister. Steven Guilbeault took certainty to its illogical end, dragging the faculty lounge of idiots in Trudeau’s cabinet along with him. Again, career scientists and researchers were crushed by his onslaught of a useless carbon tax, EV mandates and ridiculous bans on workable solutions such as nuclear. Dispute was fruitless. They were that certain of their holiness.
But climate certainty was simply the appetizer for the banquet of Covid. Here both Trudeau and Obama (and his successors in the the U.S. health industry) wielded certainty into a script that not even Hollywood would have considered plausible in 2000.
Most now recall the Rod Serling scenario of an engineered Chinese virus somehow wiping out civilization. This plot was employed to suspend everyday activity and lock the population in their homes across much of the West and Asia. (Surprisingly Africa declined the invitation to insanity and survived nicely, thank you.)
Lock downs, masks, distancing, surface wiping, police raids, government bans— all were the poisoned fruit employed by bureaucrats and fanatics in service of their certainty. Everyone has their pained memory of overreach, from arresting surfers on the beach to locking arriving Canadian travellers into hotels to seniors dying alone in quarantined wards.
Citing the worthlessness of masks was always accompanied with the admonition that defying the new normal was a fatal threat to someone’s grandmother. It is a truism that people cannot remember the pain of dental extraction or childbirth. But the dystopian effects of Covid are likely to be carried to the grave by young people isolated from schools and grieving citizens denied a final farewell to parents.
While authorities sought to keep their grip, certainty finally began to erode. It was revealed that six-foot distancing was an invented standard, masks were useless in stopping the spread of the virus and the avalanche of positive tests were largely false positives and unlikely to make anyone sick. Soon Covid humour became accepted. Compliance was mocked. Citizens chucked the mask and re-started life.
Those certain in their power recoiled at the insubordination. Armin Rosen noted their stunned disbelief in Tablet, “Perhaps the higher levels of the American media complex, masquerading in the clothing of a different century, should embrace their essentially patrician urges and accept their permanent bafflement at the inscrutable, inexplicable passions of the American polity, thus exempting themselves from any deep concern about what the rest of us are up to.”
Donald Trump’s call to reject those who’d prospered in Covid found willing ears in the United States. His resounding sweep in the 2024 elections— every state in the union moved rightward in voting— was the final rebuke to those who preached certainty. The same people who sloughed off not one, but two assassination attempts on a presidential candidate as mere distractions.
It remains to be seen whether docile Canadians, always deferring to authority first, will shake off the certainty crowd in the next federal election. The Liberals are still hoping they can fool them with the Pierre Poilievre-as-Trump-as-Hitler narrative, a scare tactic that failed miserably down south. (One recent poll shows the Conservatives winning 240 seats, the Liberals with 19.)
Cardinal Lawrence’s appeal in Conclave to a higher purpose than certainty should be a stake in the heart of those who’ve oppressed their families and neighbours to no perceptible gain. The Trump comeback signals an opportunity with RFK Jr. and Elon Musk for a revival of healthy debate and skepticism. Whether it holds and prospers is still uncertain. But we have learned that uncertainty is a thing to be wished for.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
In case you missed it, the Hubris party has halted the business of Canada for three months in the heart of the biggest existential crisis since NAFTA. The reason? Justin Trudeau called timeout to allow banker/ green advocate Mark Carney to slide into his chair before the next election becomes Bull Run.
Who is Carney? In September Justin Trudeau appointed him a “special advisor” to the Liberals. He then asked for— and received— $10 B for Brookfield, the private hedge fund of which he was chairman, so that he might sprinkle it on the Green Agenda. There’s more, but this tells you why Libs think he’s ideal.
In his introduction to a nation that didn’t know Mark Carney was a solution to anything, Carney insisted that Canadians want new ideas, new energy, new purpose. (In his defence his opponent Chrystia Freeland is mumbling the same contrition.) And who were the architects of the malaise requiring such an overhaul?
The Liberals themselves. Okay, the NDP rates blame for polishing the Liberal apple in a minority government. But Canadians have long ago consigned Jagmeet Singh to a deserved obscurity. Yes, the denials choir at the Toronto Star and CBC are trying to harpoon Pierre Polievre for ruining the Parliament that Liberals prorogued. While the Flora MacDonald Marching Society cites Donald Trump’s tariffs for the crisis. Deny, deny, deny.
It’s not working. Consult the polls. Even the staunchest supporters of Canada’s self-appointed national party are fed up with PMJT and his legacy. In fact it is stunning to see how wobbly the Liberal platform is under Carney. All the massaged polls and handshakes with Olympic heroes on the Rideau Canal cannot disguise that their legacy issues are now DOA. As we wrote last week the challenges come on a many fronts.
