A mostly youthful throng estimated at more than 15,000 people braved the coronavirus pandemic yesterday evening to join the Fight for Equity rally against racism at the Alberta Legislature in Edmonton.
The rally was organized in response the public murder of George Floyd, an African American man, at the hands of Minneapolis police officers on Monday, which set off a week of demonstrations across the United States and throughout the world.
The size of the crowd is a telling sign of how troubled young people are by the institutionalized racism that continues to plague many countries — including Canada.
Yes, things are terrible in the United States right now. But we owe it to our country to stop pretending systemic racism is just an American problem, and to quit engaging in racism denial as so many people on this side of the Canada-U.S. border seem so stubbornly inclined to do.
It was much more than this, of course, but the huge, peaceful and mostly socially distanced crowd delivered a telling rebuke to Alberta Energy Minister Sonya Savage’s fatuous recent claim that, thanks to COVID-19, “now is great time to be building a pipeline because you can’t have protests of more than 15 people.”
As the last few days all over the world should have made clear even to Alberta’s United Conservative Party, if the cause is important enough, Canadians will rally for what they believe is right even during a pandemic.
It is also worth noting that had the UCP’s so-called Critical Infrastructure Defence Act passed by the Legislature last Thursday been proclaimed into law, the entire demonstration could have been declared illegal with a snap of Premier Jason Kenney’s fingers, its leaders and participants jailed and heavily fined for exercising rights guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
After all, what infrastructure could be more essential from the perspective of a career professional politician like Mr. Kenney than the Legislature Building itself, and the public parks, public square, and public sidewalks that surround it? And the legislation allows the cabinet to declare anything it fancies to be critical infrastructure.
To give Mr. Kenney his due, he acknowledged yesterday in one of his Twitter homilies that institutional racism is real in Canada. But his invitation not so long ago to white nationalist Faith Goldy that she would always be welcome in Alberta suggests the premier may still have some work to do on this file. As far as I know, it has never been retracted or explained.
Mr. Kenney should note that the longstanding Alberta habit of shrugging off inappropriate comments about race by prominent Alberta Conservatives seems to be coming to a much overdue end.
Former Alberta cabinet minister and Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day found himself in hot water Tuesday after denying on a CBC commentary program that systemic racism exists in Canada. Mr. Day apologized, but soon got the bum’s rush from both his generously compensated gig on the Telus Corp. Board and his role as a Power & Politics commentator.
Mr. Day probably would have gotten away with it had he not compared being a victim of racism to his experience as a child of being teased for wearing glasses. You have to shake your head at this remarkable lack of perspective, for which even his profuse apology could not compensate.
Also last week, Calgary reality TV personality and oilpatch billionaire W. Brett Wilson found himself under attack for accusing Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi of playing “the race card” in a debate over the city’s Green Line public transportation project, which Mr. Wilson opposes.
Mr. Wilson, who is notorious for tweets calling for environmental activists to be hanged for treason, has apologized to Mayor Nenshi.
But Royal Roads University in Victoria, which granted Mr. Wilson an honorary degree in 2010, yesterday afternoon tweeted a statement saying it “has been deeply disturbed by the comments made on social media by Mr. Wilson. Such comments are inconsistent with RRU’s values and the president’s recent statement on anti-racism. … We are considering our next steps in this matter.”
Readers will recall the outrage among Alberta Conservatives, including Mr. Kenney, when the University of Alberta granted an honorary degree to broadcaster, environmental activist and scientist David Suzuki.
Despite their similar political views, under the circumstances Mr. Wilson probably shouldn’t expect Mr. Kenney to rush to his defence.
On this D-Day anniversary, don’t forget Russia’s vast accomplishment in the east
Today is the 76th anniversary of the D-Day invasion. Slightly less than a year later Hitler was dead and Germany had fallen.
Normally on this date, I remind readers that, despite the heroism and vast historic importance of the Allied landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944, we would probably still be fighting there, or worse, were it not for the valour and vast sacrifice of the Red Army in the east.
