Spinners and Boozers

The alternative choice had a weak J, she said, pointing to the sign at the door. So they decided to go with a different typeface – one that still conjured up the idea of history and presented the fortitude the opposition party needed to get whatever message it was it had across to the people of Canada.

On that particular day, the message from the opposition was about the budget implementation bill, and its apparent un-democratic tendencies. It was too much to put into one bill, a panel of experts told the small-ish crowd gathered in one of the two big committee rooms in Centre Block of Parliament Hill – a roundtable on the budget convened by the opposition.

It was the room with the large painting of the founding fathers of confederation, sweating their bags off in Charlottetown on that summer day in the pre-1867 days, trying to piece together some rough sketch of what the dominion might look like. I wrote about the painting once, as the lede to a story about nothing – some House committee meeting that didn’t matter. Ethics, I think. And there it sat, that stupid paragraph, a six-sentence beast at the top of the story, some lyrical bullshit about the history of this and that, and the fact that these men were forever forced to stare at the endless inanity of daily parliamentary proceedings like a death penalty from some special kind of bizzaro hell where all the results of your decisions are laid out before you for all time. It was too long. It didn’t get to the point. The lede, that is.

So, here we all were, back in the same room some time later, listening to the experts called forth by the New Democrats to reveal all the issues with the Conservative budget implementation bill – a piece of legislation that aims to do so much more than what it states, including changing environmental assessment regulations, employment insurance, and – if we were to take the opposition at its word– the very foundations of Canadian democracy itself. Oh, but fuck it. You know? Who gives a shit about democracy, anyway?

It’s not as stupid a question as it might seem. The Ottawa streets sitting at the feet of the Hill buzz with this or that conversation about the tactics and strategic thinking, but outside the precinct it’s a tough sell – especially when there are kids to cart off to some school somewhere and a huge suburban palace to maintain and pay for. And you need to get to the gym so all that wine you drink this weekend will sit better with the prematurely aged guilt you developed somewhere in your mid-twenties when the Life Schedule was kicking into high gear.

This is the government that has created 750,000 net new jobs, apparently. Or so we’re told, day after day, minute by minute. Every job is a government-created job. Every lost job is the result of market volatility. Or the Europeans, with their joint currency and socialist leaders, destined to force the dangerous lapping shores over the barricades, breaking into every living room across this northern nation. Christ. Help us. Someone.

And lo, the budget raises up, a heavy, beefy document of wealth and long-term prosperity. Or so say the government spinners and hangers-on who like to quote titles. It is a budget that will set a course for the future, a chance for us to make it all right again. Deficits? Where we’re going we don’t need deficits. Why should we go with it? What happens if we don't? What, do we all become assholes or something? No, no. It’s not you, it’s your kids, Marty. Fire up the flux capacitor. Engage. Disappear.

The future is now: Canada, the way we all believed it to be when we found out we were entitled to it five minutes ago, right after you mentioned that bit about no more deficits and prosperity and all that stuff. Oh, by the way, in order to get to that, we should mention you need to step into the office over here because you’re fucking fired.

To make matters worse, the bill that will put the whole thing in place is sitting at committee stage now like a big wet fart, seeping through the finance committee into a sub-committee to deal with its environmental provisions. Not that it will help, the opposition says. That’s not enough. Split it up. Cut that fart. Well, the government disagrees. And maybe they’re right. Who knows. Either way, it’s causing a stink.

But where was I? The committee room, under the watchful eyes of Sir John A. Macdonald, the sage of early Canada, the drunken first prime minister, governing the country when Ottawa still had pigs roaming its main thoroughfares. And now someone is saying something about the budget’s ability to silence dissent and cut off the voices of the every day Canadian. This is how we all feel about this, the experts tell us.

OK. But I keep thinking about that typeface I saw on the way in. That was a calculated decision to win over some part of my brain. I’m not sure this isn’t the same.