Canada Needs Less Sgt. Schultz Public Relations

Our lack of seriousness is dangerous; we are being played.

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The early 1970s TV show Hogan’s Heroes was a comedy set in a German POW camp. This environment did not naturally breed humour.

German prison guard Sgt. Schultz was a bumbling fool famous for saying, “I know nothing, I saw nothing.”

Of course, historically, the show was wildly inaccurate; German camps were abusive and violent, with almost 1300 Americans dying while interned.

But in Canada today, our political parties, particularly the Liberals, seem to be watching too many Hogan’s Heroes reruns because their go-to public defence now is the Sgt. Schultz's defence: “I saw nothing, I knew nothing”. And it seems to work.

Perhaps when Canada elected Trudeau’s Sunny Ways, we might have seen such unseriousness approaching in the distance. But we missed it, and now we have a cabinet that carries itself like a high school debating team that returns to school boasting about their third-place results - but neglecting to tell us just four teams were competing.

Led by PM Justin Trudeau, a man whose intellectual ability is a slow plodder, lapped in the race several times by his ego, we should have seen this coming.

Compound this with an attractive but vapid Foreign Minister Melanie Joly, who recently admitted that her continued attempts to draw a moral equivalence between Hamas and the Israelis were driven as much by morality as strawberry Twinkies are filled with actual strawberries.

It was diaspora politics; she didn’t want to lose the Arab vote in her riding.

But together with another “It’s 2015” gang member, the condescending Chrystia Freeland, the Slavic studies major whose sole business experience was driving her division of Reuters into a bankruptcy ditch and who frequently looks like she took her body language coaching on being an active listener way too seriously - Canada is also in deep financial trouble. Our interest payments on debt have surpassed our healthcare spending.

The thoughtless selloff of the future for the present will be Trudeau and Freeland’s penalty for our children when they look at their pay stubs.

Canadians are witnessing their democratic institutions eroded by a government that appears more concerned with maintaining power than addressing real challenges.

Despite clear evidence of foreign interference from nations like China, the Trudeau government has dragged its feet, avoiding decisive action and hiding behind platitudes. But platitudes work and fit nicely within our new 100-word reading limits.

More unseriousness? The Hogue Commission was meant to investigate foreign interference in Canadian elections. Though better than the doddering Johnson inquiry, this commission was initially hamstrung. Unlike other Western democracies that have established robust frameworks to address foreign meddling, Canada’s commission has been mired in bureaucracy and has produced no significant results. This ineffectual approach further underscores the Trudeau government’s lack of interest in genuinely addressing these problems.

More disturbing still are the growing concerns that some Members of Parliament may be involved in selling favours to foreign actors. If proven true, such allegations would indicate incompetence and corruption at the highest levels of Canadian politics. Yet, the Trudeau government seems to have little urgency in investigating these claims. Instead, it continues to obfuscate, delay, and deflect, undermining Canadians’ trust in their elected officials.

But unserious people let them get away with it.

The party nomination process in Canada is another area ripe for abuse. There is ample room for favour-trading and manipulation in a system where party insiders often control nominations, and candidates can be parachuted into ridings. This system allows foreign or corporate influence to infiltrate the political process, as donations, external support, or promises of favours can influence nomination battles. The lack of transparency in these processes erodes faith in the democratic system, leaving Canadians with the impression that their politicians are more interested in serving special interests than their constituents. This well-earned cynism is the friend of the future autocrat. When everyone lies and is corrupt, we question ourselves and just put our noses down and plod forward, absorbed in our desire to look out for number one.

Amidst all this dysfunction, Trudeau’s government falls back to the Sgt. Schultz defence. Whenever scandal hits, or accountability is demanded, Trudeau and his ministers retreat into a fog of professed ignorance or outright lies, like in the case of SNC Lavelin.

Whether it’s foreign interference, ethics violations, or questions about the integrity of MPs, Trudeau’s Liberals repeatedly claim they were unaware of the severity of the problem or had no knowledge of wrongdoings. This strategy of feigned ignorance shields them from accountability and highlights the sheer unseriousness with which they approach governance.

This tactic of weaponising ignorance serves the Liberals in multiple ways.

First, it allows them to avoid the hard questions—after all, how can one be responsible for a problem they didn’t know about? Second, it shifts the blame onto the bureaucracy, creating an illusion that the system itself, not the elected government, is at fault. Finally, it leaves the opposition flailing, as they cannot hold the government accountable for knowledge it claims not to possess.

The unseriousness of Canadian politics is not just embarrassing; it’s dangerous. When the government fails to take issues like foreign interference seriously, it opens the door for malign actors to influence elections, undermine democratic processes, and destabilise the country. When MPs may be selling favours and when party nominations can be manipulated, it suggests a deeper rot in the political system that will only get worse if left unchecked.

At its core, the problem is a lack of accountability.

The Trudeau government seems content to coast on a mixture of image management and avoidance tactics, but this approach is unsustainable. Canadians deserve better than empty gestures and ignorance masquerading as policy.

