It started, as these things always do, with a smell. Somewhere around question period last Tuesday, a reporter in the gallery leaned over and whispered, “Is that menthol?” By lunch it was a theory. By dinner it was a movement. By midnight my uncle had forwarded me a 14-minute video titled THE BALM IS THE BRIBE (THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW), filmed vertically, in a parked car.
The theory, as explained to me in a parked car
According to the video, a mysterious little tin of “Chinese Balm” is now the official currency of Canadian politics. Wire transfers leave a paper trail. Cash is bulky. But a tin of balm? It fits in a blazer pocket, it smells faintly of eucalyptus, and absolutely nobody at a riding association barbecue is going to ask why your lower back is tingling.
The evidence, in full:
- Several MLAs were seen rubbing their necks. (Politicians have necks.)
- One of them said “that’s a relief” after a committee meeting ended. (Committee meetings end.)
- A grocery store in Richmond sold out of a menthol rub during cold and flu season. (It is cold and flu season.)
- My uncle’s knee feels better and he refuses to say where he got the tin.
Case closed, apparently.
How the balm economy supposedly works
Per the theory, one small tin buys you a nod in committee. A large tin buys a free vote. The family-size jar with the red lid gets you a cabinet shuffle. Exchange rates are set every morning by whoever in the caucus has the worst back, which, after decades of bending over backwards for donors, is everyone. Economists are calling it the first currency in history that gets stronger the more you rub it in.
This is, of course, the kind of story that spreads faster than any fact-check. It is also the kind of thing people end up fighting about online with pictures of frogs. If you want to see what that looks like when it is at least honest about being a game, there is a whole arena where the memes fight each other instead of your relatives.
“A majority government is now certain”
The video’s big finale is a prediction: because every MLA from Victoria to St. John’s is now “on the balm,” a Conservative majority is guaranteed. The methodology was explained at length. As far as I can tell it was a poll of eleven people outside a pharmacy, weighted by how strongly they smelled of wintergreen.
Small problems with this. MLAs sit in provincial legislatures, not the House of Commons, so they do not actually elect a federal government. Elections are decided by voters, not by ointment. And if a muscle rub could buy a majority, every physiotherapist in the country would already be Prime Minister. Polls go up, polls come down, and no tin in anyone’s pocket changes that. If you want real seat counts, follow the day-to-day headlines I actually trust and the official results when they come in, not a man with a dashboard camera.
If you really want to follow the money
Here is the funny part. The reason a balm-bribery theory even sounds plausible is that most money is hard to trace. The fix for that already exists, and it is not a tin. A public blockchain records every transfer where anyone can check it, forever. You can even stamp your own collectible onto a public ledger for free and watch how nothing about it can be quietly edited afterwards. People have been inscribing things straight onto Bitcoin itself for years now. Try sneaking a jar of balm through that.
And if your idea of a good time is putting real numbers on something instead of rumours, this tool costs out an entire AI server room, cooling bill and all, in a couple of minutes. Zero menthol involved.