SAINTS PRESERVE US
What Are They Thinking?
Ann and I have a scripted routine which we know by heart. We employ it often whilst discussing COVID-19 pandemic events beyond the confines of the Crooked 9.
Ann will sigh, “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
That’s my cue: “I don’t fucking know. I just don’t fucking know.”
“I don’t know either. I don’t know anything anymore.”
In these most peculiar days of emergency measures, mixed messages, sniffy moralizing and profiteering, our lines are growing stale. Because I’ve had some additional free time on my hands of late, I was able to spend a couple of days last week furiously scratching my head over two blunders made in the public’s interest.
First, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation announced its suspension of all locally produced supper hour newscasts. Normally, I will always listen to a well-reasoned argument that is contrary to my point of view. In this instance I’m so deaf to the Mother Corp.’s rationale that I won’t waste words repeating it.
The taxpayer-funded CBC is one of the world’s great news-gathering organizations. Since its inception in 1936, the crown corporation has filed hard news stories from war zones and disaster zones the world over. It has reported history. Its mandate is to be a key component of the ethereal infrastructure that connects Canadians coast to coast to coast through six time zones. Canada is such a quagmire of regions and jurisdictions that free trade between its provinces and territories remains an administrative nightmare 153 years after Confederation. And so, while the City of Edmonton has declared a state of emergency complete with the potential infringement of civil liberties the act implies and the City of Red Deer has not, citizens of both cities and their environs require localized and accurate information from a credible source. There is absolutely no excuse for the CBC shirking its duty to Canadians across the country.
The second blunder is almost laughable, colossal for a province the size of Prince Edward Island. The health authority, acting in good faith, announced that the government controlled pot shops and liquor stores would close until further notice. I can sort of glean the rationale here as many people view sin products as non-essentials. Then again stores that sell baggies or bottles and cans are no different from grocery stores. The official mistake was providing Islanders with advance notice. The resulting panicky queues were so long that any semblance of social distancing evaporated.
The City of Edmonton last week experienced its own miscalculated encounter with the law of unintended consequences. Transit officials reduced the frequency of our light rail trains and reduced the number of carriages strung together for each one. What could possibly be transmitted from passenger to passenger in a rolling sardine cylinder?
My examples are linked by a thread of well-intentioned incompetence backed by a foolproof excuse. I’m not sure if the parties involved are bright enough to seek some sort of temporary pandemic advantage, but a reduction in services sure helps strained operating budgets and the resulting unemployed become a federal responsibility, wards of the greater state; much like any CBC employee working or not. I don’t know. I just don’t fucking know.
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