Our falling to unserious nation status is largely the fault of the ruling party of the last nine years - #Team Trudeau. Though now not officially propped up by sycophantic NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, whose Sybil-like personality splits outside of parliament, where he hisses, spits, and widens his hood only to shrink back in parliament, Singh sill rises in parliament most often only to attack the official opposition. He doesn’t seem to have started on his road to Damascus when it comes to his relationship with Trudeau.

And to unseriousness, we recently discovered that Singh does not know the difference between revenue and profit; in 2019 he also confused the two, so his economic literacy seems to be taken as seriously as the Governor General’s French lessons.

Though Singh is famously prone to peacocking with a bevvy of expensive luxury goods, the public can deal with hypocrisy. But can we deal with an elected official who might be the next opposition leader who couldn’t pass a ninth-grade business course? His frequent financial illiteracy ranks there with Trudeau telling the Germans there was no business case for selling Canadian LNG.

However, these criticisms are more focused on ignorance, and while accurate, the key problem is a decided lack of seriousness; according to Ipso research, 70% of Canadians view Canada as broken.

Unserious = broken.

Our prime Minister is now showing the extent of his selfish, petulant nature. He leads an unqualified cabinet whose adults have left and a government that confuses optics with actions.

With the world on the brink of war, our government is still unwilling to address military deficiencies properly. It prefers to hide behind indefinite promises with long timelines over concrete actions, knowing full well that the fickle public will forget promises in months, let alone years.

It's not a serious country.

Will there be war in the Middle East - where our democratic ally Israel has been insulted by Canada? Canada has been banned from sitting at the adult table, and Joly is banning military exports to Israel, a few scraps of red meat that she hopes will satiate Arab voters in her riding. And what of the killing fields of Ukraine, what of China and Russia supporting Iran, and China sabre rattling over Taiwan? Is Canada ready?

No, in Canada, we are still playing domestic politics.

Bad actors like China, Russia, and, to a lesser extent, India have noted the sad state of our military, immigration system and internal security. The Hogue Commission into Chinese and Russian interference seems determined, with some help from Trudeau, to put itself in the news cycle, another Macbethian PR stunt, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

When it comes to inquiries into foreign interference, Defence Minister Blair rivals Trudeau in employing the Sgt. Schultz defence. How often have we heard, “I didn’t know until I read it in the Globe and Mail?”

“That memo didn’t make it to my desk; it must have been the mistake of some staffer; everybody makes mistakes,” Blair fumbles.

We are not a serious nation.

We grant citizenship to terrorists when we are a Google search away from finding videos of them decapitating men. We forgot who fought the Germans in WWII when assembling the Parliamentarian party list.

How often has the announcement of a CSIS discovery been prefaced by the statement that the Americans tipped us off?

Not a serious country.

Minister Bill Blair has taken the Sgt. Schultz defence to new heights, 54 days to sign an approval to investigate Chinese interference by Liberal ally Michael Chan. As Minister of Emergency Preparedness, Blair was criticised for the federal government’s slow and disorganised response to the devastating wildfires in 2023. His bumbling history includes the ArriveCan App, the Nova Scotia mass shooting investigation, border closures during the pandemic, gun control cock ups and civil rights violations with the Ottawa Convoy. Blair couldn’t even handle legalising weed. He has admitted he doesn’t read emails on screen but has them printed; he knows nothing and sees nothing.

All this bumbling and fumbling is just an act. Nobody ever hated Sgt. Scultz. And that is the point.

This is simply the latest go-to move recommended by the Liberal PR team.

Deflection and convenient attacks to provide media cover are other tactics in the thick book that is the Liberal public relations manual. One would swear they had reincarnated Goebbels with the proficiency that Katie Telford, the PMO and their PR corps have played the Canadian public.

But serious nations and serious people do not endlessly fall for stunts. We could barely handle a group of disgruntled truckers upset at COVID-19 without collapsing into a panicked abrogation of our civil liberties. What if the Russians start making advances in the Arctic? Our hunting rifles won’t do much.

Can we be assured of getting help when we toddle over to Uncle Sam and pull on his waistcoat, interrupting his conversation with the adults? What if the Americans don’t tell us next time we have a terrorist coup being planned? Are our institutions strong and stable enough to handle further stress after years of childish neglect?

Assuming Pierre Pollieve’s Conservatives toss off our nation’s Liberal albatross in a year, will the public continue to be led like a bull by its nose ring with Sgt. Schultz defences and whatever manipulative PR technique du jour is discovered?

Is the lack of seriousness only a leadership issue? Is it as much a problem with a disengaged and tribalised population that does not give serious attention to this once proud and mighty nation?

Please subscribe and get at least three pieces /essays per week with open comments. It’s $5 per month and less than $USD 4. I know everyone says hey, it’s just a cup of coffee (with me, not per day but just one per month), but if you’re like me, you go, “Hey, I only want so many cups of coffee!” I get it. I don’t subscribe to many here because I can’t afford it.

But I only ask that when you choose your coffee, please choose mine. Cheers.

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