With this last bit of news I am officially ashamed to be from this country. Not since I was maybe ten, when I dressed up for Halloween as the made-up superhero, the Canada Kid, where I wore a Canadian flag as a cape, along with a red toque, red tights and a red t-shirt, would I say I was patriotic. Supporting Olympic athletes, thanks to the corporate encouragement from Maple-flavoured Wheaties, and free Esso collectable cups, was one of my greatest passions. I would draw pictures of the Canadian Olympic logo, dream of the distant lands of Nagano, and talk about getting a tattoo on my ass that said, ‘Made in Canada’. I could’ve ended up like this.

But thanks to years of cynicism, informative reading, thrashy music, I haven’t.

And thanks to years of governments ruling the country as if it was a coloured piece of land on a board game, I haven’t.

There is maybe nothing else a government could do to embarrass me more (I am currently, and constantly, knocking on wood). The environmental-raping side of Bill C-38 makes ‘sense’ in a twisted, soulless, no-foresight kind of way. But this, sweet Lord, this makes me feel like I just ran over a family of immigrants in my car, which was maybe what they were going for. I feel like I was at the driver’s seat. I feel responsible. I can no longer make this political banter poetic or ambiguous. I can no longer dance around my views to avoid this as an idiot-styled opinion blog. We reduce our foreign aid for those billions that don’t live here, but taking away funding for the hundreds of thousands that barely made it here, and only did so to save their own lives, is, put lightly, misdirected. If put truthfully, it is selfish. It is inhumane and uncivilized.

I can only imagine how many fabled jobs this will create, as if job creation were the cure to the illnesses of our likely already employed refugees. Hard work cures all. Hard work makes you forget your ills. Hard work leaves no time to go to the doctor. Hard work kills. Hard work reduces the amount of refugees. The Omnibus is now departing, and the Omnibus now makes sense.

Here is to the creation of jobs, the trump card used in every possible governmental situation to make cuts sound reasonable. Those temporary, resource and location-based, earth-pillaging jobs. I can’t wait to get one.

On that Halloween as the Canada Kid, in between houses where we scavenged processed sweets from wealthy extra-suburban families, I found my bladder full of carbonated beverages. I stopped at a group of bushes, my cape blowing heroically behind me until a new gust sent it back my way, intercepting my stream of warm, patriotically-digested sodapop. I pissed all over it. A fortunate bit of foreshadowing as to what I wish I could do now if I had a flag on ground level, or if my rainbow of piss could reach the height of a flagpole.

I would gladly piss all over this place now. And on the many symbols that represent it. As it has already pissed all over us. Several times over the past year.

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