What Do You Celebrate on Canada Day After the Flood?

I stole this from a Dave Rutherford tweet, but am pretty sure it's going viral, so that should be okay. 

On 11 September 2001, we were told by those who could remember days of similar impact—Hiroshima, Kennedy’s assassination—that there are days we remember every detail of. Forever after, we tell people where we were when, what we were doing when, how we heard that. We define our life by before that day and after it.

                Forever our days are the pre and the post.

                For many in Canmore and High River, those days will be the days before and the days after Thursday, 20 June 2013. A day later for the people of Calgary and Siksika Nation. Over the course of the weekend, breath was held and then released in Red Deer, Drumheller, Medicine Hat. After the devastation upriver, their fear was understandable.

                June 20 and 21, and the days which followed. The longest days of the year twice over in 2013.

                This is my tenth year in my adopted province. Twice in that ten years Southern Alberta has been ravaged by floods, though 2005 is only a memory now. The Flood of the Century forgotten in less than a decade. I have come to love Alberta, and am proud and delighted to live where I do.

                On this day where we celebrate the nation we live in, if you’re like me you’re feeling, perhaps, a little guilty to be celebrating anything while others toil in in homes that, unlike your own, are not dry or safe or perhaps even standing. How can we celebrate anything, especially something as vague as our national identity when people are shovelling sewage out of their basements rather than looking aloft at fireworks?

                I won’t remind you of the savagery of Mother Nature. I won’t add my voice to the chorus of “This too shall pass.” Instead I will encourage you to celebrate things that are very worthy of it, as an Albertan, as a Canadian, as a human being. I will remind you of the good.

                Of the grinning firefighter carrying the little old lady through knee-deep water.

                Of the volunteers who keep coming, long past the expectation, to work in their neighbors’ devastated homes.

                Of Edmonton military, police, firefighters, rushing down the QE2 to come to the aid of their beleaguered sister city.

                Of the people who opened their homes to complete strangers needing a place to stay.

                Of students and teachers from Strathmore who, a day away from summer break, went to Siksika to help the stricken.

                Of the people who donated clothing, food, or time to those who lost a little or lost it all.

                Of the people who said, over and over, “At least we’re alive. Stuff can be replaced.”

                On this Canada Day I’m proud of us. As we march further into the days that came after, we need to remember this unity, this good. The clean-up and rebuilding will be long and difficult, and possibly more demanding than the initial shock of tragedy.

                We have two lives now, the one before and the one after. What we need to remember is the unity we saw at the point where our days became divided. Where we stood as one and we held a mud-streaked hand out to a brother or a sister.

                I love you today, Southern Alberta, for I have seen us all stand as one. 

The Future of Elections? Here's Hoping

It’s a sad state of politics in this country that when Calgary and many of the municipalities in Alberta held elections last night, people celebrated huge turnouts at the polls, but those numbers revealed that only about half of eligible voters turned up.

About half. Hurrah for democracy at work.

In Calgary, and in some towns such as Okotoks, Airdrie and Strathmore, voter turnout was high because the races were tighter, ferocious, and highly publicized. People got angry, people got interested. People did something we’ve been seeing less and less of in this country of late: they exercised their democratic right.

In our last federal election, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives won a minority government with thirty percent of the vote of the just less than sixty percent of the country that voted. More people voted against this government than for it, but in a multi-party system, that’s life. Doesn’t it make you wonder what would’ve happened had the other forty-some percent of the country shown up at the polls. A Harper majority? A completely different government?

About a year ago I commented on my Facebook page about voter apathy, and some of the most disturbing replies to this came from intelligent people who have given up on our system. They don’t believe in our democracy at all. “It’s useless; they’re corrupt; they just fight and holler; they’re more concerned with keeping power than with governing.”

Disturbing, especially when I find myself inclined to agree with the last two statements.

Could it be that the childishness of our governing officials, the petty finger-pointing and playground “he did it first!” mentality has turned Canadians off of a system the rest of the world has so admired for decades?

Yeah. Duh.

It’s been bad for a while now. I can remember a time it wasn’t this bad, where every single statement in the House of Commons wasn’t met with caterwauling from the benches across the way, but maybe it’s because back then I was younger and ignorant. Or perhaps those were the days of crushing majorities so the Opposition just couldn’t voice its pettiness to the same levels of immaturity they can today.

Calgarians woke up this morning to a new mayor, a man whose Obama-like rise to glory overshadows the fact that he could be just as petty as the rest of them during this past election. I’m glad for Calgary, glad they elected an intelligent, educated man, a younger mayor whose status as a visible minority may do much to erase the taint of being “the Whitest City in the West.” However, when the mud was there to be slung, Mr. Nenshi was willing to come up with mitt-fulls to huck into the faces of opponents eventually defeated not so much for their policies as for their status as representing the old guard.

I am overjoyed at the new involvement, at the news of line-ups at polls and that the third place mayoral candidate would’ve won any election in the past with her number of votes. I am saddened that at the municipal level we are seeing the seeping of the slimy partisan politics that are making a mockery of Ottawa. We are seeing attack ads, character vilifications, and basically the same levels of Us and Them idiocy that has stained the Houses of Parliament for the last decade or so.

I hope that the new interest is a start, and that the numbers continue to climb. I hope that our new mayors, respectively, can live up to a few of their promises. I hope most of all that people are voting because it’s the right thing to do, not because of the spectacle that has been created.