Just some casual observations to relate to you this week, dear diary.
For instance, did you realize that we, as taxpayers, spent $28 million recently to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812?
Apparently "we" won. I'm not sure who "we" is/are, though. Were "we" the few hundred French or the 300 scarlet coated British or were "we" the few thousand Aboriginals who knew what to do? Or were "we" the few scraggly new Canadians who just happened to be in the neighbourhood when the shooting started?
This so-called war was with the Americans, by the way.
Did anybody inform them that this 200th thingy-dingy was going on? I mean someone other than Maclean's magazine? Was Bev Oda out having a smoke with Andy Scheer when the news broke?
In fact, did anybody bother to mention this birthday party or whatever they called it ... to Western Canada? We helped pay for it, but no War of 1812 commemorative ship sailed down the Souris, at least I don't think it did. No phoney cannons were shot from any of our reconstructed forts. I understand the federal government was required to eliminate $9 million in the community archives program so that "we" could celebrate this war that really wasn't and from what I hear in the aftermath, the Americans are claiming that the whole 74-hour siege turned out to be a tie game after regulation time expired and everybody just went home instead of paying the referee for overtime. Now that sounds very Canadian to me.
Declare a tie and let's hit the beer gardens.
Thought two:
Who was responsible for unplugging India for two days?
And if you think that's a sorry state of affairs for this hard-pressed country, please remember those rolling brown-outs they had across the western and mid-western United States a few years ago when Enron was running the show. Hey, it happens here every time we get a thunderstorm. Maybe not two days worth, but just enough to start us worrying about what we can do without electricity. Turns out, not much.
Did you laugh too, when you heard that our PM, Stevie Wonder, that Harper boy, was in Kindersley Aug. 1 handing out pardons to Alberta farmers who had apparently been jailed for three or four hours five years ago for defying a Canadian Wheat Board regulation that prohibited them from selling wheat without going through the CWB?
I think the poor guy was suffering delusions. I believe he honestly thought he was a Texas or Alabama governor handing out last hour pardons to death row inmates rather than a hard-pressed PM using a non-descript Canadian glitch law that let him "release" the already "released" producers who did that hard time so many years ago to make their point. I don't know why it is, but other than Vancouver, most of our Canadian protest movements are really pretty lame affairs. We have a hard time getting riled up about anything. Our second to last protest didn't even make the highlight package on the news channels, you know those "Occupy" Wall Street ... ooops, Occupy Bay Street, or some other so-called important street or city hall ... had to be borrowed from the United States. Nobody seemed to know what they were protesting about, but hey, the weather was good, might as well get outside and do something not too positive.
Then of course we had those poor down-trodden Quebec students in their designer jeans and poofy coats and scarves protesting the fact they have the lowest tuition fees in the country. What a cause! Storm the Bastille Henri ... then meet me at Starbucks.
