Canada, Utopia

HAPPY CANADA DAY

Canada is the greatest country on earth. But we should always be looking for ways to improve. Here are my suggestions:

alberta acknowledgements: Every indie film project coming out of Ontario or (especially) Quebec that uses any national funds will be required to show a thirty-second acknowledgement of the Albertan oil sands’ contribution to the arts via equalization payments.

birth rate acceleration strategy: What can we do about the birth rate? I think it would be cheaper to nationalize a dating app than set up tax breaks per child. After the ArriveCan scandal, you can assume that the government is going to make the app as efficienctly as possible. It could require users to sync their government IDs to their profiles and reward them with micro tax breaks for going on dates.

can con colonialism: Canadian music is good once you get used to it; it takes forty hours of Rush to really get Rush. I didn’t appreciate the Barenaked Ladies until the second time I saw them live. Anyways, the point is, if we get the world to consume enough Canadian content, it’ll be forever cemented within the greater global culture. We need to manufacture a computer virus that occasionally redirects you to CBC Gem and subsidize corner shops across the world, contingent on them playing CBC LISTEN.

democratize MAID: not sure how I feel about people being able to take their own lives, but if everyone in the neighbourhood agrees you should go…

ed, sex (reform): I think we should keep sex-ed sex segregated, but only give the boys safe sex education about gay sex, and only give the girls safe sex education about straight sex. This is the most efficient way to do things.

frankenstein rob ford: I just feel like we should bring him back.

greatest american juno award: It would be a huge cultural win to pick 6-8 nominees for honorary Canadian of the year, mostly because it would require some rubric of “Canadian-ness”, which would force us to have some prescriptive values. I generally think we should be exploiting the fact that Americans are charmed by Canadians more than we currently are.

hegelian canadianism: “Canadian Hegelianism” was a short-lived field of thought that saw Canada as a successful union of opposites (freedom & civic duty; french & english; upper & lower; etc). I think we should double-down on this kind of meta-understanding of our “culture” until we have a real culture. Contradiction is the motor of history.

illegalize the phrase “world-class city”: what the fuck does that even mean, man.

john galt line: Work program where people aged thirty and under are employed to add new rail so that via rail can actually run on time without having to share tracks. This will also solve the “no jobs” problem. We’ll name the railway after John Galt, the first superintendent of the Canada Company, in order to honour our history.

keep the flag: Just want to get ahead of the curve and say I think we should keep the flag.

loblaws as a crown corporation: I’m against government-owned grocery stores, but not as much as I’m against Loblaws.

mass female migration: who doesn’t want more women?

national value of multimulticulturalism: We already have multiculturalism enshrined as a national value, but what kind? We sort of use liberal multiculturalism across the historic French/English Canadian divide, pluralist multiculturalism for other groups, and cosmopolitan multiculturalism when among friends. I suggest Canada enshrine a commitment to multimulticulturalism, embracing a mosaic of cultural mosaics.

official opposition to the canadian council for the arts: There’s not enough discourse between Canadian artists, and certainly not enough namecalling. I propose we start a grantmaking body which is entirely dedicated to giving money to artists who make art in opposition to art created by artists funded by the Canadian Council of Arts. “Opposition” here means any kind of negative stance, whether critical or personal. Grants will be awarded on the basis of how likely the work is to create a larger discourse. This will make Canadian art feel more dangerous and alive.

package and sell cold air: I don’t know if you’ve heard that there’s a bit of a heat wave in Europe, but apparently they’re very anti-A/C (or, as they say, “air con”) for environmental reasons. I suggest we box cool Canadian air in the winter, save it up until the summer, and then ship it on boats to Europe. Because the weight of the boxes will be negligible, it’s a near-zero-emissions solution.

quirky careerist brunette Canadianess as cultural export: we had a good run of this in the 2010s and then stopped. Need to start producing these again.

resurrect terry fox: It’s not over yet. (after we’ve perfected upon the aforementioned Rob Ford technology)

squatters’ rights expansion: We currently have a 10-year adverse possession requirement in most provinces, which is useless. This would alleviate some problems with the backed up LTB.

