More Totalitarianism in Canada

This is not a post about COVID. The COVID debacle is only a culmination of lomg-existing trends

My sister who lives in Canada forgot to renew her car registration on time. They’ve been under a lockdown for two years and haven’t had a chance to use the car much. It’s easy to forget if you aren’t actually driving.

Then she remembered and tried to renew. The process of renewal for registrations that lapsed by a few months is so byzantine, multi-staged, confusing and humiliating that I’m not going to try to describe it here. Life is too short. All I can say is that it’s designed purposefully to make life as uncomfortable as possible for people who DARED TO BREAK THE RULES. A crowd of useless, angry people are employed to harass citizens who pay a boatload of money in taxes so that the useless, angry idiots can get hired. And so on.

This reminded me of how in the USSR disabled people had to come to a disability office every year to re-certify their disabilities. If you were an amputee or a blind person, for example, you had to present yourself in person (and wait in a long line, which is particularly sweet when we are talking about disabled people) to prove that your amputated leg hadn’t grown back and your eyesight hadn’t been magically restored. Of course, the authorities didn’t really believe that people could grow a spare leg. But they didn’t want to waste a great opportunity to torture and humiliate the unwell citizens.

If I had more time, I could also relate the story about how my sister had to pay $1,000 last week for a yearly wellness check in the “free healthcare” Canada. Or how her kids don’t have a pediatrician because the free healthcare is completely free from having to provide services.

What I’m trying to say with all this is that COVID strictures aren’t a new unexpected development. Canadians have been trained like poodles for many years to put up with totalitarian discomfort, humiliation, pointless regulations, etc. Yes, almost all of my Canadian stories are from Quebec, which is at the forefront of Canadian totalitarianism.