SAINTS PRESERVE US

ACME Corp. Sues Wile E. Coyote, Warner Bros

Times are tough in Alberta, but they needn’t be so fucking embarrassing.

I’m no MENSA candidate, but when I watch a short or feature length cartoon, I figure out pretty quickly that what’s on screen isn’t real. The tell is usually talking animals who routinely defy the laws of physics. Other folks are equally as clever as me: no Creationist has ever tried to convince me that The Flintstones is an accurate depiction of life on Earth as it was 5000 years ago; Raquel Welch in 10,000 B.C. doesn’t even rate (Ringo was only the second-best caveman bone beater).

Every week I speak with my older sister who lives in Montreal. Yesterday evening, she asked me, “What the fuck is going on in Alberta!? The province used to be such a beacon (in Canada).” Where to start? Why not with last Friday’s latest, and possibly ultimate, cringe? The province’s United Conservative Party (UCP) government will struggle to top itself on this one (but I live in hopeful despair).

Since its electoral victory in 2019, the UCP has exhibited a disturbing propensity to smudge the line between government business and party business. I suspect its political model is the modern Republican Party (GOP) of the United States. Down south, for instance, gerrymandered districts with absurdly strict voting protocols are not intended to preserve the democratic integrity of the republic so much as entrench the Grand Old Party.

Most Canadians are aware that Alberta is broke, busted. Alberta Health Services employees will be laid off during a global pandemic. Education cuts suggest a cohort of morons in the near future. When the UCP was on the stump, its big tent, clown truck platform merely consisted of magic bullets for Alberta’s out-dated, mostly single resource economy: two long-disputed and long-delayed pipelines, one north-south and one east-west, would change everything. Blam! Back to black, good times rolling like upended barrels of bitumen. Once in power the party immediately created the publicly funded Canadian Energy Centre (CEC) to promote its big lie. Contemptuous Albertans refer to the agency as the “war room.” 

Mercifully, most Canadians have never heard of the CEC. Then again, most Canadians don’t identify as foreign-funded shadowy forces, leftist greens bent on destroying Alberta’s economy. The CEC ain’t no think tank. The CEC Friday denounced a Netflix cartoon movie about a family of sasquatches whose idyllic domain is threatened by the incursion of Big Oil into a fantasy land very distant from the tar sands and a prairie prickled with orphan wells. But the plot’s premise fucking rankled a certain petty party. Children are so impressionable and at risk of brainwashing! The new Stepford brood in their Baby Gap brownshirts must be raised to worship the old ways, oil and gas. Economic diversification and forward thinking are strictly verboten.

In other news, the ACME Anvil Company, a subsidiary of ACME Corporation, has filed separate suits against the coyote and the roadrunner because their shorts cast its product in a poor light.

The UPC is the ruling party that seeks to rewrite Alberta’s elementary and secondary curricula in its own ideological image. This is the party that is allowing coal mining leases in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. This is the party that has contemplated privatizing or closing scores of provincial parks. This is the party that has padlocked a Government of Alberta library because, well, who the fuck needs access to academic journals, papers, studies and like resources if they’re crafting public policy and enacting laws? Open doors at that facility cost Albertans $1.2-million per year.

The CEC did not exist prior to the UCP’s ascension to power in 2019. The UPC “war room” is not subject to independent oversight. Its annual taxpayer-funded budget is $30-million.      

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of Now What? since 2013. Special thanks to my friend Tim. My novella Of Course You Did is coming in 2021. Sign up for e-mail alerts from the Crooked 9, use that thingy on the right.