Like U.S. President Donald Trump, who tweeted last month on the anniversary of the German surrender in May 1945 that “America and Great Britain had victory over the Nazis,” it is now strangely easy in the amnesiac West to forget that if the Allies in the West were the hammer that stuck Hitler’s armies, the Russians were the anvil on which they were crushed.
About 80 per cent of the German Army’s casualties were inflicted by the Red Army, which after June 1944 cleared the Wehrmacht from Eastern Europe, wiped out an entire German Army Group and opened the road to Berlin. We should never forget this when we rightly celebrate our own accomplishments fighting fascism.
Finally some good news at the Alberta Legislature.
Now if only this youthful energy can be harnessed for the next provincial election.
Are the real issues, systemic, institutionalized racism, colour and religion; or our corrupted democracy, money driven economics and poverty?
It isn’t much wonder that we’re inundated with rubbish from the likes of Jordan Peterson, the “smart person” for right-wing imbeciles when this is the kind of stuff that comes from the left, or progressive camp. People protesting because their livelihoods haven put in jeopardy by the most farcical panic I have witnessed in my lifetime are “covidiots” but people who choose to protest for more acceptable reasons are heroic in their disregard for the imaginary threat of Chupacabra. The left is dead, dead, dead, because there is no consistency nor concrete thought behind any purported “resistance”.
The police forces in the US are completely militarized and threy’re trained to do stuff like kneel on people’s necks by Israeli security firms, who perfected their special brand of barbarism on Palestinians over the last hundred years. I say hundred because Orde Wingate was teaching Jewish supremacists the art of destruction of arab bodies thirty years before the Israeli land-grab in ’67.
But we don’t talk about Israel because if we do we end up like Jeremy Corbyn. There is apparently, good and bad racism in the world of progressives.
Racism is not the problem in our society, the problem is an economic system predicated on institutionalizing inequality and eliminating threats to the existing economic hierarchy.
Martin Luther King was killed by elements of the US state apparatus not because of race but because he had publicly come out against the perverse economic system and it’s global murder program.
Covidmania has resulted in giving the game away to the neoliberals, who will have free reign to dismantle the entire post-war welfare state because the bug destroyed the economy. Austerity is coming and it’s coming to a degree and with a rapidity that nobody could have imagined six months ago.
I’m not sure how many people reading this page could really count themselves among a “we” who accomplished anything in terms of fighting facsism. Certainly the western allies were a gang of racist plunderers, which makes them scarcely different than the Nazis. The British handed control of Vietnam back to occupying Imperial Japanese forces until the French empire could pull itself together enough to begin oppressing the Vietnamese after 1945. The French General Bigeard, hero of both the Vietnam War and the Algerian War used to put Algerian rebels’ feet in cement and drop them into the ocean from helicopters. The anti-fascist good guys killed at least 20% of the population of North Korea in three years with the effects of aerial bombing to prop up Singman Rhee’s dictatorship. The same super team destroyed SE Asia, dropping more bombs on Laos than on Nazi Germany and Japan combined.
Indonesia had the largest communist party outside the PRC until the US teamed up with fascist generals and moslem fundamentalists to kill 800 000 people in under five years.
The Red Army had 90 000 killed in the assault on Berlin, twice what Canada lost in the entire war. I cannot imagine the outcome of that battle if the Red Army soldiers operated with terrified magical thining of Covidmania in which we handed ourselves to the fascist with nary a whimper.
“Universities like Concordia and McGill collaborate on projects like developing the weaponization of nanotechnology with Israeli schools such as Technion, the Israel Institution of Technology in Haifa, according to the Independent Jewish Voices of Canada. Halper claims Canada benefits when Israeli researchers use Palestinians as “guinea pigs” for its weapons and systems and their exportation.
“Israel is involved in your prison systems. It’s involved in training the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. It’s involved in your airport security,” Halper said of Canada’s use of Israeli security tactics.
As the director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolition, he referred to how austerity measures in countries like Canada is leading to cuts everywhere except the military and police.
