Let the good times roll

Here in my province of New Brunswick, Canada, there were recently two deaths of indigenous people at the hands of the police.  Black Lives Matter is to the U.S. what MMIW (Missing Murdered Indigenous Women) is to Canada, although to be sure, indigenous men are also on the shitty end of the police baton.  I'm pretty disgusted with how our governments (read: plural) have handled the whole mess that has existed at least as long as Canada has.  But wait.... there's more!

A Canadian federal election is surely coming soon enough, since right now we have a minority Liberal government heading up the country.  The carelessness of Justin Trudeau on how he handles certain matters is freakishly startling to me.  And I'm a liberal.  Note... liberal with a small 'l', not of the Liberal Party.  The Conservatives scare me a lot more than any Liberal government ever did, especially since they wiped the 'Progressive' out of their title.  That ought to make people think right there.  But the Liberals aren't a hell of a lot more progressive, either.  I remember the last federal election where JT's 'Sunny Ways' movement was inspiring people to get away from the backwards disaster that was the Harper regime, but now it all just looks like a facade.  Harper can be somewhat forgiven for a tanking federal deficit because of the stock market crash in the late '00s, but the oft-proclaimed 'genius economist' didn't see the crash coming when it was creeping right up his nose.  In the meantime, he put all of Canada's economic eggs in one basket with the tar sands (I refuse to say 'oil sands' because that shit's much dirtier), and we fell down the rabbit hole of painful recovery that cost us our accumulating EI funds and countless social programs that hurt everyone from the poor and middle class to our tearful veterans, not to mention Canada's reputation worldwide as a nation that actually cares.  Give JT props for raising Canada's reputation back up worldwide, but here at home, he's looking more and more like a bumbling fool who, unfortunately, is making the Cons look like they were right when they proclaimed he's 'just not ready' to be the nation's leader.  He isn't.  And he wasn't.  "WE" certainly see that now.

Whenever there's a crisis where he has to defend one of his big mistakes, he either gets 'mommy' Chrystia Freeland to fight his battles for him (who, in my mind, ought to actually be the country's PM), or he throws gargantuan amounts of dollars at it.  It's what he did for the MMIW issue, which yielded absolutely nothing.  The Phoenix payroll debacle, while not born on his watch, just got worse and worse, with the sounds of ka-ching ka-ching echoing in the foreground of finance minister Bill Morneau's disastrous remedying of its mounting issues.  Money to fight these kinds of issues is fine, if it's spent responsibly, and with intelligence, none of which seems to ever happen with this government. 

I'll give them props for a few things, like managing the COVID crisis and helping keep Canadians safe, especially in comparison to our next door neighbours.  But every damn time I see JT on television, he's dishing out more billions with no plan to recover.  The recent 'economic snapshot' was just a joke, looking to me like a brief moment in time before things get worse and they have to admit the numbers are going into freefall.  Let's make no mistake... recovery isn't going to be easy.  It isn't meant to be.  Anyone knows the more money you borrow, the longer it takes to pay it back.  Canada will not be out of its current debt in my lifetime, or yours, regardless of how old you are.  Let's just be real.

But if we're going to climb out of this seemingly endless well of deficit, the country needs to take bold and dramatic steps to make it happen.  If COVID has done anything positive, it's forced us to re-think the world's economic model in the age of the ticking time bomb that is climate change.  There is a sect out there that is addicted to oil, and like any addiction, there are going to be withdrawal symptoms, but getting off of it won't kill us.  Staying on it WILL.  But again, like any addiction, once we are off of it, we'll be so much healthier and our outlook so much more promising.  Any scientist will vouch for this, also.

America's Joe Biden's recent media address left me feeling a hell of a lot more hopeful for the future than anything I've heard from any world leader in ages.  He wants his nation to get off oil by the middle of next decade, and he acknowledges that it won't be easy, but the rewards are endless.  Millions upon millions of jobs can be created through renewable energies and innovation, eliminating the need for pollution-spitting, humanity-killing fossil fuels, concurrently giving our very planet a shot at a future with humans on it.  And let's face it; if humanity destroys itself with its greed and lust for power via fossil fuels, planet earth will breathe a sigh of relief for itself.  It will continue on prosperously without us.  So why not feed the earth instead of starving and torturing it? 

The Liberals touted themselves as champions of the environment for many years now, only to buckle to pressure from oil tycoons and petrol-rich provinces.  I sympathize with Alberta.  It's all they've ever known.  They've quite literally fed Canada for decades with the riches that come from its finite reserves of fossil fuels.  We owe them!  Let's face that.  They're literally lashing out at the rest of the country for being thankless for helping build Canada through its history, only to be virtually shit on for doing just that with the means by which they've been doing it.  The best thank-you we can give Alberta is to make them one of the country's top priorities in sustainability through renewables.  But the Liberals have all but ignored that idea.  The Greens, on the other hand, recognize what needs to be done, and have laid out a plan for that for years.  I realize there's next to no support for the Green Party in Alberta, but thankfully, the feelings aren't mutual. 

Even Jagmeet Singh and the NDP have been borrowing from the Greens' agenda by pledging to modernize Canada's energy sector.  Hell, even the Bloc has a smarter look at the future of energy and environmental concerns than the Conservatives do.  While I don't ever want to see some kind of 'Unite the Left' movement like the Progressive Conservatives and the Reform Party (if "reform" is actually what the "R" stands for) did with the right, I do hope that the balance of power sticks to liberal interests that look forward than the backward peering conservatives.  You can't drive a car somewhere by staring in the rear view mirror the whole time or you'll surely crash.  However, you also want someone experienced driving that car if the road ahead is a long, bumpy one.  Justin Trudeau can't even change a proverbial flat.  He needs Freeland to do it for him.  Regardless, we can only let the good times roll if the leader really knows how to drive.  And that's just what we need.  Time to shake it up for a brighter panorama of the future.

And for the love of the sweet Lord, talk to the friggin' Chinese leaders and get our guys back.  NOW.