The Canadian election is turning into a comedy of cringe

Next week my compatriots will cast their votes in what has arguably been the worst Canadian election ever. By ‘worst’ I don’t mean allegations of voter fraud or political corruption or scenes of civil unrest but a collective release of hot prairie wind followed by a vague sinking sensation — the feeling of a prosperous nation of decent people settling into a new low of political disillusionment.

The campaign kicked off with a bang, as Time, a US magazine, humiliated the Canadian press by breaking the story of the year: yearbook images of our dreamboat PM — the thinking non-gender-binary person’s gluten–free crumpet — cavorting in blackface back when he was teacher at a private Vancouver high school. Since then the spiral has continued. Readers of this magazine may have missed the news what with all the buzz over… stuff, but allow me to enlighten you — Brits aren’t the only ones who know how to paralyse a country with a hurricane of political pointlessness. If the recent election is anything to judge by, Canada seems bent on joining its first- and third-largest trading partners — the US and UK — in the tribal dance around the bin fire of unreason. We’re team players if nothing else.

Social media has gone predictably haywire in the most un-Canadian way — fake attack ads (mostly from the hard right, featuring Justin-Trudeau-as-closet-jihadi/crack-legalisation–enthusiast and up-skirted cellulite shots of his foreign minister, Chrystia Freeland) are popping up everywhere, in English and other languages, targeting specific communities, distorting public opinion and highlighting Canada’s woefully outdated data regulation. (We are pathetically behind on this stuff — just ask the UK’s formidable Canadian-born data commissioner, Elizabeth Denham.)

The liberal establishment is also to blame. Earlier this month multiple Canadian media outlets, including the CBC, spent weeks chasing down false leads of Russian and Chinese interference leaked to them by Trudeau gov-ernment aides in the wake of brownface-gate.