2024 Governor General’s Finalists

This year, Brandi Bird (left) and six other BC-based authors made it to the shortlist of the GG’s Literary Awards within four categories. Read about the finalists and their work here.FULL STORY

 

#66 Kill or Tweet

February 09th, 2017

The Tweeter & The Twerp – Chapter One

Okay, so where do we begin…. Trump or Trudeau?

I hope you are sufficiently happy to learn your federal government has loaned a million-plus to the good folks at Bombardier. At least they’re calling this a “loan” and not an outright grant or subsidy or gift or … Ottawa has been bailing out that @#$%^ company for years. And why?

I think much of what they produce gets built in countries other than ours.  Poland, I think. The Twerp could probably get more bang for his buck if he just gave the money to Poland directly, take out the middleman. You know, efficiency, we hear a lot about efficiency, we might want to try it.

The Twerp said 2015 would be the last election run under First Past The Post…but alas, he has about-faced on that, too. And he gave the kiss of approval to the KinderMorgan pipeline. That ought to make the folks in Texas heave a sigh of relief.  And no, he’s not moving ahead on the legalization of marijuana, not even on the decriminalization of the weed.

I want to publicly declare I did not vote for him! The Liberals always seem to campaign from the left and then rule from the right, usually with an iron fist. I’ll admit I ALMOST voted for Chretien when he ran but thank gawd I changed my mind.  Didn’t care for the Trudeau the Elder, either. There’s something about elitist arrogance that hits me the wrong way.

I am not the only one who feels this way. On a snowy afternoon I received this letter [below] which, if I was an editor, I might entitle: The Name of Mr. Trump’s game is “Kill.” Kill or Tweet. It’s not that far off Trick or Treat. Trump is a ghoul who has showed up on the front door of history and everyone—including our Prime Minister—is going to now welcome him to the neighborhood, not unlike Neville Chamberlain.

****

Prime Minister Trudeau,

First I’d like to say that I was satisfied to cast my vote for you in the last election.  I was also wary, but appreciated that you campaigned on several issues that are important to me, and I felt a fresh wind blowing.  And then…

  1. You crashed on your commitment to a new process for the Kinder Morgan pipeline.  I live on Vancouver Island ~ and am horrified.  But you are already familiar with the reasons why so many of us on the west coast have by now vehemently expressed opposition to your decision.  (Think Prince Edward Sound.)  I won’t repeat their rationale, but count me among them.
  2. You promised to get right with Mary Jane, but that commitment seems to be strangling in the smoke of obfuscation.
  3. You pledged electoral reform, but have now declared that proportional representation is dead.  A reprehensible pronouncement for so many reasons, which I’m sure you’re aware of.  I’d have loved for my BC vote to count in an election; I’m among those citizens who believe in and want a popular vote ~ one in which each ballot counts.  I think our first-past-the-post, winner-take-all system is as antiquated and grossly biased as the Electoral College in the US ~ and you see what that got them.  And now we know that autocracy can live comfortably in either country until we and the Americans undertake electoral reform.

I will of course continue to vote, because I believe to do so is both a privilege and a significant civic duty.  But not for you again.  Unless of course you revisit Kinder Morgan, move toward electoral reform in 2019, and get on with the legalization of marijuana.  You can keep the support you’re losing now.

Oh, and one or two more things:

  1. It seems nit-picky petty to me that your adversaries were so shocked at your failure in ethics: terrible that you would go to the Aga Khan’s private home on a private island via his private helicopter while you were on a private holiday hosted by a man who has known you for decades…  Personally I’d have far more appreciated the expression of their ire regarding your Kinder Morgan decision.
  2. And your e-n-d-l-e-s-s apologies following the elbowing incident in the House last May did not bode well.  Once or twice would have been good ~ would have seemed appropriate and honourable to me.  But then you just went on and on and on in a mealy-mouthed, hand-wringing sort of way.  So embarrassing.  And I can’t tell you how fearful I am that you’ll reveal that kind of obsequiousness when you meet with despot Donald.  I know you have a keen, if misguided, survival instinct; else you wouldn’t have supported Kinder Morgan and left electoral reform moribund.  But I hope you understand that the name of Mr. Trump’s game is “Kill” and he’ll have you for lunch if he sniffs servility.  How about putting on velvet gloves, joining hands with Enrique Peña Nieto, and squeezing hard?  He looks so lonely twisting in the wind…

Yours for understanding the value of holding faith with your electorate,

Caitlin Macart

****

Meanwhile madness continues on the homefront. At my place, when the hot water tank went ker-plooey, the water went under and through the wall into the bathroom and the tiles on the floor began to lift. Then the dishwashing machine went… and the water went under the laminate flooring and it all started to swell, then curl.

It has been, as my grandmother Sarah would say “one thing after another and none of it good.”  So Michael has entered my life. Michael is the handyman who is trying to un-do what unkind fate has visited upon me. The sound of hammering, sawing, and expletive deleted now fills the hours of my days.

If you see a white-haired wrinkly-faced woman with a cane and a limp, and if she is accompanied by two spoiled mutts, and if she has a tin cup she is rattling, while her quavering voice begs “alms, alms for the reno,” for gawds sake, take pity…

All of which is why I find this perpetual white mess totally unacceptable. ENUF! Enuf I say, of this white shyte drifting down from an unrelenting sky!  Stop it, already!  I don’t know what dreadful sin we have committed, but surely we’ve been punished enough.

Anne Cameron grows pussywillows on the western edge of Vancouver Island. She received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award for an outstanding literary career in British Columbia in 2010. Her 23 books include Daughters of Copper Woman, the bestselling work of fiction ever written about B.C. and published from within B.C. She has banished herself to Tahsis, a small town not far from Friendly Cove where the shenanigans called British Columbia all began.

 

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