Large Fierce Mammal

This picture of Farmer Eamon Sheehan on the phone was drawn from an article on herd management in Farmer’s Guardian. It should be obvious, and nonetheless will be emphasized, that no entity depicted here considers any other likewise depicted here to be an “enemy”, neither express nor implied, nor finds the identification of one to be necessary, or even particularly helpful. Any similarity between entities depicted here and other persons, entities, or circumstances set forth in the article below is strictly coincidental.

Today we will be taking a brief trip on a related side road from our current “A Thin Veneer” series for some much needed scene setting.

We’ll begin with this snippet that arose from the travails of recently defrocked Justice Minister for the Government of Nova Scotia, Becky Druhan:

“She said they were told that ‘every story should have an enemy, and to make sure that you knew who the enemy was when you were making your plans for communicating about the story.‘

“‘And to me, I think that that speaks volumes because I truly do not believe that every story has an enemy. In fact, most stories don’t have an enemy; most stories have complexity but not enemies,’ Druhan told reporters.

“‘I think it’s important for people to know that that is a lens through which some I think see the world and are attempting to frame the world, and that’s not the way that it is.'”

That quotation (with bold emphasis added) is an excerpt from a CBC News article titled Former NS justice minister decries staff interference, lack of civility in legislature, written by Michael Gorman and published 28 November 2025. Click the link in the title to read the article for context, which you should do notwithstanding that I can tell you nothing else in it is as significant as what is revealed in this one singular disgruntled utterance from Lunenburg West Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA), and now former Nova Scotia Justice Minister. As a starter for our point du jour, it couldn’t be better if I’d written it myself.

Other than that it was actually spoken aloud in a public venue this time rather than simply standing evident from obvious outcomes, this attitude as a foundational tenet of mass manipulation comes as no surprise to me. Here’s something I wrote in early 2022 in reference to a case where the hue and cry was out to stick the “ENEMY” label on a demographic of circumstance it was overtly fashionable and officially encouraged to hate.

“I will posit that after two years, anything Truly worthwhile to society should by now be sufficiently self-evident as to not require daily doses of contradictory news coverage, blatant falsehoods, shameless fear mongering, dutiful repetition of a narrative long since grown unsupported by observed evidence, and creation of a two-tier society to sell it, but yet here we are.” ~ The Illusion of Truth — Introduction

The matter in question was, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic during which the federal and provincial/territorial governments of Canada became increasingly shrill as the ticking clock of lived experience wound down to reveal the carpet hadn’t ever really matched the drapes.

“Vaccine mandates are, of course, intended to protect public health and save lives. After all, what else would they be for? One writer, Geoff Schullenberger, has recently suggested another plausible alternative: They are – or, at least, are increasingly becoming – a vehicle for signaling belonging to a political tribe, and punishing one’s ideological foes.

“One doesn’t like to think that public health policy could be motivated by anything so juvenile as that. And yet, the troubling escalation of and excesses in rhetoric suggest that in some cases it may well be. This was always the risk with the mandates, of course. The problem with coercive measures, as Schullenberger notes, ‘is that they risk conflating intention and outcome.’ In which case, support for the mandates comes to driven not by empirical evidence that they are working, but rather by a conviction that they are, in some abstract moral sense, ‘the right thing to do.’

“True, there may be another, more sinister motivation at work, though one hesitates to mention it. Despite the claims of our technocrats that if everybody only did every dot and tittle of what they told us to do, they might control and eliminate COVID, the virus has so far refused to comply. Even previously successful zero-COVID jurisdictions like Australia, with all their ideal geographic advantages, are now facing the reality that, with the hyper-transmissible Omicron variant, community spread and endemicity are inevitable. In the face of this uncontrollable tsunami of infections, politicians will inevitably grope about for the nearest scapegoat. If only for this reason, we must be quick to reject any hint of rhetoric ‘othering’ the unvaccinated.

“Schullenberger is right to single out the ‘remarkable incuriosity’ of our political and chattering classes about whether the mandates passed so far have actually accomplished what they are supposedly intended to do. Are mandates having an appreciable impact in increasing vaccinations, and ultimately (the only metric that really matters) in curbing the spread of disease and saving lives? Meanwhile, what are the costs: to social cohesion, to long-term trust in authorities? These questions scarcely ever get asked, let alone answered.” ~ Why So Vindictive, Mr. Mandate Man? (14 January 2022)

Questions voiced and left unanswered have a way of answering themselves.

An interview with then Prime Minister Trudeau from 5 January 2022:

In the end, the narrative required belief in the promise from government that those who did “the right thing” would win The Prize – permission to go forth, freely associate, attend concerts and restaurants, all of it gleefully forbidden to the knuckle dragging science denying miscreants who chose to get their immunity the old fashioned way by maybe the disease, or not, and if they did then staying out of circulation until they were over it. There being no way to withhold The Prize forever, nor to claw it back when the foregone conclusion soon reached its climax, it wasn’t long before people mixing willy nilly in what had until recently been known as “super spreader” events, became sick with COVID-19, vaccine bedamned. In this atmosphere full of people who were now “inexplicably” ill and in a state of the vapours at a possible return to lock downs, proclamations that the only explanation was an unvaccinated sonofabitch in the woodpile fell upon fertile soil indeed.

All this time down the pike, sources official and professional, now freely admit that, not unlike vaccination against other viral infections, those against COVID-19 in no way ensure that the recipient will be immune to contracting or transmitting the disease, and that while a lighter set of symptoms may present in vaccinated patients, even this is not a certainty. It is also accepted that acquired immunity from having had the disease is in no way inferior to the artificially induced version – no surprise since it’s hard to find anyone who hasn’t had some variant of COVID-19, vaccine or no vaccine – and much of any outcome is conditional on individual patient circumstances.

From all of this, much was learned by governments world wide about managing and messaging. I suspect one thing, likely the main thing, is to turn the heat up on the frog faster next time.

For those viewed by them as chattels of the state, my first piece of closing advice is to view with a healthy dose of self-interest the motives of anyone who uses one or more of these in a sentence:

1. economies of scale;
2. experts say;
3. scientists say;
4. a new study says;
5. in the interests of national security;
6. in the interests of public health;
7. in the interests of public safety;
8. if you have nothing to hide …;
9. safe and effective;
10. step up;
11. I/we have your back;
12. the right thing;
13. the right side of history; and/or
14. I promise I won’t come in your mouth.

My second comes with credit to Mrs. LFM from whom this is a given in the face of anyone attempting to enlist her support under allegations of urgency and the “hurry ups”:

“If you need an answer now, the answer is no.”

I invite you to meditate how many times in your life taking that position may have saved you from taking another less dignified one.

In closing today, I would caution you, Goode Reader, not to become infatuated with the driving circumstances of today’s case study, intended as it is to illustrate administrative behaviours in the face of a building “emergency” where government efforts were bent on maintaining control of the narrative from earliest warnings through to a desired outcome that, in this case, got away from them. The lesson will be made clearer in our next episode when we will look at the strikingly similar machinations at play in the face of the “assault style firearm”, a mythical thing so terrible that a new and never before seen phrase had to be invented to describe it at peril of plunging into madness.