“It’s getting to a point where, if you don’t fall in line to the powers at be, you’re a terrorist,” he said about the West’s increased police militarization. “The whole word is being corrupted; it’s delegitimizing all resistance.””
https://thelinknewspaper.ca/article/activist-reveals-hidden-military-ties-between-canada-and-israel
My significant other and I finally agree on something to do with the Spray-glo Fuhrer’s nemesis: America’s national millstone appears to have passed a significant milestone at the intersections of COVID19 Nervous-breakdown Avenue and Black-Lives-Matter Boulevard by attempting to commandeer the police, the National Guard and the US Army for his personal defence from the American Constitution and the broadly attended and growing protest marches inspired by worldwide outrage over the blatant murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police—yet another last, pleading cry of “I cant’ breathe!” And “Mama!” by yet another black man suffocated to death while handcuffed by a white cop kneeling on his neck for nine minutes while onlookers videoed the incident and three other cops cordoned them off while they implored them to relent before Mr Floyd died.
We debate often to what extent the presidunce’s fate is already cast, my dove and I, the pandemic and George Floyd’s murder being more or less unforeseen events (at least specifically) along the way; but insofar as the Narcissus of Queens cuts his own path in hackneyed swaths of incompetent reaction, the Ole Yellow Prick Trail seems to have arrived at—or passed, as we concur, his very own Teutoburger Forest by provoking rebuke from respected retired generals of the one branch of American government which stands most aloofly from partisan or personalized politics—most tellingly and stingingly from his very own former secretary of defence, the decorated war hero General (Ret.) Jim Mattis.
It seems different in kind, if not degree, to milestones of tRump’s decline already passed: his failed, first-day demand of personal fealty from FBI Director (soon after fired) James Comey; his global dissemination of diplomatic poison; his mishandling of natural disasters in Puerto Rico, Texas, Florida and California; his incitement and encouragement of racial hatred; his defence of the NRA after recurrent mass-shootings; concurrent erosions of Republican support in gubernatorial and congressional midterm elections; convictions of tRump associates resulting from the “Russiagate” inquiry; impeachment—even his erratic, dangerously absurd ineptness in handling COVID19, and frightening anti-Chinese bellicosity as distraction are hitched together along this narrowing defile of tRump’s decline. But the opprobrium expressed, if unofficially, from retired generals seems to have rounded the backstretch, riding-crops cracking, clods of mud splattering toward, finally, the inevitable fall.
tRump’s attempt to commandeer American firepower for use against American citizens exercising their rights of assembly and freedom of speech—their constitutional right to protest systematic police abuse of African-Americans’ rights incited by George Floyd’s murder—is a bridge too far for the normally politically arms-length military establishment, the most racially integrated institution in the country: like Varus just over two millennia ago in the Roman frontier of Germania, the Great Whitehouse Dope has jumped the shark by going too far beyond his line of communication and effectively provoking reprisals by the usually staid military institute to not only express disapproval, but to effectively invite others to gather their pluck to do so, as well, now proceeding more courageously toward the light at the end of the dark and foreboding forest of potential retaliation from an increasingly infuriated, rash and petulant presiduncy.
It’s not what the man-boy does (his accumulations of lies and failed policies have long since exceeded even excess and should be expected to persist until the very end); it is, rather, the point he has gotten to —while he does what he’s always done—that’s essentially different and, IMHO, will proscribe the rest of this sordid misadventure. I think tRump is starting to realize a grim reality: he has enemies hiding in the trees waiting to waylay him, observing, as Bonaparte did: never stop one’s enemy from making his own mistakes. tRump’s typically transparent and predictable resort to unconstitutional measures has just let him down and everybody can see it. To me it marks the point from which the worst US president ever must fight rearguard into the throes of his incredibly damaging and inevitably singular term.
