Where's Waldo?


Where's (Waldo) Justin?

When a natural disaster occurs we've come to expect our political leaders to show up to inspect the carnage, offer sympathies and assure the locals that help is on the way. 

As wildfires rake British Columbia, erasing towns and sending clouds of hazardous smoke to cross B.C., blanketing the prairies and beyond, we ought to have seen our prime minister tour the devastation followed by his patented impression of sincere concern and sympathy.

(Correction: It turns out that PMJT did meet with the mayor of Lytton in the first part of July albeit in Coquitlam a long stretch away from the devastated B.C. interior.)

These aren't even "once in a century" disasters. They're annual "worst in recorded memory" events of steadily increasing frequency, intensity and duration. 

It's not like he's been too busy to make pre-campaign stops across the West. 

Maybe it's the awkward forest fire/climate change/petro-economy link. Maybe it's the prospect that someone might ask "what the fuck do you think you're doing" throwing upwards of  20-billion government dollars into building a brand new and expanded pipeline to flood world markets with the King of Garbage Fossil Fuels - bitumen. 

We don't even get one of his well rehearsed teary-eyed apologies or any other form of apology. We probably won't get one next year or the year after that either. 

Or the year after that. Or the year after that. Or the year after that. Or, well, you get the idea.

Just so we know where we stand.


Comments

  1. Bill MalcolmAugust 16, 2021 at 1:02 PM

    "Trudeau’s visit to B.C. comes amid rumours he will call an election, which the prime minister recently refused to confirm or deny. His visit to B.C. includes a meeting with the mayor of Lytton, which was destroyed in a wildfire last week."

    That was July 8 in Coquitlam, in case you forgot. Trudeau and Horgan were signing that $10 per day childcare deal. I'm no Trudeau fan, but fair's fair, and your memory faulty.

    I know where I stand in the federal election. None of the above.

    Tomorrow I and many others vote in the NS provincial election. The Liberals are done for, I'd say. The major issue is not enough doctors, not enough nurses, sky high housing costs and lack of new stock, crap private ambulance service, etc. The thanks for the stellar Covid response here and current significant provincial lead in vaccinations over the rest of you lot, has been awarded to our Chief Officer of Public Health by citizens at large. He's a popular bureaucrat is Dr Strang, taking no damn nonsense from anyone, yet somehow not seeming threatening, just practical and downto earth -- he gives not a damn about politics.

    The PC's will likely take over here with a platform that is so left of centre you'd think you were in a dream. The PCs also disabused Nova Scotians of the notion that they have anything to do with Old Toole's federal CPC, when an old NDP cabinet minister joined the PCs last week. and that public announcement refuting ties with the CPC was jointly made.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The Disaffected LibAugust 16, 2021 at 2:31 PM

    I stand corrected, Bill. Thanks. I wasn't aware of the Coquitlam meeting. I'll amend my post.

    What's this about NS PCs gone 'left of centre'? I never thought I'd live to see the day. Sounds like it's one worth following tomorrow.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Cognoscenti Syndrome

  There is a group of people I think of as the Cognoscenti, people who are well educated, very informed and of rapidly diminishing relevance. Their ranks include writers such as Chris Hedges and Glen Greenwald. These are people who have honed an almost Puritanical value system, readily finding fault in any direction. They are scathing in their attacks on Republicans and Democrats alike to the point where they become nihilists. They don't endorse. They prescribe. This is where they fail. They're unable to advocate for anything that might resonate with the public whose interests they argue are being trammeled. Donald Trump was bad but Joe Biden is scarcely better. This is where their elitism comes in.  74 million may have voted for Trump but, hey, they didn't know any better. The mob that stormed the Capitol. They were just victims of the system venting their frustrations. All the racism, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, white nationalism - inevitable side effects of their oppr...
Read more

The Gun We Point at Our Own Heads

Image
  If you're sitting at a table and there's a loaded pistol in front of you, do you pick it up and point it at your own head?  Probably not, unless something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. How would you feel if someone else was holding that pistol to your head? But there is a pistol pointed at our heads and, unless we do something about it, we're goners. It's not a Glock. It's fossil fuels and the industry is slowly squeezing the trigger. Proven fossil fuel reserves are sufficient to generate 3.5 trillion tons of greenhouse gas emissions .  Russia and the United States each have massive reserves of fossil energy sufficient to push humanity through the 1.5C heating limit, sometimes called the "carbon budget."  I have it on reliable authority that Washington and the Kremlin aren't getting along very well these days. After all, if you won't hold the line on nuclear proliferation, you might not be inclined to voluntarily give up a major source of na...
Read more

Who Asks "Why?"

Every time there's a conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, all we hear is 'why?'  Why, as in, whose fault is this? It's easier to affix blame if you can truncate the event. Pick a convenient start date, something recent. In this case we'll make it either the Israeli eviction of Arabs from Jerusalem or the scuffle that took place outside the mosque in response. If those don't work, let's go for Hamas launching unguided rockets into Israel. That's even better because it tags Hamas with the blame. The nice thing about this approach is you can just keep using it. It goes on and on, just as it has for the past half-century since the '67 war. You can even date this whole mess to the beginning of the occupation of the Palestinian territories. The Israelis are said to have called these periodic wars, "mowing the lawn." The idea is that, every now and then, you have to take these Arabs to the woodshed. And then you keep your powder dry unt...
Read more