Poor Mark Carney, PM
I finally had to go to bed at 11.30 last night, couldn’t stand the tension of watching the election. The Conservatives had a much stronger showing than was predicted, seemed to be surging, and I was too nervous. In the end, the Liberals came through, albeit with what seems, unfortunately, like a minority government by only a few seats. PP lost his own seat thanks to the indefatigable Bruce Fanjoy and his ebullient team. The NDP are eviscerated, and the Bloc Quebecois not much better.
My own province — the city itself a sea of red, and the surrounding suburbs, the places that elected the vile Doug Ford, a sea of blue. Talk about two solitudes. We are close neighbours but have diametrically opposing views of the world in which we live. My former cleaning lady and friend who lives in Mississauga would ask me about stuff she’d heard about or read — conspiracy theories, absurd medical lies, Covid myths — and I’d ask where she’d heard them while I tried to set her straight. I know, the concerns of the 905 are genuine; there was a desperate sense that food and housing are too expensive, that change is needed, and that the Conservatives, who vote against social programs, health care, public education, and everything good, would help them. Like Trump voters, they would have been in for a big surprise.
But have to say, of all the people in the country I do not envy today – chief among them Pierre Poilievre – the one I feel sorriest for is Mark Carney. An inexperienced politician, he has at least 168 ambitious souls to manage, two prairie provinces that hate him, a threatening lunatic to the south, a number of unstable countries and vicious wars, a burning planet. Who would want to take that on? I wish him godspeed and all the luck in the world.
In other news, I have spent many, many hours deleting every cartoon from my blog over the last 18 years, but just received another threatening note demanding payment for ones posted more than a decade ago. Some poor schmuck is having to hunt through my blog day by day. I read online it’s happening to others with tiny little blogs like mine that have never made money; we simply post for the pleasure of readers. Hard to comprehend a company out to make money threatening people like me. I cannot imagine the cartoonists object to a fan posting their marvellous images on a personal blog read by almost no one.
So the only images that will appear here from now on will be ones I have taken myself. Here’s my lunch. I used to make it for the kids as a way to get them to eat vegetables, as the chief ingredient is broccoli; I called it frog soup which made them laugh, and they ate it. It looks dreadful, but it’s the taste of their childhood and so my relative youth. I’m still hacking and sniffling, so soup is the thing. Cheers!
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