"Canada Is Suffering From An Excess Of Right-wing Idiots"

Iceland Or New Zealand might be good escape options if you want to leave the fuckery behind

(Canada, eh? Greetings from our neighbors to the north. They come in peace. And sans culottes)

Remember the heady days of post-election 2016, when we all swore that we’d move to Canada before living a day under the reign of Orange Jesus? We eventually calmed down when we realized that our jobs, spouses, families, friends, and mortgages were here in the YEW-nited States of AmeriKKKa. And so we stayed- under protest, but we survived.

It was neither fun nor pleasant, but we stuck out four years of The Reign of Error. Then came Election Day 2020, when we had an opportunity to rectify AmeriKKKa’s Epic F**k-Up. And so we did- and once again, peace and happiness reigned throughout the Kingdom…or as close as we get to it these days.

And the fact that we didn’t move to Canada may have worked out in our favor. As it turns out, there’s some fuckery afoot in the Great White North:

Ontario, my home and native land, is so thoroughly, thoroughly fucked.

Doug Ford, noted brother of the late and not great Toronto mayor Rob, has all of Rob’s flaws with none of his sibling’s charm. A college drop-out, he ALLEGEDLY spent much of the '80s selling drugs.

He roared into office in 2018 with a hefty majority, and proceeded to strip the province for parts. Like, there’s no way to list everything he fucked up, but some have tried.

The waiting list for autism therapy went from 23,000 to 53,000 in his first four years in office, with an average wait time now of eight years.

He passed legislation holding public employees such as health care workers to a 1 percent annual increase, which contributed to the unprecedented increase of 56 percent in nursing vacancies in just the first half of 2021. You know, during the pandemic. No biggie.

Oh, and with absolutely horrific conditions in privately owned nursing homes, leading to high death rates from COVID-19, Doug Ford’s response was to give them 30-year contracts instead of focusing on non-profit homes instead. In one home, more than a dozen residents died of dehydration, as the army discovered when they moved in to help.

Hmm…is it just me, or does Ontario sound like New Jersey under Chris Christie?

Reading this makes me feel like I’m watching an episode of The Sopranos.

He pushed through plans to build a $10 billion by-pass through valuable agricultural land and natural wetlands to save 30 to 60 seconds per trip. But oh, hey, there are lots of Doug’s developer buddies who have lands they’d like to turn into more suburban sprawl all along the route! How crazy is that? (It’s on hold right now because the federal government is insisting on an environmental review, as well as Indigenous consultations. Phew!)

Oh, and yeah, while Ottawa, very much a part of Ontario, was occupied by the honkening this past winter, where was Doug? Snowmobiling.

So, you’d think with all this and so very, very, much more that there was NO WAY Doug could win a second term this past June, right? Wrong!

Forty-three percent of eligible voters actually got off their asses and voted. Of them, 40 percent voted for Ford and his merry band of thugs. They won 83 seats of 124. Eighteen percent of eligible voters have saddled us with four more years of fuckery. (It didn’t help that the Liberal and New Democratic Party were both fucking useless during the campaign.)

So, what’s happened since? Well, when school support workers tried to get a decent wage hike so they wouldn’t be scraping by on ridiculously low pay, they got stonewalled by Ford and his preening Minister of Education, Stephen Lecce, offering them less than 16 percent of what they were asking for, just to keep up with inflation.

The workers voted to strike, legally. Ford turned around and introduced legislation forcing them to stay on the job, and imposing a contract with increases of only 2.5 or 1.5 percent. Well below inflation!

So, I can hear my gentle reader wondering, “Where and when does the fuckery start?” But, patience, dear one, for all is about to be revealed.

Before I do that, one should remember that Canada’s legal system is still home to numerous nifty little ways for a business person to screw over their workers.

Yes, you might think of our neighbors to the north as the home of peace, order, and good government, but corruption a la Doug Ford would shame any New Jersey politico. Sure, it’s nasty, corrupt, and cruel, but when viewed in a particular light, it’s almost a thing of beauty.

But wait, you may say if you knew the previous history of such Ontario legislation. Did not a judge strike down a similar attempt by the Ontario Liberal government in the past?

Why yes, yes he did! But there’s this one weird trick that we all hate, called the Notwithstanding Clause. You see, when Pierre Trudeau, daddy of Justin, was prime minister back in the early '80s and negotiating with the provincial premiers to get the Charter of Rights and Freedoms into the Constitution, the only way he could get them to sign on was if there was a handy escape hatch that could be used to override those said rights and freedoms.

In other words, all a premier had to do was use that clause to shut down any judicial appeal of any law. And that’s what Doug Ford has done here.

So, last Friday CUPE workers went out on strike. Ford ran straight to the Labour Relations Board over the weekend and begged them to declare the strike illegal. Monday, he and weasel-who-walks-like-a-man Lecce blinked. Probably because they knew the LRB was going to rule in favour of the union. Anyway, Ford promised to withdraw the legislation if CUPE quit striking. They’re negotiating again (phew).

Oh, and Ford just sent out a few hundred dollars to every parent in the province for tutoring or a new tablet or whatever. Despite the fact that it won’t pay for more than a couple of hours of tutoring, if mom or dad does decide to spend it on that and not on basically whatever the fuck they want.

You know what’s funny? Seven construction unions endorsed Doug in the election. All seven have now condemned him for trampling on union rights. Why, it’s almost as if you can’t trust the man to actually care about workers, but that can't be right?

And it gets worse; Ontario has had something called the Greenbelt since 2005. It’s a swath of environmentally sensitive lands around Hamilton, Toronto, and other cities. In 2018, Doug Ford promised not to touch the Greenbelt.

Well, integrity doesn’t exactly run in the Ford family…so I’ll leave my gentle reader to guess what Ford’s next move would be.

Yep, the man who’s tight with developers has announced that his government is planning to carve out 15 parcels of land so Ford’s pals can build 50,000 homes.

It’s OK, Ford is telling his fellow Ontarians, ‘cuz they’re going to make things right. They’ll take land from other places to make up the difference. But, unfortunately, what Ford proposes is not a like-for-like swap. Instead, he wants to build homes on wetlands and some of Canada’s most fertile farmland.

Oh, and there’s a “funny” story to go along with that. Guess whose land they will use to “make up the difference?” It turns out that some of Ford’s developer buddies have been purchasing large parcels of land in the Greenbelt.

It has to be a coincidence, right? I mean, who coulda foreseen that?

And this is just one Canadian province- Ontario- we’re discussing. I have no idea if other provinces are so easily and casually corrupt, but even if they’re only half as bad as Doug Ford’s Ontario, Canada’s a freakin’ mess.

So what we have here is a clear-cut (pun fully intentional) case of the grass not being greener on the northern side of the border. Sure, Canada sounds excellent, what with all those polite people, Mounties, back bacon, and hockey. But, when you dig a bit deeper, it sounds like New Jersey with very polite corruption.

If you’ve made it this far, you’ve probably already figured out the moral of the story: Canada has the same type of ignorant, corrupt, self-absorbed Right-wing nutjobs we’re blessed with on the south side of the 49th Parallel. There may be grass in Canada, but it’s the same shade of green as it is here in America.

If you’re looking for someplace to escape to that feels different and definitely ISN’T America, you might have to look a bit farther afield, like Iceland or New Zealand.

And I hear that land is VERY cheap in Russia these days….