Melissa Lantsman’s latest video cuts right to the bone. She points to Brazil, Terry Gilliam’s dark, brilliant satire. The film’s dystopian world unsettlingly mirrors the direction in which Canada is heading.
In Brazil, the government doesn’t exist to serve citizens. It exists to preserve itself. Bureaucracy grows for its own sake. Paperwork multiplies. Departments expand. Ordinary people become trapped in a maze of rules, forms, and procedures. These processes seem designed to wear them down rather than help them.
It’s one of Hollywood’s sharpest political warnings. It doesn’t rely on fantasy. Instead, it shows how a system collapses under its own weight. This happens when the government forgets who it’s supposed to serve.
And today, that warning hits uncomfortably close to home.
We’re watching a federal government that keeps getting bigger but delivers less. Programs multiply while outcomes shrink. More money goes into feeding the machinery of the state than improving the lives of the people who fund it. That’s the road Brazil warned us about, a country where the bureaucracy survives, but its citizens don’t thrive.
Gilliam meant it as satire. But for Canadians, it’s starting to feel like a preview.
