Canadian celebrities at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) 2015 — notably actors Rachel McAdams, Ellen Page and the curmudgeonly, decrepit Donald Sutherland — bombed badly this week.
Not onscreen, but off, by supporting the appallingly stupid, Naomi Klein-penned Leap Manifesto.
(Nicknamed the “TommunistManifesto” by conservative wags in “honour” of supposedly centrist NDP leader Thomas Mulcair.)
The reputations of McAdams, Page and Sutherland weren’t the only ones hurt by association with this manifestly moronic manifesto.
Add to the list such notables (or forgettables) as Pam Anderson (whose best screen work was CPRing Tommie Lee’s manhood); multi-millionaire wheezebag and gas-guzzling hypocrite extraordinaire Neil Young; and the usual looney left suspects: Stephen Lewis, David Suzuki, Maude Barlow and Sid Ryan, to name a representative few.
I am a big Rachel McAdams (True Detective) and Ellen Page (Juno) fan.
Donald Sutherland, on the other hand, was great in the 1970s (in M*A*S*H, Klute and Don’t Look Now) but since then his ongoing scene-chewing evil role in The Hunger Games, is, to use a highly technical cinematic term, pure crap.
We admire McAdams and Page for their acting talent and their ability to touch us and move us emotionally. But let’s face it: When they do so, they are reading other people’s lines and ideas.
Their fame and high profile are based upon their cinematic success and Hollywood promotion.
Where these actors fall miserably on their TIFF-ready faces is in their arrogant belief that their artificially-created Hollywood fame confers upon them influence and wisdom, so that we, their audience, will actually care and believe what they have to say in real life.
So let me put this in terms these clueless, ignorant, self-satisfied, self-entitled, jet-setting, island hopping Canadian stars and celebrities understand.
Your public support of the Leap Manifesto? Two thumbs down.
You and the Manifesto were a bomb of Heaven’s Gate proportions.
Simply, this ridiculous and irrational manifesto proposes to fix problems that don’t actually exist in Canada: widespread extreme poverty, unsustainable inequality, the genocide of our native people.
And to top it all off, they think Canada’s climate change policy is a crime against humanity.
The Manifesto’s solution is revolution. To blow up Canada’s economy – specifically, its oil and gas sector.
And essentially, go back to a pre-industrial Walden-like existence, where all 35 million Canadians will tend to our garden and our cattle on our little cute farms.
All this would be sustained by clean, renewable energy, pursuant to strict NIMBYism principles; In their own words – they call it a “new iron law” — “If you wouldn’t want it in your backyard, then it doesn’t belong in anyone’s backyard.”
Which, taken to its logical conclusion, means no renewal energy of any sort — wind farm or solar — you Hollywood nimrods! (Or, come to think of it, any more iron, either…)
Even the left of center Globe and Mail agrees:
The manifesto calls for immediate social revolution in response to the threat of climate change. Its “demands” include “innovative ownership structures” as an alternative to “the profit-gouging of private companies,” and a “new iron law of energy development” that, if taken seriously, would pretty much put an end to every project ever – pipelines, windmills and solar-panel farms included. This iron law states, “If you wouldn’t want it in your backyard, then it doesn’t belong in anyone’s backyard.
If these Canadian celebrities expected their natural audience — leftist NDP members and supporters — would be jazzed by these suggestions, they were misled. Or they have been powering their noses with “questionable” products.
Because the Leap Manifesto sank faster than Adam Sandler’s once buoyant career.
The response so far from Mulcair and his party? Zip, nada, zero. Crickets.
And for good reason, as the Globe’s editorial concludes:
We don’t think Mr. Mulcair endorses the manifesto’s madness. He is far more moderate than that. He is also a politician, and he wants to govern a country that is by its nature suspicious of radical social upheaval, especially when promulgated by rock stars.
Saddling him now, barely a month before the election, with the task of answering questions about a revolutionary utopian manifesto seems like an obvious case of failing to look before you… Well, you know the rest.
I love you, Rachel McAdams. Because of your film work, you are the archetypal sweet Canadian “girl next door”.
But by signing your name to this crazy manifesto, while probably being chauffeured around in a very large gas-guzzling limo, from movie premiere to movie premiere, and from private VIP party to private VIP party, you have transformed yourself into the ditsy, brain-dead lefty goof next door.
Not a pretty picture, Rachel, my dear.
Mitch Wolfe: The Playful Contrarian 