My boss gave me the afternoon off Tuesday. I had planned to go shopping (either for myself or for Christmas gifts, I hadn’t decided yet). I wandered around the Bay on Queen Street a little bit, tried out the Eaton Centre, decided against it, and went to get myself a crepe. I bought myself a smart phone back in September, so nowadays I have constant access to the Internet (although I try to keep the data off when I’m not using it to save the battery and also to reduce the temptation to Facebook from work). I had seen the news already the night before but I was reading again about how the Government of Canada had formally pulled out of the Kyoto Accord, and how it had banned face coverings from citizenship ceremonies. I got so bummed out that I just went home and took a nap. What a waste of an afternoon off…
And what a terrible way to react to policy decisions I disagree with (to go home and take a nap, I mean). Seriously, Jess…
I found out the night before after getting home from such a win at trivia (my first, actually). Now that French classes are over the holidays, I let myself join my fellow MPAs for Monday night trivia the way I used to. I used to go every week in second semester last year, but with the long commute home, it’s tough to stay out on a school night (work night) – I’m getting old. I got home, and I noticed those two news items on the BBC News front page (later I would find out that Canada made the BBC front page for a third item in the same day). Canada only ever makes the BBC News front page for the worst reasons (the first time I noticed was in 2006 when for the third time, a man entered a Montreal institution with a long gun and took out his hate). Beyond the way I disagree with such policy-making and beyond the way it offends my ideological sensibilities, I hate to see my home country on the news like this. Sure, we have a stable federal government for the first time in nearly a decade but it’s not a government or country I recognise. It’s true that I look back on the 90s with rose-coloured glasses. I was a child in a comfortable middle class family so the austerity measures that went with the early 90s recession didn’t hit personally. There were all sorts of things going on in the world, and I’m sure it isn’t the case that Canada represented itself well at every turn. But I know that I grew up feeling that Canada had good standing in the world, and even now I’m sure that was actually the case… but Canada’s standing in the world today? I really do worry, and it really does bum me out.
When I was in China, and my mum phoned me on New Year’s Eve to tell me that Stephen Harper had prorogued parliament for the second time, and I heard Jian Ghomeshi so sad at what the G20 had done to Toronto, I used to joke about how they were always fucking up every time I left the country. I came back… I was really inspired by what I saw from my fellow countrypersons upon the news of Jack Layton’s passing… but it’s not that shiny here these days, and I really worry.
