Culture

Our new guests had arrived to join us on the patio. We were 48 hours removed from the marathon voting session in the lower chamber over the contentious bill C-38, that one that would implement the Conservative government’s latest budget. The Action Plan for Canada’s economy. A vision for the future. Probably not one guiding us to the world of science fiction imaginations, but apparently instead a map for a staid path we’ve been told is a tested route to success, though nobody seems to be able to agree whether it points forward or backward.

It’s been two weeks since the body parts turned up here in Ottawa, since Albert Street was lined for a block with emergency vehicles and Hazmat precautions all afternoon, through a monstrous early summer thunderstorm that cracked through that thick air that lingers in this valley. And now that the alleged sender, one Luka Rocco Magnotta, sits in a German jail and the search continues for his victim’s various other body parts, the precinct within which the Conservative Party headquarters is located – that is, The Hill – has returned to a kind of normalcy.

The server says she’d come out from Ottawa to work in Whistler. A ski bum. A bit of working in the winter and then some travel in the summer. But it didn’t work out. It lasted two weeks, she says. Now here she is in Vancouver, landed in a shift job serving discount ale on a Sunday at this particular iteration of whatever bourgeois chain of gastro-sameness we were in at the time. She’ll be going home soon enough, back to Ontario and back to university, most likely. Back to the city of bureaucrats and big mouths resting on tired, leftover big suits.

One hundred and something days, everyone. We’re into it now, whatever the fuck this has become. The people in the streets, banging away on pots and pans are going viral. Buzzfed to the world’s eyeballs – a meme direct from the barricades of Quebec, the Montreal mayhem of tin noise and, if nobody's careful, a dangerously hollowing sense of purpose. Just an emptying pot, banging away. This was about the tuition. Or about the general theme of a government so broke it can’t even pay itself to make the corruption go away. It was something like that. But anyway, to the streets.