A Czar Is Born

Fentanyl czar, fentanyl czar, does whatever a fentanyl czar does.

The Mounties always get their manufacturer. (Photo: RCMP)

There’s a new sheriff in town, and he’s here to fight tariffs.

Not fight the actual tariffs on Canadian goods America’s alleged commander-in-chief has been argle-bargling about ever since a bunch of billionaires bought him another election, but rather by being a shiny new object to wave in his face to hopefully get him off the path of mutually assured destruction he appears to have his black little heart set on.

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Former RCMP deputy commissioner Kevin Brosseau, or “my Kevin” if you’re nasty, has been picked as Canada’s newly minted fentanyl czar and tasked with winning America’s war on drugs. Brosseau also served as deputy national security adviser to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and may still have the standard issue furry hat from his Mountie patrolman days to help look the part.

As the feds’ new go-to guy on the fentanyl file, Brosseau is expected to work with US law enforcement agencies to “accelerate Canada's ongoing work to detect, disrupt and dismantle the fentanyl trade,” according to a statement from the Prime Minister's Office. “The scourge of fentanyl must be wiped from the face of the Earth, its production must be shut down and its profiteers must be punished.”

Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid doctors prescribe for pain but also cooked up in sketchy drug labs like the one under Lavandería Brillante in “Breaking Bad,” kills roughly 80,000 people each year across North America. The drug has a lot to answer for, not least for taking Prince from us, but it’s beyond ridiculous to insist it’s mostly coming from Canada.

The White House recently announced that 43 pounds of fentanyl were seized at the northern border last year, a “massive 2050 per cent increase” over the previous one, when a mere two pounds were discovered. This is meant to be cover for shaking down America’s former closest friend but they left out the part of a third of the haul having instead been seized in Spokane — roughly 100 miles from the border with British Columbia but close enough for government work — in a drug bust that led to charges against three Mexicans. (For comparison, more than 21,000 pounds are claimed to have been confiscated at the southern border over the same stretch of time.) Canadian border agents caught another 10 pounds of outbound down over the same period although it was mostly headed for the Netherlands, so the Dutch may want to start making plans for a new fentanyl czar — or more likely tsaar — to hedge their bets.

The new gig was actually Canada’s own idea to sweeten existing plans to harden the world’s longest undefended border, which include spending the nearly one billion dollars we’d already agreed to with President Joe Biden but letting Dear Leader pretend was all due to him. Also we’re going to get some cool new Blackhawk helicopters and drones! And we agreed to designate Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations, which is sure to hurt their feelings if they ever show up. There have even been grassroots efforts to comply with his demand to have eyes on the border 24/7, including from a Manitoba family who had the bright idea to plant hockey sticks with googly eyes near the 49th parallel.

We are also putting on the foil in general. (Photo: CBC screengrab)

Canadians tend to defer to British spelling, which would probably be a reason to invade if spelling was something Fox News expected viewers to care about, and normally we’d have to name a tsar instead. Wikipedia even defaults on searches for czar to tsar. It might’ve been fun to appoint a czarina instead but it’s obviously unrealistic to expect MAGA to work with a woman. Better to go with a square-jawed white dude straight out of central casting.

Calling Brosseau a czar is actually a form of appeasement in itself as it’s essentially a made-up job title mostly used only by Americans. You will recall how Republicans successfully smeared Kamala Harris as the “border czar” even though she had nothing to do with border security.

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But it sure seems like a missed opportunity given “fentanyl sentinel” was sitting right there!

The first record of the term being used in North America was as a description for Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who was named commissioner of baseball after the Black Sox scandal in 1919 when eight members of the Chicago White Sox were accused of throwing the World Series. It entered the political lexicon in the 1940s when FDR named special transportation, manpower, production, shipping, and rubber czars to oversee resources needed to fight the Nazis, which was the style at the time.

It may seem a bit on-the-nose nowadays as a term associated with Russian monarchs but the Slavic word actually derives from “Caesar” as a title for bigshots. We should probably expect all of Orange Julius’s Cabinet picks to soon be referred to as czars if he still has anyone in his orbit able to tell him Julius Caesar’s most famous line was: I came, I saw, I conquered. JD Vance would know but I doubt they talk much.

But in Canada we prefer our caesars to have vodka and clamato juice, eh.

[CBC / Globe & Mail / Bluesky!]