Dear Bill Maher: Canadian ‘cautionary tale’ is a bit of a joke

Dear Bill, You have no way of knowing this but my wife and I are big fans of your Friday HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher. It’s been an essential viewing ritual ever since we subscribed to HBO (yes, kids we have Game of Thrones!), ever moreso with the political rise of Donald Trump.

Suffice it to say you had us with that whole business of Trump suing you for suggesting he was sired by an orangutan because the primate’s fur colour is the only one in the natural world comparable to Trump’s trademark mop. It obviously was a joke, but Trump took the bait, and later dropped the suit.

We admired how you fearlessly skewered Republicans but also Democrats, hosted panels that combined folks with all points of view, and interviewed a wide range of guests from Elon Musk to William Shatner to David Byrne.

We were thrilled that the show the week before the November, 2016 election (that Trump won) featured a panel of three natural-born Canadians: comedian Martin Short, conservative commentator David Frum and former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm; soon-to-be former president Barack Obama was on the same show.

We noted that current federal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland has been on the show twice, the first being in November, 2013, when she was a new Liberal MP after a high-profile career in business journalism. The second was in November, 2015, when she was the newly minted trade minister in the Justin Trudeau government, destined two years later to negotiate a new free trade deal with the Trump administration.

We remember how on that program you and Freeland sparred over the place of Muslims in North American society with Freeland defending the principle of diversity. You, meanwhile, called out liberals who back Muslims, despite views that, for example, treat women as second class citizens.

We think, Bill, Freeland’s attitude may have stuck in your mind (which, you admit, is frequently “enhanced” by pot) as the kind of approach that would eventually brand the Trudeau government as, dare we say it, a beacon of wokeness.

Hence, for whatever reason that triggered it, in a recent episode you devoted your usual closing “New Rules” editorial to exposing “zombie lies” about how wonderful Canada is - “Where all the treasured goals of liberalism worked perfectly. It was like NPR come to life, but with poutine.”

You went on to list the woes besetting Canada, from an enormous influx of immigrants, to pollution in cities, to the unemployment rate (compared to the States), to the price of housing. “If Barbie moved to Winnipeg, she wouldn’t be able to afford her dream house and Ken would be working at Tim Horton’s.”

You took aim at the “vaunted health care system, which ranks dead last among high income countries for access to primary healthcare and ability to see a doctor in a day or two.” Can’t argue with that, although the U.S. ranks 69th in the world in quality of health care according to another comprehensive survey.

We think you might want to invite your pal Chrystia back to the show to correct your assertion that “Canada has the highest debt to GDP ratio of any G7 nation. I don’t know what that means, but it sounds bad.”

I don’t know what it means either, but the fact is Canada has by far the lowest debt to GDP ratio among the G7 - 15 per cent vs 96 per cent in the U.S.. Japan is tops with 159 per cent.

The point of your rant is that Canada is a “cautionary tale” for America: “You can move too far left, and when you do, you wind up pushing the people in the middle to the right. At its worst, Canada is what American voters think happens when there’s no one putting a check on extreme wokeness.”

Bill, thanks for thinking about Canada and all that, but, all joking aside, what’s happening in the American election, with Trump still a credible contender for president, would seem to be a more serious “cautionary tale” for the world than Canadian liberalism.