My sweet isn’t so convinced as I am: she’s afraid Donald “The Spray” tRump will somehow get re-elected—by cheating or some kind of lucky coincidence. It’s my daily duty to assuage whatever this fear contributes to ongoing risks of restrictive-COVID19 cabin fever. Yet I’m not sure obvious parallels with Alberta’s K-Boy are helpful much in this effort. Yes, he’s like tRump in many respects like slashing taxes for the rich and powerful while citizens struggle with economic and ecological challenges, and now the pandemic on top of everything. And there’s also the posture of a “War premier”—at least in his room—in the same inane way as his mentor is a “War president”—at least in his gold-plated Tweetarium—, while neither the “invisible enemy” of COVID19 nor alleged “anti-Alberta” bitumen production comprises a real war. Nevertheless, the US administration has asked Congress to draft legislation to deem the pandemic a national emergency for the sole objective of suspending rights like public protests and dissent from tRump’s chaotic administration —that is, disingenuously while at the same time tRump brags of an economic rebound the likes of which George Floyd would, the presidunce gallingly claimed, approve: of a quick return, in ‘fact’ already happening, to the greatest, richest economy in all history —of which George Floyd may, with the presidunce’s permission, look down posthumously with happiness.
It doesn’t impress her much: the K-Boy, despite trying to resort—in an even more preposterously unconstitutional way—to the same brute suppression of legal dissent as the Man-boy, has three years of his mad-date left to go, whereas tRump is so close to his political gallows he can count the thirteen steps. Neither K-Boy’s comparable racism, preposterous petroleum prognoses, nor petulant politics seem sufficient to convince her of the impossibility of either scoundrel’s prospects. Politics is the art of the possible, she counters, and if it was possible for either to get elected, then it’s possible for either to get re-elected. (I haven’t deployed Stockwell Day, yet. I’m hoping it might help make my case a little better.)
Is it irony that she is by definition less fatalistic than I? That is, she only prays tRump will lose in November, while I would bet on it.
Oh, and she doesn’t gamble, either.
I think the message about Covid has been received loud and clear, the elderly and health compromised have to be vigilant and incredibly careful, for younger healthy people this is not a health crisis at all. Good to see young Albertans ignoring all the fear mongering over the mostly benign Coronavirus and doing what progressives have always done, standing up for the marginalized…..
Jeepers, I rather agree with Murphy today, but have crossed swords with Gordie_Canuk on his blog, a bit of a one-track and not very open mind in my view, a stats man who in effect ends up with the kenney view on Covid-19. I have been labelled a troll for having had the temerity to tell him off, but I remain entirely unapologetic. So far as I can see, the demonstrators shown are wearing masks and not crammed together breathing each others’ exhalations, so how this translates to young Albertans ignoring “fear-mongering” is beond my ken. They are acting like adults. Because if they aren’t, then neither is Trudeau.
Anyway, to proceed. Don’t suppose kenney cares one iota about George Floyd or Canadian victims of police thuggery, so this demonstration? Meh. No skin off his back. If they’d been after the TMX or Keystone XL, the Edmonton police might have been deployed to change the crowd’s mind about their viewpoint. And shorty pants is cunning at judging the public mood, so having police move demonstrators on or face fines or jailterms probably would not be interpreted to his advantage outside Alberta in the rest of the country at this particular time, seeing as the PM joined in a similar demonstration on Parliament Hill as is his gadfly wont.
As for Bretto Wilson, apparently philanthropic on many issues he’s interested in, but downright nasty on things that offends his precious soul, perhaps the GG should consider rescinding his Order of Canada for the same reasons Royal Roads is thinking of doing the dirty on his honorary degree. Wilson almost choked at Notley’s ascension to premiership and his gnarly outlook typifies the dumb Conservative/UCP Albertan to me, Wexit and all. I’m reminded that at their core, our military officers swear allegiance to the Queen, not Canada or our constitution or Charter, in much the same way the Privy Council members do. This is NOT understood by 99.99% of Canadians. I do believe kenney was a Privy Council member once, ahem. But since it’s effectively a secret society, nobody goes around broadcasting much about it. Here’s their oath:
“I, [name], do solemnly and sincerely swear (declare) that I shall be a true and faithful servant to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, as a member of Her Majesty’s Privy Council for Canada. I will in all things to be treated, debated and resolved in Privy Council, faithfully, honestly and truly declare my mind and my opinion. I shall keep secret all matters committed and revealed to me in this capacity, or that shall be secretly treated of in Council. Generally, in all things I shall do as a faithful and true servant ought to do for Her Majesty.”
