SAINTS PRESERVE US

Oh, Christ, Now What?

Diogenes the Cynic was a Greek philosopher who lived some 400 years before the birth of Christ. That loose timeline is based on the Gregorian calendar, itself a tweak of the Julian calendar. Your Pandemic calendar is likely still displaying our current moment in time as March, 2020 – these strange days are getting long. Anyway, legend has it that Diogenes went about his daily business whilst carrying a lantern. He said he sought just one honest man. I imagine him today in Alberta, the flashlight of his iPhone always on, seeking one sane person.

A third wave of covid-19 has walloped Alberta. We're a world beater, in a very bad way. The really weird thing about a hoax airborne respiratory virus is that an alarming number of the shadowy conspiracy’s enablers tend to get sick and die. These purported flu victims possess the utter gall to clog up and very possibly collapse a public health care system designed to barely cope with more traditional ailments, injuries, wounds and other diseases.

And that’s something of a cause for concern; in warfare the preferred euphemism is collateral damage: “That’s what the NDP (New Democratic Party, the official opposition in Alberta’s legislature), the media (I’m supposing traditional and reliable news sources) and the federal Liberals (Canada’s governing party) were looking for and want.”

Those words were typed onto Facebook last weekend by Kaycee Madu, a member of the United Conservative Party’s (UCP) caucus. Madu is not an obscure backbencher nor is he a mere Assistant Minister of Cutting Red Tape. Madu is Alberta’s Justice Minister. Justice is not an insignificant cabinet portfolio.

God bless him, Madu was only trying to spin the government’s latest series of tardy, ineffectual responses to a relentless scourge, crackdowns and lockdowns, to the party’s rural base. The UCP has consistently demonstrated an “us against them” bunker mindset since it was elected in 2019. Its constant reactionary stance of accusatory whining has since embarrassed most rational Albertans. Consequently, I’m compelled to consider the concept that Kaycee was convinced he was on message, ergo most other people in the country want the UCP’s lame health measures to fail so more innocent people will die simply because that would be bad for the party and its populist movement; curse those clever elitist fiends!

The backlash against the UCP’s covid conduct, beyond its inefficiency, has been something bizarre to behold. Some Albertans are complaining about the suppression of their perceived constitutional right to gather unmasked and speechify about Christ knows what with vitriolic spittle.

Unlike the Constitution of the United States of America, Canada has no such singular document crafted back when slavery drove a rural economy, and armed state militias seemed like a good idea after General George Washington disbanded the Continental Army following the War of Independence. The US Constitution is a lot like the Bible, of its time. Nothing’s sacred nor should it be. The Constitution of Canada is a mish-mash of legislation comprising the British North America Act (1867), the Statute of Westminster (1931) and our own Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982). As is the case with English Common Law, precedents have been tacked on here and there. Our founding documents are dry reading; they mostly divvy up federal and provincial powers. However, the Charter does note that governments (note the plural) may impose temporary restrictions upon the individual should they be deemed beneficial to the greater good of society. Not a terribly insidious Orwellian nightmare idea in a progressive country like Canada.

But these imagined God-granted rights, you know, these arcane human artifices writ in dusty legalese, continue to confound. Big top conservative populism as pitched by the UCP requires many guy wires to keep the circus tent from collapsing. A lot of huffy hot air too. And there’s always room underneath the canopy for the lunatic fringe.

Small town Alberta isn’t a place so much as a state of closed mindedness. The freak flags are flying in map dots like Breton and Boyle; Nazi symbols are a-flutter in the grassroots. Since Madu’s paranoid complaint was plain insane, how does the UCP as willing agent of a crypto-commie conspiracy bent on suppressing some form of twisted libertarianism strike you? Yes, repulsive fascist ensigns as protest in a model democracy like Canada may be jeered at but are not life threatening to their moronic wavers because, thank God, no political party in Canada possesses a retaliatory paramilitary cadre of storm troopers. And, for the most part, Canadian citizens are free to be batshit crazy.

Meanwhile, within the UCP caucus and its rank and file, there are the unmistakable rumblings of a putsch. Internal calls for the party’s founder and leader Jason Kenney, Alberta’s premier, to resign his post are growing louder. The cause isn’t the Kenney government’s ineffectual management of the pandemic; no, it’s that the premier’s tried to do too much to stop it. Diogenes wrote, “The mob is the mother of tyranny.”            

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of soul quaking and head shaking since 2013. My novella Of Course You Did is coming soon. Don’t miss out on the literary sensation of 2021. Bookmark this blog for breathless updates.