Trump’s tariff challenge/ 51st state tease is the most public challenge— and the one the Liberals believe they can whipsaw to their favour. #OrangeManBad simply tore away the PMO’s artifice of postmodern Canada. By threatening tariffs and gleefully laughing about Canada joining America he exposed an entitled political elite unwilling to admit that the world has changed.
By stirring Canada to some united economic response against his audacious measures Trump has shown Canadians how little they have in common. Ontario and Quebec want Alberta to put on the hair shirt. Alberta wants Quebec to pay its fair share. etc. Trump’s new Commerce secretary says it would be an easy ask to avoid tariffs. But Trudeau/ Doug Ford would rather posture and preen. Canadians, after years of sitting in first-class but paying for economy, now find themselves exposed to the world. As we said in 2018, Canada is an ingrate nation living off Trump’s America.
The destruction of Liberal DEI legacy doesn’t stop with tariffs. The PMO pretends that they can still use the Climate inquisition to hammer Canadians. But Trump has moved the West away from the Al Gore/ King Charles doomsday consensus. By taking America out of the UN Net Zero scheme he’s produced a landslide of financial institutions and governments escaping the draconian conditions imposed by this once-mighty body. Trudeau’s precious climate supports are toppling almost as fast as Sir John A. statues.
Trump has forced the high and mighty in banking, investment and government— who’ve been wedded to these principals— to escape his climate wrath. Trump used the election to remind voters of deadlines for catastrophic weather that come and go with only elites getting rich. During the 2024 vote he heard from average people who no longer believe the Greta Thunberg countdown clock to ruination. And he said, Drill, Baby, Drill.
CO2-obsessed Canada, meanwhile, is still dithering on its commitment to what CBC and everyone in Parliament stubbornly call the “climate crisis”. Carney talks about moving away from the sacred tablets of climate change, but only to find a new green euphemism for draining the public purse.
Another sacred cow of Trudeau’s Disaster Run has been his stewardship of Covid 19— a talking point he brags about openly but whose Emergency Measures Act are condemned by the courts and public opinion. Again, Trudeau’s flank has been protected by purchased media and a smothering censorship program.
But now Alberta’s Covid Task Force has ripped the province’s actions in the two-plus years of virus, vaccine and vexation. The Davidson Report demonstrates how The Science was used to defend government overreach while health officials used faulty data to deceive the public about the reality of Covid. (The criticisms apply to the federal response just as easily.)
One example cited in the Task Force report was one we wrote about continuously from 2020-2023. Namely the media’s daily positive CPR tests that purported to show massive numbers of infected Canadians. The truth was 80 to 90 percent of the “results” were false positives or samples too small to be transmitted or make the carrier ill. Even when they knew in 2020 no one bothered to let citizens in on the scam.
Want more? Another sink hole beneath the Libs is the Rez Schools “murdered babies” libel they used to cast Canadians as genocidal. Trudeau sought to criminalize any doubt on their veracity. Turns out that the money allocated for exhumation of alleged graves of victims has turned up nothing. Instead the “$12M spent to find purported 215 children’s graves at an Indian Residential School was instead spent on publicists & consultants with no graves found to date. “
There’s more. Environment minister Stephen Gilbeault was found guilty of violating federal rules in siphoning $254 M to a company he owns. While Conservative MPs continue to call for the release of “green slush fund” documents, Trudeau continues to defend his minister by burying the records. Then there is the $187 B in infrastructure grants supervised by former Lib cabinet minister Catherine McKenna that is unaccounted for.
Wait, there’s more. On the celebrated immigration front nearly 50,000 international students failed to show up at their designated colleges and universities in Canada during March and April 2024, according to government data.; No one can trace them. And let’s not forget the government’s seeming impassivity to the crowds of pro-Hamas fanatics crowding Canadian streets each week calling fore the death of Canadian Jews and anyone else trying to stop the intifada.
We could go on, but this seems like weak sauce on which to launch a new leader of the Liberals. But they’re going to try. And with Singh’s flip-flop, now refusing to bring down the government, it will have a puncher’s chance in the Liberal heartland. Expect them to try stretching the mandate till the fall and later while spitting out more federal aid money, a la Covid, to compensate Canadians for this stupidity.
The only question then, who volunteers to bell the cat? Can you say Convoy.2?
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed Hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org. You can see all his books at brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
The campy, trashy ceremony celebrating dysphoria at last summer’s Olympics spoke to how pervasive trans politics has become. So it’s no surprise that amid the avalanche of policies enunciated by Donald Trump in his first week as president is a ban on biological male athletes competing against women. Depending on the sports body this practice has already either been accepted wholeheartedly (swimming) or banned completely (world athletics). The recent Paris Olympics said they went by passport designation when they let Algeria’s Imane Khelif pound real XX biological females in boxing.