Yup. no mention of we proles there. So if the bigwigs get really cheesed off with you, well, you won’t know it before the hammer falls, because it’s a secret. I’ve wondered idly from time to time which office has more power, the PCO or the PMO, or indeed the Cabinet itself, but the latter are all members of the PC anyway, and honourable if not all right honourable. Where’s the Maple Monarchist? He no doubt could explain the ins and outs of these matters. If the Queen decided to abolish the Senate tomorrow for awarding themselves pay increases for making their rear ends even squarer from prolonged sitting, then that would be it. Not a bad idea.
People might be surprised that erudite Canadian writing, unknown to me at least until last summer, does in fact exist. There are two outlets, the Rising Tide Foundation, and Canadian Patriot, same people. The titles sound right wing but the contents are not. Here’s an article to get you started, and do follow the links, they’re delicious.
http://canadianpatriot.org/canadas-war-years-and-c-d-howes-battle-with-the-british-empire/
and check out this home page:
https://risingtidefoundation.net
Interesting reading for me.
BM, to be accurate you first called me a troll on my own blog….and I tossed it back at you for following me around, as it appears you have done yet again here. Interesting how one accuses others for things they are themselve’s guilty of. If you want to comment on my blog, no worries…..progressives can disagree without resorting to childish name calling….well some of us. Be well.
Youthful energy is great and its appearance on the streets in the US and Canada, against the most blatant depiction of modern day Jim Crow — police brutality toward Black men — should make the dinosaurs in public office stand up and see that there days are truly short and numbered.
But will this forceful and fearsome demand for change and progress remain come voting day?
I recall an interesting comparison someone mentioned to me once…liberals vote for morality, but conservatives vote for power.
Progressive minded voters, and they are in their millions and millions, tend to not be what statisticians call “reliable voters”. These voters always consider the quality of the policies promoted in terms of their success in instituting progressive reforms. If there is any reason to doubt the moral-quality of the candidate, their policies, or their records, progressive voters will stay at home and wait for the better candidate to come along.
This is the same mindset that caused voters in the US to fail to support Hillary Clinton. Stuck with Trump_45, the US is reaping a whirlwind of consequences for staying home on voting day. Now, there can be no one who can convincingly say that Clinton would have been worse than Trump. To believe that the worst was avoiding by rejecting a Clinton presidency is pure dementia.
Looking to Alberta, the same situation is unfolding. The crazed zealots and taken over and they are spending public resources to prop up the fossil fuel industry and the UCP donor list. The zealots have made war on civilization and are determined to break anything that serves the public good.
The lesson is clear to the progressive voter: stop voting for morality and vote for power.
With turnout for US federal elections typically hovering below 50%, with a two-party parliament and often a three-party ballot, a normally gridlocked congress, and an overdose of other overlapping democratically elected jurisdictions and offices everywhere in the USA, I think many Americans voters understand abstention as a legitimate and viable expression of democratic will.
Doubtless it was partly a return to relative apathy after the historic anomaly of elevated black-voter turnout during the Obama terms, but it was also partly a repudiation of Hillary Clinton whom black voters didn’t warm to that helped tRump win. Less omissive were voters who wanted to make sure Clinton didn’t win, a group which quite likely included erstwhile Dems or even disgruntled Bernie supporters: these did vote, but tactically against Clinton. I bet if half of these had simply abstained instead, Clinton would have won. (In any case, I bet a lot of these regret electing tRump and won’t do that again.)
