Dubar

DUBAR: Ducked up beyond all recognition. These are the most appropriate words given the half-billion dollar expenditure taxpayers are shelling out to celebrate and perpetuate 150 years of ongoing recalcitrance on some of the most important issues. And that half-a-billion merely represents the shitload of money the Fed's have pissed away on the opulent event. I suspect the true amount is closer to $5 billion when including monies arising from loosened provincial and municipal purse strings across the country.

This would not be the first time I've been highly critical about the frivolous spending of public funds on extravagant spectacles. Canada's (or at least English Canada's) preoccupation with the monarchy, as expressed in an earlier post entitled Canada's Affliction, is nothing short of an addiction. Speaking of the addictive substances themselves, I couldn't help but notice that the Duke of Big Ears and his butt-ugly bride, the Duchess of Camel Face, were scheduled to stop at a tea shop not that far from my cabin on their taxpayer-funded Canada Day vacation. According to the news, a former rapper turned tea shop owner and tea connoisseur was going to serve them a special blend he had just developed. "One lump or two?" I chuckled, imagining a deranged tea-shop server asking them politely after having switched out the contents of the sugar bowl with Warfarin.

Inasmuch as a couple less royals to spend money on may be a good thing, the point of this missive is Canada Day. Canada pins made in China, hats made in Bangladesh, a massive inflatable rubber duck (above left) from the Excited States, Ireland's U2 and a huge mothering mechanical spider (right) brought in from France. Clearly, few people have any notion of what Canada is, or should become. About the only bright spot I've seen thus far was that protesting Aboriginals were permitted not only to protest on Parliament Hill, but also to set up their teepee adjacent to the main stage. I can't help but wonder if Justin Trudeau's impromptu teepee visit on the eve of Canada Day was a strategic public relations manouevre or an attempt at damage control? Somehow I can't help but feel that the Prime Minister's words, which reiterate a desire for reconciliation with our Indigenous people, represent anything other than lip service. How much has really changed since Chief Dan George delivered his Lament for Confederation in 1967?

Canada's 150th birthday party is the drunk guy at a hockey game: loud, obnoxious and making lots of noise but adding nothing of substance to the quality of the game itself. I will proudly celebrate Canada as a nation when our Indigenous can drink potable water and live in houses suitable for habitation. I will proudly celebrate Canada as a nation when we resume a peace-keeping role on the international stage and abandon a militaristic foreign policy. And I will celebrate as a proud Canadian when we take steps to place the environment before corporate interests and afford trees at least the same legal rights as we grant corporate entities. These, I believe, are Canadian values worthy of celebrating.

One parting note on missed opportunities: The Centennial Flame was first lit on January 1st, 1967 to commemorate Canada's 100th birthday. That natural-gas gobbling fucker ought to be extinguished on this, the 150th Anniversary of Canada, as a symbolic acknowledgment that fossil fuels have been a major contributing factor in climate change and of the importance incumbent upon change.....

_{Submitted by Norm de Plume, 30 June 2017}