I used to think of Canada as a massive pleated range of stoicism/decency/intelligence. Once we were mountains. Now I see us sliding into dunes.

From whence comes the sensation of national defeat? Once again, it’s Harper favourite Jason Kenney, in charge of the Temporary Foreign Workers program that he was just forced to put on hold after an outcry over foreigners hired to replace Canadian waiters in a Saskatchewan burger joint.

McDonald’s Canada is just one of the fast food companies that is furious about the fuss over imported hires. The CBC obtained a tape of its CEO’s reaction in a conference call to franchisees this week. “This has been an attack on our brand,” said John Betts. “This has been an attack on our system. This is an attack on our people. It’s bull---- OK! I used those words when I described my conversation with the minister [Kenney] last week. He gets it.”

Betts says he was “incredibly impressed” with the minister, adding, “He really knows his stuff. And I’ll say he knows his stuff from a business person’s perspective.” But not from an employed Canadian voter’s perspective, and there’s the heart of the matter. At no point, the CBC reported, did Betts suggest solving the problem by hiring locals.

Canadians, desperate for work for themselves and their children, have proof that the Conservative government has no interest in well-paid jobs for Canadians, only in imported low-wage temps too terrified to be disobedient because a boss’s merest word can send them and their distant families back into penury.

Look at the sad and sorry evidence. We see kindly Saskatchewan waitresses weep on camera as they describe losing their jobs to trucked-in foreign workers.

In a disastrous effort to defend themselves, the three Siourounis brothers who own the Brothers Classic Grill in Weyburn, Sask., responded by complaining about the two women who went to the media, saying, “We each immigrated to Canada as young men and have great respect for our employees who have immigrated to Saskatchewan in search of better jobs and better lives.” They basically confirmed what the government denies, that the new workers aren’t temps at all but “immigrants” taking local jobs.

Good work, Kenney. Start an American-style “build a wall” war.

Thankfully no one has yet reported on the ethnicity of the foreign replacements but Canadian journalism has plenty of beardy racist Cliven Bundy “I know about the Negro” types to do it.

Before I take a bus to Weyburn to order a burger at a certain eatery in order to refuse it, I’ll sample the economic and moral mudslide at the national, provincial and municipal level. Am I overstating the case? I hope so.

There will be no charges in the 2011 robocall scandal, on the dubious grounds that few calls could be tracked and they had no proven effect, which means that it’s okay to plot a scam as long as it ends up failing.

Toronto Const. James Forcillo, charged with the second-degree murder of teenager Sammy Yatim last summer, is back at work, courtesy of Police Chief Bill Blair. He’s working in Crime Stoppers. So if I want to give the police an anonymous tip, and I most assuredly do not, I’m being asked to phone a cop charged with shooting a man eight times and hope he can be trusted to keep my name out of it.

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, crack user, drunk driver and other things, is allowed to hand out community safety awards in the company of a police officer, also courtesy of a weirdly over-tolerant Blair.

The holes on Toronto streets are so numerous and deep that I cannot text as a passenger in a car without my emails going to sklerz>>@flompy.cim. Police officers earning up to $83.50 an hour in extra pay are guarding the holes while construction workers do some aimless scraping. How I admire their pretty lime waistcoats as they lean expensively on hydro poles, their eyes peeled for misbehaving clefts and fissures. Let no hole go unsurveyed.

Meanwhile, the Ontario Liberal government is being investigated for mass deletions of mysterious emails in the gas plant scandal and has been accused of secret pay deals with corporations owned by friends and allies. If all governments have a Best Before Date, has this one passed it?

The appalling new federal Elections Act will copy many U.S. states and make voting more difficult while inviting corruption with weird rule changes. Despite slight government concessions, turnout is going to drop further.

Senators appointed to rubber-stamp Conservative legislation — they’re as fearful as Temporary Foreign Workers — fatten their expense accounts without shame. Or maybe with shame, but they won’t stop.

A Manitoba judge, Lori Douglas, who posed in photos naked and splayed while manacled to a bed, continues to accept her yearly salary of more than $315,000 — and file expenses — while her government-paid lawyers keep fighting to get her judging again, which can’t happen because it would be absurd.

Ottawa continues its attack on scientists in its employ while investigating the tax-exempt status of charities that fight climate change, which even the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers agrees does exist.

The federal public service is so terrified of its masters that even one question from a journalist can send it into months of panic. It’s hard to blame them. Job loss in this era is a life-stopping thing. Stephen Harper wants a smaller government and he will have it. Until then, good people working hard for government are left quivering.

The CBC is so short of money that it’s starting to look like a PBS station in Bismarck, N.D. I’m astonished by the CBC’s courage in maintaining good journalistic coverage of a government that despises it, and I wish it well as it fades to black.

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And as the federal health care accord vanishes, the very notion of pensions also withers away. Rather than improving the Canada Pension Plan, Ottawa is introducing a “shared-risk pension scheme,” a phrase that contradicts the very definition of pensions. Risk shouldn’t come into it. Count the euphemisms: “innovative,” “affordable,” “longevity risk.” The risk is yours. Yes, you might reach the cat-food-for-dinner years.

In 1983, as British Labour leader Neil Kinnock faced defeat by Margaret Thatcher, he made an extraordinary statement to voters. “I warn you not to be ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. I warn you not to get old.”

The man was prescient. The same warning holds true in Canada but the Harper landslide began years ago. Mountains, once fallen, can’t be propped up again without the help of glaciers, and they melted.

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