I’m not characterizing a particular voting bloc with apathy, rather suggesting that abstention is widely availed by any voting bloc. I expect it will be different blocs which avail abstention this time: traditional Republican voters who want tRump gone (there are probably more of these than would be comfortable admitting publicly) but cannot bring themselves to vote Dem or Indie. Independents might count for a lot of abstentions —for the same reason.
Turnout is becoming less typically low and more predicated on particular races and personalities in the USA. After a single term of The Donald’s racism, I’m betting black and Latino turnout will surge again, perhaps even more than it did for Obama.
The mail-in ballot debate in the USA illuminates the hitherto little-mentioned difficulties certain voting districts arrange for voters of colour: because these effective disenfranchisements can’t easily be inflicted if voters aren’t required to present themselves in person at a designated voting place, tRump has transparently objected to mail-in ballots because the skin colour of a voter is not so easily discerned—he plainly fears the coloured vote and almost blatantly admits he’d like to prevent mail-ins so’s to disenfranchise coloured voters at designated voting places. He even admitted as much by saying if mail-ins were permitted, Republicans would lose so many districts they’d never form governments again. It almost sounds as if he’s referring to some kind of diabolical statistical model that’s already been sampled.
It’s important to recognize—as the mail-in debate facilitates—how many methods have been used to disenfranchise black and Latino voters, the crudest being preventing them from voting at all (as opposed to destroying or disqualifying marked ballots). In The age of phone-cam surveillance, huge, discouraging lineups of coloured voters are now recorded and broadcast for all to see. Shining a light has probably reduced the intentionally discouraging habit of shaking black voters down for bench warrants and unpaid parking tickets if they try to vote at a designated place—but this tactic does continue here and there. “Hanging chads”— faulty voting machines— have had their infamous heyday. And cheating of any kind will risk being exposed more than ever after all the fuss over Russian interference in the election that gave us tRump: this should be one of the most invigilated elections ever. The reason why tRump has been so dismissive of COVID19 masks makes more sense psephologically than it does epidemiologically: the mail-in rationale is predicated on preventing CV19 person-to-person contact at a gathering such as at a designated voting place, thus tRump’s effort to prevent mail-ins (which would virtually eliminate opportunities to disenfranchise coloured voter likely to vote against him) is rationalized by his duplicitous claim that masks are not needed because the virus is overblown, has peaked and gone, or never existed in the first place.
Thus mail-ins remedy not so much apathy, but fear of being blocked from voting or arrested for trivial or trumped-up charges at a designated voting place.
Turnout is naturally of paramount concern for politicians —and especially for tRump who faces serious legal difficulties after losing the immunity of the presidential office. Turnout on the right is most reliable, therefore suppression of voting on the left is a preoccupation of the right. Things are turning sour for the Orange One so expect him to focus desperately on voting impediments for voters who won’t support him, especially those who turnout or not in huge waves as we expect black and Latino voters to show up in droves to vote the racist tRump out of office.
But it’ll be difficult For tRump to claim a pandemic crisis that would warrant federal intrusion on state jurisdiction with respect voting systems (to ban mail-ins) —or, it’s been mootly floated, cancel the election altogether —while, presumably, bragging about how the economy has recovered and returned to the greatest, most wonderful, most tremendously stupendous prosperity in history by this autumn. Even harder to force voters to gather at designated places when, as forecast, a ‘second pandemic wave’ exacerbated by seasonal influenza and vectored by returning school kids will be gathering steam just as the campaign hits full stride.
Follow the money who benefits from a divided population? Who profits and maintains their power and influence? The manipulated masses seem to always go along with the game not realizing they are being used, never protesting the true source of their suffering.
The George Floyd murder was tragic and it appears the wheels of justice are turning slowly with the outcome not yet clear. Why no protest against the Obama presidency that encouraged the further militarization of American police forces both with equipment and training?
Demanding that Wilson and Day be cancelled for making stupid comments just enforces the notion those on the left are against free speech. Call it what it is but demanding those who don’t share your world view be silenced just serves to further divide us. Afterall some of the same voices shouting the loudest are the same voices who forgave Hillary Clinton for her super predator comment and thought she would be a good president. Currently they seem to think Biden with his long list of inappropriate comments would be fine and are covering for his metoo scandal. Of course we have our own Prime Minister who has a habit of wearing blackface, but all is forgiven because of his I got caught apology.
