Hey What's Up In Canada Eh? A Roond-Up!

Maybe don't have your go-bags to flee north just yet.

Hello! It is I, your Canadian Girlfriend, whom your friends do not know.

The Editrix has kindly given me the opportunity to let you know exactly to what degree we up here are currently fucked — or maybe don’t have your go-bags ready to flee across your northern border?

Let me Wonksplain!

Ontario, my home and native land, is so thoroughly, thoroughly fucked.

Doug Ford, noted brother of the late and not great Toronto mayor Rob, has all of Rob’s flaws with none of his sibling’s charm. A college drop-out, he ALLEGEDLY spent much of the '80s selling drugs .

He roared into office in 2018 with a hefty majority, and proceeded to strip the province for parts. Like, there’s no way to list everything he fucked up, but some have tried .

The waiting list for autism therapy went from 23,000 to 53,000 in his first four years in office, with an average wait time now of eight years.

He passed legislation holding public employees such as health care workers to a 1 percent annual increase , which contributed to the unprecedented increase of 56 percent in nursing vacancies in just the first half of 2021. You know, during the pandemic. No biggie.

Oh, and with absolutely horrific conditions in privately owned nursing homes, leading to high death rates from COVID-19, Doug Ford’s response was to give them 30-year contracts instead of focusing on non-profit homes instead. In one home, more than a dozen residents died of dehydration , as the army discovered when they moved in to help.

He pushed through plans to build a $10 billion by-pass through valuable agricultural land and natural wetlands to save 30 to 60 seconds per trip . But oh, hey, there are lots of Doug’s developer buddies who have lands they’d like to turn into more suburban sprawl all along the route! How crazy is that? (It’s on hold right now because the federal government is insisting on an environmental review, as well as Indigenous consultations . Phew!)

Oh, and yeah, while Ottawa, very much a part of Ontario, was occupied by the honkening this past winter, where was Doug? Snowmobiling .

So, you’d think with all this and so very, very, much more that there was NO WAY Doug could win a second term this past June, right? Wrong!

 Forty-three percent of eligible voters actually got off their asses and voted. Of them, 40 percent voted for Ford and his merry band of thugs. They won 83 seats of 124. Eighteen percent of eligible voters have saddled us with four more years of fuckery. (It didn’t help that the Liberal and New Democratic Party were both fucking useless during the campaign.)

So, what’s happened since? Well, when school support workers tried to get a decent wage hike so they wouldn’t be scraping by on ridiculously low pay, they got stonewalled by Ford and his preening Minister of Education, Stephen Lecce, offering them less than 16 percent of what they were asking for , just to keep up with inflation.

The workers voted to strike, legally. Ford turned around and introduced legislation forcing them to stay on the job, and imposing a contract with increases of only 2.5 or 1.5 percent. Well below inflation!

But wait, you may say if you knew the previous history of such Ontario legislation. Did not a judge strike down a similar attempt by the Ontario Liberal government in the past?

Why yes, yes he did! But there’s this one weird trick that we all hate, called the Notwithstanding Clause. You see, when Pierre Trudeau, daddy of Justin, was prime minister back in the early '80s and negotiating with the provincial premiers to get the Charter of Rights and Freedoms into the Constitution, the only way he could get them to sign on was if there was a handy escape hatch that could be used to override those said rights and freedoms.

In other words, all a premier had to do was use that clause to shut down any judicial appeal of any law. And that’s what Doug Ford has done here.

So, last Friday CUPE workers went out on strike. Ford ran straight to the Labour Relations Board over the weekend and begged them to declare the strike illegal. Monday, he and weasel-who-walks-like-a-man Lecce blinked. Probably because they knew the LRB was going to rule in favour of the union. Anyway, Ford promised to withdraw the legislation if CUPE quit striking. They’re negotiating again (phew).

Oh, and Ford just sent out a few hundred dollars to every parent in the province for tutoring or a new tablet or whatever. Despite the fact that it won’t pay for more than a couple of hours of tutoring, if mom or dad does decide to spend it on that and not on basically whatever the fuck they want.

You know what’s funny? Seven construction unions endorsed Doug in the election. All seven have now condemned him for trampling on union rights. Why, it’s almost as if you can’t trust the man to actually care about workers, but that can't be right?

And now there’s something new and rotten going on! You see, we’ve had this thing called the Greenbelt since 2005. It’s a wide swath of environmentally sensitive lands surrounding Toronto, Hamilton, etc. In 2018 Ford promised he’d never touch it.

Oh, guess what? (You guessed, didn’t you?) Yes, last week, he announced that they were going to carve out 15 parcels of land to build 50,000 new homes. But it’s okay, really, guys, because they’ll just add other land in other places to compensate. It’s not okay; they’re proposing to destroy wetlands and some of the best farmland in Canada to do it.

And you’ll never guess whose land is being released! (You guessed, didn’t you?) Funny story. Over the last year or so those same developer buddies have been buying up huge tracts of land in the Greenbelt. Huh. Crazy coincidence!

Fun! Meanwhile, Doug is refusing to appear before the inquiry into the Emergency Act that ended the Clownvoy occupation of Ottawa in February. Because what possibly could he have to say about a major event that happened in his province while he was premier and should have been doing something to end it?

About that Convoy Inquiry…

You do know about the absolute fuckery that happened in Ottawa because it sure made big news!

Right now, a judge is holding an inquiry into the reasons for invoking the Emergency Act that got the ruffians swept off the streets. There is A LOT that I could tell you about it, but let’s just deal with a couple of the most interesting (read: fucking terrifying) tidbits so far.

Flyers were circulated threatening that Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland would “get a bullet to the head.” Those guys seem nice!

And the convoyers (I refuse to call them truckers because most of them weren’t truckers, and my husband the trucker was fucking furious over what they were doing!) were getting a constant stream of information from not only the Ottawa Police, but also, too, the Ontario Provincial Police, the RCMP, and, god help us, CSIS, which is our spy agency. The calls were indeed coming from within the building!

One of Thursday’s witnesses said, and I quote, "I was told by God to put this convoy together." So that bodes well for our future, doesn’t it?

One of the latest tidbits: Tow truck operators in Coutts, Alberta, were being paid NOT to work with the RCMP to tow away trucks that were blocking the border crossing. By whom? It’s a mystery!

Oh, and what was Pierre Poilievre, now the new leader of the federal Conservatives and possibly our next prime minister, doing during the occupation of Ottawa? Hanging out with the honkers , of course. And now he’s hired this charming woman , who loved hearing the truck horns for eight hours straight, as the Conservative communications director.

Tl/dr; Canada is suffering from an excess of rightwing idiots. Maybe check out Iceland or New Zealand instead?