Welcome to Well, That Sucked, our weekly compendium of exactly what it sounds like. Thrown in this week’s garbage: you, probably.
The long weekend is almost here! For three days, it’ll be nothing but barbecues, beers, and bears (if you’re camping or going to Pride or both). So happy Canada Day! Enjoy the fireworks and think about how your government has failed you, how you’re ruining the environment with your terrible oil dependency, and how, chances are, you might be underwater right now.
O, Canada! You are the worst.
From the July/August issue of Foreign Policy magazine, writer Andrew Nikiforuk (a Canadian himself) describes Canada as a “rogue petrostate,” ever determined to become a major oil producer and, perhaps, nefarious super-villain. The story collects all of the Harper government’s efforts to promote a Canadian oil boom, to increase profits while forcing other countries to deal with the economic fall-out. We know about these things, Harper’s Kyoto-panic and his refusal to listen to actual scientists. The piece refers to him as “a right-wing policy wonk,” and someone who considers the oilsands “an enterprise of epic proportions, akin to the building of the pyramids or China’s Great Wall. Only bigger.” Hopefully one less reliant on slave labour.
Summed up in a few hundred words, it makes our prime minister sound like someone who still lives in his childhood bedroom, wearing an aluminum foil hat while rocking back and forth, watching television static, pulling a wool blanket over his shoulders. I can have it all, he thinks. It’s mine. All of it is mine.
And if that article didn’t make him sound like a paranoid control-freak, it was also reported that the Prime Minister’s Office dispatched Conservative party interns masquerading as protesters to demonstrate against Justin Trudeau on Parliament Hill after they were tipped off the Liberal leader would be speaking. Reporters, obviously, recognized them as government employees and not angry dissenters.
If you’re going to stage a protest of your political rival, do not send your interns while they’re still in work-clothes. Second, if they’re going to carry signs with slogans, maybe they shouldn’t read “JUSTIN IN OVER HIS HEAD,” which is strikingly similar to a slogan you are using. Be creative! Why not something like, “Trudeau? MORE LIKE TRUD-UGH,” or “Hey Justin, if you love government transparency so much, why don’t you gay-marry it, TRUDEAUMOSEXUAL.”
Come on, interns. Have some fun with it.
But maybe you’re in flood-stricken Alberta right now, where you’re too busy making sure your dog doesn’t drown to pay attention to whatever shit-pies your federal government is in the middle of crushing into shape with its bare hands over in the nation’s capital.
It might take an entire decade before Alberta gets back to normal due to the damage, but perhaps most devastating is that the flood shut down the country’s largest beef plant. Alberta may have seemingly bottomless pits of oil and a seemingly genuine mayor leading Calgary in Naheed Nenshi, but their claim to fame will forever be giant slabs of dead cows, coming down a conveyor belt.
And yet, the same guy keeps coming out on the bottom: Illustrious mayor of Toronto Rob Ford, who can’t get away from being compared to the one-man rebuilding effort that is Nenshi. While Cambodian orphans are donating money to Alberta for flood relief, news broke this week that Ford was not only spending time with alleged members of one of the most notorious gangs in North America, but getting a staffer to call into his own radio show to support him while still using a variation on his real name.
Remember what I said about creativity?
Well, That Sucked appears every Friday.
