学啥别学加拿大——《Don't Be Canada》读后
近些年，加拿大以迅雷不及掩耳盗铃之势，从三线摇身二线，甚至一线明星。作为加拿大人，空前自豪，隔壁美国算老几。咋滴，老子就敢跟你叫板，袖子卷得比你还高。
刚好这几天出了个大事，至少在加拿大人眼中，关乎国家生死存亡的大事。加拿大总理卡尼也因此成为国际政治的一线超巨，浑身上下笼罩着民族国家英雄的光辉。美加贸易谈判，从未如此牵动加拿大人的小心脏。连用独立安身立命的魁人党也不独了，坐等川普下台再独不迟。
本该与全体加拿大人万众一心，痛骂美帝川普，我却不小心读了一本书：Don't Be Canada，副标题：How One Country Did Everything Wrong All At Once，意思就是说，学啥别学加拿大，他们最善长的事就是同时搞砸几乎所有的事。
作者Tristin Hopper，资深媒体人，数十载耕耘加拿大国内政治。书中尽显Darkly hilarious。春秋笔墨，嬉笑怒骂，黑色吐槽。解颐之余，令人深思。
引几段。
Of late, whenever Canada has garnered international attention on the world stage, it’s often been for something humiliating ——丢脸不要紧，只要能出名。
BC considered employing “glory holes,” a hole in a wall intended to facilitate anonymous sex. “Use barriers, like walls (e.g., glory holes), that allow for sexual contact but prevent close face-to-face contact,” read guidelines published by the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control —— 请原谅我不怀好意色色地笑了。情色小说的情节在政府文件中，居然冠冕堂皇。
But 2014 was also the year everything started to fall apart——2014，土豆时代揭幕，加拿大分崩离析元年。
One of the hardest pills to swallow has been the simple fact that Canada is no longer among the world’s richest nations. At the end of the Cold War, the wealth of the average Canadian was bested only by Switzerland, Luxembourg, the United States, and the richer corners of Scandinavia —— 自己约的炮，含泪也得打完。咋滴，老子祖上也阔过。
Canadians trusted their leaders not to turn the country into a petri dish for bad ideas. And ironically, this is a big reason why the bad ideas were able to become so entrenched, so quickly —— 一切行动听政府，政府就是我的娘。政府不会错，错的是人民。
But the prime minister of Canada retains a level of executive power that is utterly mind-blowing by the standards of his peers in the rest of the G7 —— 总理大于天，美国总统算个屁。
Journalist Jeffrey Simpson wrote in The Friendly Dictatorship that Canada can often feel like a “de facto one-party state.” —— 事实上的一党专政，说得委婉点，温情脉脉的独裁。
Canada has also put massive amounts of power into the hands of its judiciary. At the heart of virtually every chapter in this book is an activist judge. A jurist who looked at the Charter of Rights and Freedoms decided that a vague phrase such as “security of the person” denoted an unquestioned constitutional right to do drugs in a playground or obtain suicide on demand —— 加拿大的司法热爱入世，强烈的政治能动性。最高法就是最高罚。
Canada is where streets are safe and where justice is served. It’s where immigrants are grateful and well-integrated; it’s where sound policy reigns and corruption is non-existent; it’s where wealth is so plentiful that prosperity can always take a backseat to ideology; it’s where health care is free and the vulnerable are cared for; to be a Canadian is to be the envy of the world —— 一点不夸张，在2014以前。
It’s a very comforting national image. And Canadians believed it so fervently that they didn’t notice anything had changed until almost all of it had ceased to be true —— 归去来兮，田园已芜。
1996，我与梅梅，拎着四口大箱，来到这块自由之地，岁月静好近二十年。无奈好景不长，眼睁睁看着土豆上台，大伙倒也齐心，配合折腾，好端端的Canada Goose整成Canada Gross。
加拿大这些沉疴，冰冻三尺，非一日之寒。想想看，还真是，加拿大，大半年都是冰雪。而其社会的冰冻，更是匪夷所思，过犹不及。难得作者并非泛泛而论，桩桩件件，都有来源。
加拿大病了，并且是结构性的病。我把书中加拿大病的病因，按其始发地，分成两大块：自上而下，自下而上。
自上而下。总理，议会，最高法。行政与司法高度融合。自下而上。大量左派媒体，官办媒体。民众意识形态。上面有国家政策，下面有意识形态。二者相互绑定，导致加拿大国民身份认同锁死，导致社会纠偏变得异常艰难的现象。
书中引了名嘴Maher，一位资深的左派电视人，眼见加拿大往左狂奔，连他都看不下去了。说：“They say in politics, liberals are the gas pedal, and conservatives are the brakes, and I’m generally with the gas pedal, but not if we’re driving off a cliff.”
我也引句里根名言：If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it. 说的就是加拿大政府，他们的三板斧。
