I rarely watch things start to finish and am not sure how it unfolded chronologically but I saw Singh’s response to a Rebel question and nodded to myself, giving him credit for the act of principled defiance in refusing to answer. I literally said to myself, “Well it’s a start.”
Then a fair bit later I saw a reference to Trudeau’s response and assumed it was something similar, a principled refusal to answer, and I said to myself, “Good, they finally got their heads together on something.”
And then I saw that Trudeau clip and I swear I was dancing around my office doing Rocky moves and shadow boxing with my poor, confused dogs. For a brief, shining moment there was Camelot sort of thing.
I just got a bunch of dog bites on my hands and arms because a dog got tangled in a rope and I was the only one there. Eventually I had to cut him out and he’s on his way to the vet. Molly thought she needed to save me.
Were it not for her “down stay” training, I’d likely need surgery and both dogs would be on their way to the vet.
I’m fine, isn’t my first and won’t be my last dog bite and all our dogs have all their shots. He was a young, scared dog in pain.
Two important morals:
1. The kindest thing you can do for a dog is to train it to stay when told. Nothing even comes close.
2. That pocket knife you keep in your glove box? Put it in your pocket.
This is a version of “those in the middle class”. The only difference is that it excludes the “and those hoping to join it” portion. There’s a lot of neither rich nor poor people perennially annoyed at being left out of the political discussion for whom this will resonate.
Which is essentially what our courts said. So how it is attacked in Canada is to reduce access and add restrictive legislation. Like “Sure you can get an abortion, I have an opening in Nunavet in 11 months, shall I book you?” stuff.
So when abortion comes up, the right wing scoffs and tells us not to worry about abortion stuff because the chances of it ever being criminalizes are very very low -which is true. Which has nothing to do at all with being ABLE to access one. That’s a genuine fear that women have.
Recently in New Brunswick the federal government had to step in because the conservative government was trying to limit abortion by limiting access. The Liberal platform contains protections in law to ACCESS abortions and penalties to provinces that try to restrict it.
I feel I should say that while I’m making direct “plot” comparisons to our current political climate and what happened in America, which I believe are rational and accurate, we are NOT America and do not have the same stressors, systems, problems, society and … worldview.
So, it’s *extremely* unlikely for us to have any sort of insurrection, as an example, and the damage to our society would play out in very different ways and our system is incredibly robust in checking the power of a PM.
O’Toole is very much NOT a Donald Trump.
My point is that we’re at a place where we can choose a pretty dangerous path that will exacerbate the cultural divide that is happening around us, playing out in a surreal scenario where people protesting a … vaccine … are affecting an election.
Remember when America elected the party that gave aid and comfort to these same sorts of people? You can go ahead and buy into the anodyne Dad routine O’Toole is pulling (which is different from his “true blue” leadership campaign) but these are his people.
And you can forget that the only way he won the leadership was to make pacts with and promises to the most odious social conservatives, anti abortions and climate deniers in our country, but he owes them now … and they WILL collect.
This is the guy who doesn’t believe we have a racism problem, that put the guy who said “Aboriginals need to learn the value of work” into his cabinet, that made a fake video about the CEO of Pfizer to scare us - scare us - about vaccines.