Trump’s EO mirrors the newly elected U.S. Congress which passed legislation banning trans athletes from competing against women. It also dovetails with orders that ban all U.S. passport applications with ‘X’ gender marker after Trump’s executive order.
As expected the trans lobby cranked up the outrage. Rep. Lori Trahan, D-Mass., the only woman in Congress who played Division I college sports, said Republicans were using the measure to “inject themselves into decisions they have no business making.” She had company as 106 DEMs voted against the bill. Along with the industry that has made children’s author J.K. Rowling a pariah for dissenting.
Society’s recent obsession with gender dysphoria would have been an unimaginable development even a decade ago for a community that’s a rounding error in the census. Monty Python hilariously spoofed a man wanting to have a baby in Life of Brian. The cool kids loved it. Then.
Now trans-as-victim is embraced by radicals in academia and media— and championed by the Trudeau prime ministership and the Obama and Biden presidencies. Such is the hysteria surrounding the issue that it was headline news that future Canadian PM Pierre Poilievre insisted to a CTV interviewer that there are only two genders. Blockbuster stuff in CDN media.
While Canada remains mired as deeply as ever in DEI politics conservatives and evangelicals in Trump’s base are demanding that the trans movement be treated as a manufactured crisis created by radical left-wing elements. Is it real or is it a product of social engineering gone bad? The Salem Witch Trials ? The dawn of a golden age of dysphoria or a hysteria like the McMartin Pre-School witch hunts ?
MacDonald Laurier Institute fellow Mia Hughes has charted a history of similar social contagions such as bulimia and multiple-personality disorder. “In 1972, British psychologist Gerald Russell treated a woman with an unusual eating disorder involving binging and purging. Over the next seven years, he saw a further 30 woman presenting with the same condition. In 1979, he wrote a paper published in Psychological Medicine, in which he gave it the name bulimia nervosa….
“Then something remarkable happened. The illness swept the globe like wildfire… affecting an estimated 30 million people by the mid-1990s, the majority of whom were teenage girls and young women. The explanation for this rapid spread is what philosopher Ian Hacking calls ‘semantic contagion’ – how the process of naming and describing a condition creates the means by which the condition spreads. The epidemic of multiple-personality disorder in the 90s was spread this same way.
“Bulimia entered the lexicon via women’s magazines such as Mademoiselle and Better Homes and Gardens, which ran stories about this new and worrying disorder affecting women and girls. Multiple studies demonstrate the media’s culpability in the spread of social contagions
“In the first decade of the 21st century, the seeds were sown for another global contagion. A rights movement that started out with the aim of improving the lives of transgender people has given rise to a new type of gender dysphoria with all the hallmarks of a social contagion
“Just like bulimia, gender dysphoria was virtually unheard of in the teenage girl population prior to 2010, and then, all of a sudden, countries all over the industrialized world saw an explosion of adolescent girls identifying as transgender. [Ed.: statistics show it rising by 500 percent] It was the perfect storm. In the 2010s, the media fascination with transgenderism began with ‘Caitlyn’ Jenner and I Am Jazz; the political left became infatuated with trans rights, and schools started teaching gender ideology to children as young as kindergarten.
“Social media came on the scene and provided the perfect super-spreading environment. Teenage girls are now just one click away from 1000s of TikTok and YouTube videos of young women proudly showing off their mastectomy scars and extolling the joy of taking testosterone.
“Just as this new, atypical type of gender dysphoria was emerging, gender clinics, at the behest of activist groups, abandoned the psychotherapeutic approach of watchful waiting and adopted the affirmative model – fast-tracking these teens to irreversible medical procedures.
“We’re in the eye of the storm right now, so most people can’t see the damage being done. But soon, all the young people emerging from this contagion sterile and missing body parts will be visible for all to see, and people will be horrified that they supported such evil.”
Knowing the lunatic left’s penchant for denial the trans contagion evil will be suppressed and forgotten. The young women who lost Olympic medals and world records to biological men will be memory holed. The social suffocation employed to defeat its critics will be re-defined as an attack on the proponents of the movement. Not convinced? Veterans of the McMartin travesty in Los Angeles still remain astonished by the complete lack of accountability of those who perpetrated this fraud.
Hughes may be right that, just like bulimia, the trans contagion has peaked and is diminishing. But the people who cultivated it as.a tool to punish their enemies will still be in place, waiting for social media to embrace their next campaign of punishment. Their ruthless, recklerss grasp for power is the real contagion of modern times. Solving that will take more than a Donald Trump executive order.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed Hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org. You can see all his books at brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
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