Having lived in almost every province in Canada while being an Air Force brat, I’ve often been confronted with the need to reassess my opinions as to how segregated populations develop their political philosophies. Fortunately, this “travelling” experience has allowed me to be exposed to an equally diverse range of political contributors, including former Prime Ministers (St. Laurent, Pearson, Diefenbaker and PET), premiers (Allan Blakeney, Rene Levesque and Wab Kinew), royalty (Princess Ann) and international leaders (Gerald Ford and Marshall Tito among them).
Now, if you foolishly want to believe that I’m offering up this list of dignitaries just to brag, you’re already missing the point of this column, which is that were it not for the fact that my father happened to be posted at one of these locations where an historical event was about to unfold—OR I was trying to freelance a story so that I could afford to finish my degree in Education—NONE of these encounters would ever have happened. Then I wouldn’t have had “learning experiences” to share with those who regularly read my column.
Right now, though, I’m trying to expand that readership to include more rural folk, simply because my mother was a descendent of Ukrainian immigrants who came to Canada to escape the Bolshevik’s version of Marxist theology being applied to their daily lives. From having learned the first truly meaningful life’s lesson, that being on how to survive when you’re being threatened by a fascist dictator such as Stalin pretending that he was actually a “socialist” at heart merely looking out for the best interests of his proletariat comrades in arms, no matter who was to be executed the following day for failing to succumb to his personal will.
In today’s parlance, such a learning experience may be described as having enough sense to be able to fight through the sensory application of political bullshit so as to avoid being personally exploited. Interestingly enough, this highly developed intellectual capacity would eventually be passed on to the next generation, who would next realize that their ability to support their families was being threatened by American and eastern Canadian agricultural business interests, so had to also be resisted through meaningful political action.
It is from this foundation of learned response to what was now economic repression that social democrats across the Prairies joined hands, not just to form the first truly politically activist party first known as the CCF, later to become the New Democratic Party. They brought with it not just the further promises of social fairness to all, but also to generate the will of those so inclined to solve farming complexities themselves while allowing businesses such as Craik’s Harvest Services to begin formulating machinist generated solutions for our agricultural community.
So here we are, four generations later into a second fiscal nightmare brought about by two political parties pretending to be fighting for one’s personal rights even as the size of our budgetary deficit now exceeds the levels of fiscal greed promulgated upon us by the Devine Conservatives, and led further down this budgetary sinkhole by a premier, Scott Moe, whose Saskatchewan Party mockingly pretends to be “the sole voice” of our rural brethren…
My question should be obvious to those in our rural ridings who still have the capacity to think for themselves and aren’t sidetracked by the teenage acne-based “serious issues” the federal Conservatives under Pierre Poilievre or the quisling narrative of Alberta’s Premier Smith want us to believe are at the root of our current “affordability” crisis: “Where did all of the individuals who still believe that some day Scott Moe is going to actually balance a budget come from?”
Yes, that comment might sound condescending as Hell, my being someone who “holds a degree” (three, actually) and speaks of progressive ideals, but MY family from BOTH sides were raised in an agricultural environment, and in both Grades 11 and 12 I used to drive my nun teachers and principal crazy because I didn’t start school until late October because I was working on a neighbour’s farm picking potatoes, planting crops, milking cows and baling hay – because I wanted to have the “essentials” of a teenage male’s life for the rest of the school year: being able to buy my own 26er of good Canadian rye, have gas money when dad let me have the car, and could actually buy some attractive woman in my class an A & W meal or a real restaurant dinner when out on a date.
To be honest, I believe I have earned the right to question the “buzzword” mentality of right-wing trolls who try to stir the blood of our rural constituents by pretending such items as “the carbon tax”, “Justin”, or even “the rights of responsible gun owners” play any part in resolving the problems that threaten to destroy the economic potential of our agricultural community, especially those trying to manage to survive on small farms, and ESPECIALLY those relating to climate change and a new phenomenon called “weather bombs” and “atmospheric rivers”.
Why can’t people see through the joke of CTF pundits and Poilievre resisting the imposition of this “personal” carbon tax levy? In Saskatchewan, it was a Saskatchewan Party unwilling to part with the fiscal largesse of party members that were already overinfluenced by Big Oil’s overactive lobbyists that resulted in us paying that five per cent levy on carbon gas-producing product, so why aren’t we taking our anger out on Scott Moe instead of “Justin” Trudeau? Stop blaming China, where the per capita production of carbon gases is now starting to flatline, and has installed more energy saving product world wide than the rest of the industrialized world to mitigate its carbon footprint.
Yes, it’s true; the Carney government has moved away from our personally contributing to environmental healing to redirecting such fees towards industries whose metric tonne production now requires their attention to constrain that output. So, “yes”, these plants will have to “modernize” and spend money on research instead of paying it out to “stockholders living THE life” in places such as Rosedale or Outremont, and maybe the cost of their goods will rise, but sooner or later their customers will no longer tolerate their price gouging techniques, and move to other suppliers whose products are not only less expensive, but more efficient as well. That economic reality is known as “capitalism in action”.
As for the phrase “the rights of responsible gun owners”, I’m sick and tired of listening to western Canadian adults pretending that, like their American cousins, they “have the right to bare arms” without realizing that they’re so locked up in their own self-indulgent rhetoric that they didn’t even manage to catch the spelling mistake that I DELIBERATELY inserted in citing America’s Second Amendment.
In western Canada, stupid males believing that their manhood is reflected in the size of their firearm aren’t “responsibly” utilizing their guns, but rather are being increasingly influenced by seriously sick politicians such as Danielle Smith pretending that her province’s economic woes are being created by immigrants, or as we are learning by following the American legal drama, “ICE v City of Minneapolis”, where a narcissist named President Donald Trump is attempting to rid “his nation” of brown-skinned types arriving from “sh*thole nations” consuming all of America’s pampered household pets.
The Conservative Party is NEVER going to explain to western Canadians that the reason eastern voters support our federal government: that in the east, its citizens have borne witness to an “incel” freak deciding to mow down a classroom full of “uppity” women seeking knowledge, a man having mental health issues shooting up sixteen different communities in Nova Scotia, and a crime wave created by criminal gangs on both sides of our unguarded border smuggling small arms into Canada – an issue that “bail reform” will not remedy and which will never be mentioned as a “problem” by a member of Poilievre’s party ranks.
We also have to start dealing with the real issues currently forcing our nation into an “affordability” crisis, a topic I will further address in next week’s column.