toronto language police: two-twos which mandem carrying culture like the toronto man dem? gotta protect the ting, real mission. but if man don’t lock it in…… OT boy fawad tief the whole wave, linguistically speaking….. . so we gotta pull up like quebec did, ahlie, and make it law: the “Multicultural Toronto English protection act”. my ting is two deezed squads, first dem making sure the slang neatly proper pon every ting. you can’t wop the unto without writing correct or trust you get latched. taking it straight into the schools so the gerberdem learn it proper from time.

universal healthcare but for real this time: I propose the following healthcare reform:

• let nurse practitioners be covered by OHIP to do what doctors do

• allow med students to fund their own residencies as long as hospitals and schools don’t close any unpaid residency spots

• let pharmacists submit bloodwork requisitions

This would free about 300 million dollars a year into the ontario healthcare system and virtually eliminate the waitlist for GPs.

We can use the $300 million to create public-access gyms in community centres. Everyone signs up for a card with their ID and is allowed to use the space for free, with a three strike rule for bodily fluid mishaps and drug use.

voluntary alberta: Albertans are not Canadian by default, but there are strong incentives for every Albertan to opt-in to being Canadian

winter time: Abolish daylight savings time changes.

xenophobia tax: I think we should import advanced Chinese AI systems and look for xenophobia big-brother style. Everyone gets a xenophobia jar (like a swear jar) and every time you say something mean about brown people we take a dollar from your tax return and put it in the jar. When the jar gets full the funds get redistributed to woke.

year of mandatory military or public service: I propose we make it mandatory for all Canadians to do a year of public service in the year they turn eighteen. By default, this service will not be combative and will require participants to serve in a province outside of their previous residence. I predict the following benefits:

• Merits recognized regardless of class or social status: when everyone is uprooted from regular life and asked to put on a uniform, you get about as close as you can get to equal opportunity. You’ll never fully be able to uplift people from whatever holds them back, but this sounds like it’s close.

• Get people to make better life choices en masse: when you’re eighteen you’re usually graduating from high school and you’re going to have to make some kind of choice for what’s next. I think that most people don’t need help here, but the people that do (whether because they’re about to get involved with some kind of a ‘bad crowd’ or sign up for a university degree that costs $72,000 in a field they probably aren’t going to work in (oops)) would benefit from an extra year.

• Deflation of post-secondary: lots of people go to university for a kind of ‘adult summer camp’ where they can meet people and learn to grow up and are actually uninterested in higher education. If we offered the adult summer camp experience to everyone decoupled from higher education, I think the value of post-secondary education would increase significantly as it could stop trying to be adult summer camp.

zedification: It happens frequently: we had Yonge Dundas Square and then we didn’t like Dundas anymore, so we¹ spent eight hundred thousand dollars naming it something else. We still have Dundas Street though, because renaming that would’ve cost twelve million dollars. We don’t like Ryerson anymore and so we change the name of Ryerson University and end up with two Toronto universities for the low cost of six and a half million dollars².

May I propose a cleaner solution? We could add the prefix “zed-” to any proper noun to denote that we renounce that name. So, Zed-Ryerson University, Yonge Zed-Dundas Square. We can just mass-print “Zed-” prefix stickers and apply them on top of preexisting signage. Not only does this signal we no longer venerate the behaviour of the zedified individual, it forces us to remember that we, too, may be zedified in the future, not just forgotten but remembered poorly, which I think will steepen the arc of the moral universe. Plus, it uplifts the Canadian pronunciation of “z” as “zed”.

We can make the system even more economical in the long-term by redesigning all street signs to have a couple inches of dead space in front of the name in case it loses popular favour.

1. renaming Yonge Dundas Square will take a little over two million dollars, but Zed-Ryerson University is mostly on the hook for this, right now it looks like taxpayers (”we”) will pay $700,000 - $800,000

2. paid by Zed-Ryerson University, not the taxpayers