Uh-oh Canada Votes

NEWSFLASH! If you are right-wing you are going to vote to the right and if you are left-wing you are going to vote to the left. 

A political reality heightened by the cocaine rush from mass media manipulation is churning friends and families into foes of the twenty-first century. Different views, as far as I can figure, have always existed within our race. They aren’t necessarily absolutes, many people carry both right and left ideals inside them like two wolves sniffing each other’s butts. Some claim to be apolitical although there’s usually a pattern to their opinions (or silence) as history repeats itself between rinses of loss and conditioning.

Teachable moments appear closer in the rear view mirror. Mark Carney, a respected well educated Christian man, husband, father, banker, hockey player, business leader, and prime minister made a significant mistake or admission last month by allowing a Liberal MP and former cop get away with threatening a Conservative opponent with imprisonment/possible execution via a Chinese bounty. Paul Chiang later stepped down as MP and candidate for this month’s federal election after numerous voices outside the reigning party rose in anger… this is what democracy looks like. 

Lots of Canucks believe living under an elected Liberal government over the past decade has made Canada one of the worst countries in the world though gas prices, taxes, healthcare, crime/safety indexes, facts, stats, wealth, vacations, and freedoms say otherwise on a global scale. It is absolutely true things are getting too costly and worse everywhere since the pandemic (except for the billionaires).

Participants and fans of the 2022 Trucker Convoy got a small taste of authoritarianism that pales in comparison to the police state clampdown on other rebellions like the land defenders of Wet’suwet’en or mass demonstrations against the captains of capitalism. Freezing bank accounts is terrible, a powerful tool employed by the bosses long before any of us were born. Welcome to the club kid. 

Neoliberalism is designed to eventually devour its offspring but plenty of you have no frickin’ idea about Milton Friedman’s economic theory that manufactures oligarchs and rewards your family with cheap bananas on the backs of the damned. It doesn’t have to be this way. This invention that’s made so many of us members of the working poor and even that is getting harder to afford. No worries, if you are reading this online article you’re almost certainly part of the planet’s privileged class despite your struggles. In The West even the homeless are fed throughout the day and can easily escape from the toils of existence in sundry ways. 

A multitude of modern comforts woven into our society’s security blanket will soon be lost, perhaps eternally, if the predictions and reasoning by experts holds as true as the expertly built computer device in your hand. We are starting to plummet in a horrible heartbreaking biodiversity collapse and a lot of the population have come to believe redemption can be found in the removal of others. 

Villainy.

On Earth there is far more than just two sexes. Everywhere around us are male, female, and intersex beings who encompass a wide spectrum of sexualities like a rainbow. Life is larger than black and white beliefs. For the love of God, we live in an incredibly spectacular place where one of the oldest and most popular means of procreation involves insects crawling over the sexual organs of an entirely different species. 

Hey buckaroo, the birds and the bees ain’t just about heterosexuality and nuclear families (which are wonderful in their own right but are not the only forms of true love: consensual, beautiful, icky). Relying on myths to justify and prove prejudices is merely proof of willful ignorance or deliberate hatred. 

Canada’s upcoming election, just like that last one in America, boils down to a choice between two neoliberal pathways for our home on native land. I view one route as especially treacherous and am not alone in this observance. Millions like me clearly comprehend a very dark and deadly period of humanity’s past echoing today, spreading like cancer, as contagious as fear. Millions more are cheering on some great purge while millions of others look away, trusting compliance will spare them a seat on a runaway train bound for hell.

“A Conservative government would put an end to the imposition of woke ideology in the federal civil service and in the allocation of federal funds for university research.” 

-Pierre Poilievre’s platform, Canada First

Thanks to recorded history and our empowered Republican neighbors, one no longer has to wonder what they mean by woke or who is wicked. Bullies have started another fight against human kind and kindness. Now is the time for allies to stand strong together and defend a future that is just and fair and where laughter is shared. Heads up, I question anyone who brings a guillotine to a gunfight. 

We’re smarter than that. Fighting fire with fire may feel right but can easily inflame everyone if it’s not a controlled burn. Let’s aim to be more civil before an uncivil war incinerates us all. Try to treat others as you’d like them to treat you. Jesus, how hard can it be?

Mark Kirkwood Callingham works for a homeless shelter in downtown Ottawa and is the founder of Money With Morals, a plan to co-create a new global economy by and for the people.