It really is a shame humanity could be so much better.
Too much drama.
Day and Wilson’s right to free speech has not been infringed. The orgs in question have simply said they may no longer be associates after freely exercising their right. Day and Wilson have this right, but they also bear theor own responsibility for using it.
It has nothing to do with left or right partisanship. But I agree: the notion that it has would require enforcing since no unbiased assessment would freely believe it.
JT does not have a blackface habit. He has been forgiven by voters—although with the condition of minority.
It’s actually a good thing, not a shame, that humans can do so much better than they have been doing—that means there’s hope.
You know, maybe TELUS and McMillan LLP didn’t need to receive thousands of emails complaining about Stockwell Day. Maybe they’re smart enough to know this kind of thing is more grief than it’s worth, corporate-image-wise, and they informed him he’d resigned all on their own. With regard to McMillan LLP, I’m betting that taking him on was not popular internally in the first place, and a farewell party is scheduled for this week – to which he is NOT invited.
The difference between large corporations and smaller ones is that the large ones are committed to a public presence that doesn’t tick people off. You’ll never see the big O&G corps pull all the immature emo stuff that small O&G producers do. For large corps, the market is everything.
The BLM movement even reached “hillbilly Grande Prairie” (as my youngest daughter called it on FB): about a thousand area residents marched around the downtown core yesterday — almost everyone wearing masks, from what I saw in the pix. (Full disclosure: I wasn’t there … it was our granddaughter’s 6th birthday party, planned weeks ago).
Now, some of the comments on Everything GP’s FB post of this story are pretty odious, so you can’t say racism isn’t alive & well up here — but at least the protest was peaceful & there were no counter-protesters, so that’s one positive.
https://everythinggp.com/2020/06/07/speeches-given-at-black-lives-matter-protest-highlight-issues-in-the-community-and-ways-to-address-them/
Stockwell Day…
But wait, did you say Telus, as in the same Telus that owns Kenney’s Babylon Health app, or as it is now called, Babylon by Telus Health?
How many of these Harper-Kenney cronies are there behind the scenes getting paid to stealthily reshape our lives into ultra-conservative, Old Testament Alberta, where there is absolutely no separation of church and state?
Let’s take a walk back in time, shall we.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/day-drops-threat-to-sue-lawyer/article25437483/
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/election-rhetoric-flies-over-racism-and-religion-1.230437
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2000/11/day-n27.html
https://thetyee.ca/Views/2004/12/01/TheManwhoWalkswithDinosaurs/
https://www.questia.com/magazine/1G1-66011882/bentley-alberta-hellfire-neo-nazis-and-stockwell
Stockwell Day also does not like women who are “shrill”. Yes, dinosaurs do walk among us to this day, not 6000 years ago. Some of them ride Sea-doos.
Where were the loud, visible, youthful protesters in this instance?
“A disturbing new report from the Canadian military paints a picture of severe neglect inside several of Ontario’s long-term care homes struggling with the Covid-19 pandemic, including observations of insect infestations, staffing shortages and patients being underfed and left in soiled diapers. Cockroach infestations were observed in two of the centers. There are multiple reports of residents with untreated bed sores due to prolonged bed rest. The report also notes serious hygiene problems, including patients being left in soiled diapers or on bare mattresses due to a lack of clean linen. There are reports of “forceful feeding” and hydration of residents causing “audible choking.”
Silence, followed by more awkward silence. The visible displays of a youthful, energetic angst/sturm und drang on the public stage are at least consistent, as they dramatically showcase the vast gulf that exists between the advertised vigor of a youth oriented culture and caducity.
Nice to see.
Now do protest against homophobia.
The, march for support for public education, university funding, pubic health funding, and publicly-funded and regulated long term care for seniors.