Why the increasingly boring and totally irrelevant former Conservative MP Gerry Ritz can’t take a hint and stay “retired” is beyond me; every time he opens his mouth, I am reminded as to the role this has-been played in colluding with Stephen Harper to rid Canada of the Wheat Board, and the subsequent chaos that move made in the grain transportation scheme of things – Big Ag rushing out to sign the “big producers”, pressuring the rain system to prioritize unloading of produce at our export ports, and in the end causing over $17 BILLION in penalties to be assessed against grain producers, or approximately $114,000 EACH on average for the just under 44,000 producers in Saskatchewan at the time of this political philosophy war crime’s undertaking. That’s $5 billion divided by 44,000 – you do the math…
Randy Hoback often referred to Mr. Ritz as the ultimate “friend to farmers”; I’ve never been able to get my mind around whether he meant that in truth or as with some wry sense of regret for even knowing him…
Then we have Nadine Wilson, now leader of the province’s latest addition to party irrelevance and hard right-leaning half-truths and outright lies, the Saskatchewan “United” Party. Wonder how this new “image” goes over with Elders in her riding…
The reason I’m even writing about these two is because of the sideshow they created in Lumsden on Wednesday was exactly of the variety and content I’d expected to come from the Saskatchewan Party. On June 23rd, Minister of Education Dustin Duncan had issued a “directive” to BAN Planned Parenthood from presenting workshops on sexual education, at least until September, because one of its APPROVED presenters brought “age inappropriate” sexual discussion-prompting playing cards to a Grade 9 presentation in Lumsden.
The original reports that the Minister first received respecting this event was that in passing out of these cards to some students following its presentation Planned Parenthood did not take into consideration the fact that SOME of these cards might have contained materials that were “age inappropriate” – and that alone would be a good enough reason for the Sask Party to “Go Ugly!” come the 2024 campaign – and link Planned Parenthood and the NDP together to place them in opposition to the post-“Roe v Wade” crowd of neanderthal Republicans finding unique ways to further the cruelty presented to women wanting only the right to have access to safe medical care and access to abortion proceedings.
Wilson and Ritz, it now seems, would like the upcoming three by-elections in and around Regina to become “workshops” on how such an attack on the NDP would work before channelling them into the knife fight that 2024 will bring out between the Cracker Channel adherents of right-wing “culture”. And so when the Saskatchewan Party decided to call a “Protecting Parents’ Rights Town Hall” this past Wednesday, more than 250 people showed up at the Lumsden Town Hall to listen to Wilson and Ritz try and score some political points showing their party’s “concern” for this alleged abuse of the educational system.
In what would soon become a forum wherein the Saskatchewan United Party would unveil its true reasons for attending this gathering, that being to express their opposition to LGBTQ2+ and transgender health policies and rights. Former Harper shill and Minister of Agriculture Gerry Ritz started his sermon off by noting that “Our families are under attack…THEY think they’re going to win on the family level by sending in the so-called educators from Planned Parenthood”, whom he then proceeded to refer to as “groomers.”
Other than the fact that I’m still trying to find out just WHO were the “they” to which Mr. Ritz was referring, Mr. Ritz’s comments sounded not unlike MTG’s April 2nd televised interview when she referred to Democrats in general as “groomers”. Asked by CBS interviewer Lesley Stahl to explain that comment, MTG went on, maintaining that “Democrats support – even Joe Biden, the president himself – children being sexualized, having transgender surgeries…what pedophiles do to children.”
I would like to point out that oft-companion to Ms. Greene is MAGA Republican Matt Gaetz, a Florida Congressman representing the Tampa Bay area, currently under investigation for allegedly transporting, and having a sexual relationship with a young women of 17 years of age. One might actually see him as fulfilling the role of a true “groomer” for sexual purposes – that is, BUT for the objections of the even “harder” right wing-nuts who prefer to impose such labeling upon “trans” people, whose very doubts as to their personal sexual identity, whether “male” or “female”, have decided to answer this question by imposing on THEMSELVES the decision to re-identify themselves to society as of the opposite sexual persuasion, or perhaps even non-sexual.
Ritz may want to take a trip down this alley to see whether or not it “sells” in this heavily fundamentalist and religious section of the province, but even there parents are all too conscious as to how the past three years of dealing with the traumas induced by Covid-related actions and laws that may or may not have been beneficial in minimizing that disease’s influence upon their behaviours to follow in their children’s pathway to adulthood have contributed themselves towards having their young question almost everything about themselves, including who they truly are, sexually or otherwise.
Still, in pretending that she had no linkage whatsoever with whatever legislation her former colleagues in the Saskatchewan Party had taken in administering Covid-related policies, Wilson again plays the “outrage” card, “a grandmother of 10 beautiful grandchildren…[who]. wouldn’t want them to see…that filth. And we’re going to fight for you.”
To “fight” – and for what – is a really good question to ask here. Were the playing cards that “graphic” that the intent of the Planned Parenthood presentation was despoiled by their presence? I’m not going to provide an answer to that question, simply because as an adult who has had to give similar presentations in class (albeit for people over the age of 18), I had to look up the meaning of some of the terminology myself.
Did the cards include pornographic imagery to even “define” them as being “pornographic”? Not to the best of my knowledge.
And finally, despite by expanding a Grade 9er’s vocabulary in a rather bizarre direction, does anyone believe that the children actually using the cards to answer some of the questions their own parents should have been explaining years ago “traumatized” or permanently and emotionally damaged?
Let me answer that question as a teacher. When you’re doing hall duties during recess or other school events, you see words carved in the elementary school washrooms that you know the kids could only have heard coming from their parents’ lips. When you call in a parent to discuss how he and five of his buddies from Grade 8 were “body surfing” a severely traumatized Grade 6 girl as though they were all having intercourse with her, and the mother accuses you of making this stuff up DESPITE the Principal witnessing the event (and doing nothing to stop it), or worse, having some of your best students reporting the rape of one of their classmates, and knowing that the RCMP aren’t going to even hear about it – what’s worse?
Could this event have been handled better by Mr. Duncan? Of course – but that’s too late now, isn’t it?
Are the “United” party going to bring this incident up again in the near future, just to scare up a few more political points? Probably – but if they do, I might just drop by one of their “rallies”, just to see to whom Mr. Ritz will attribute the word “they”.
He won’t have to yell his answer across the entire hall for me to hear it, either…
