I wasn't going to write this. Then again, I wasn't going to write the one in March 2024 either. That post changed my life because, for once, I stopped pretending I was managing and simply told people what was actually happening and how ideological liberal policies affected my household. Two and a half years later, I'm doing it still. I kept telling myself I could handle one more thing. Then one more thing arrived. And another. Eventually you run out of things to sell, things you can fix yourself and creative ways to rearrange $14.37. You don't necessarily fall apart no matter how much you may want to. Sometimes, you just sit down and tell the truth. So here it is... My mother along with the other 7 assorted guardians in my first 15 years of life always said there'd be hard days like this. They all really should have been more specific about their frequency though. September 8 would have been mine and Dave's 30th anniversary. I knew that date was coming. I thought I was prepared for it. Apparently I wasn't. Maybe that's why everything feels heavier right now. Or maybe it's because everything actually IS heavier right now. I don't know anymore. Since losing Dave, I've been trying to keep the life we built running on my school bus income of less than $24,000 a year while still fighting the life insurance claim. I can't afford a lawyer so it's a tedious process. As well, I lost a secondary gig earning $550 a month for managing a social media account for an organization whose founder seems to have lost their mind and sensibilities, and went on a kneecapping spree. And now the house is not cooperating. The sewer line collapsed in the spring after a guy I hired to power auger it apparently did more than auger it. Sixty-some feet of sewer line had to be dug up and replaced. And no. I do not have house insurance. I can't get it with the electrical problem in the basement and what I can get is exceptionally expensive and out of reach for me. Thank God Saskatchewan has an emergency home repair program and I qualified, because I honestly don't know what I would have done. I did have to pay a lawyer hundreds of dollars to get Dave's name removed from the title of the house first, back in April this year. The man on the phone felt horrified telling me a mere 7 months after I lose him that I need to have his name removed. I found myself consoling the gentleman and reassuring him he was simply doing his job and I know he wasn't personally involved in that policy. But he was very distressed asking a fresh widow to sever one more tie to her deceased spouse. Poor guy was inconsolable. That was a strange day. Your husband dies, and a few months later you're paying somebody to take his name off the house you bought together so you can qualify for government assistance to replace the sewer. Nobody puts that part in the "So You're A Widow Now" brochure. Then my family friend finally came in June. He'd been telling me for months not to worry. He'd take his three week vacation, come down and he'd help me finish the things Dave didn't get to. He swore up and down that he knew how to do this stuff. And I believed him. I had no reason not to. I need to be very clear about something because I don't want anyone thinking badly of this man. He's 60. He has recurring cancers from blood to bone and skin. He's on dialysis. He got on an airplane and dragged that dialysis machine across the country to spend three weeks on vacation helping DaVida and me. He bought the materials himself. He did it because he loves us. Unfortunately, love does not a dry shower make. The whole tub surround and shower had to be redone after he left. All of it. Regular drywall had been installed in the shower. Vertically AND backwards. Brown paper facing the bathtub. The tub surround was glued over it and left 2 inches of exposed drywall all around the top. I made him cut that out, and he solved it by using 3/8 pvc quarter round molding to bridge the half inch gap at the top. He used butt joints to bboot. For anyone not aware, a butt joint in a corner not only looks terrible and unprofessional, but it still allows water to enter and destroy the drywall and grow mold. My basement flooded twice while he was here, both times as a result of him or something innocuous that he did. Once because his dialysis machine kept tripping a breaker and nobody realized my sump pump was on it, but would have been avoided if he had just listened when I told him to plug the camper he was using for three weeks into the house, not my garage. The second time, he had been kneeling on my basement floor and grabbed the sump discharge pipe to pull himself back up. In the process, he completely dislodged it from the wall and pulled the outside end of the pipe back through the hole and into the basement. I didn't realize what had happened, so for about a week my sump pump was faithfully pumping water out of my basement and directly back into my basement. The pump worked perfectly. The water just kept coming back. Nobody noticed. Including me. I'm not sure whether that technically qualifies as a sump pump anymore or an indoor water feature. Keep in mind, this was barely eight weeks ago. Then he finished some siding on the back of the house using white soffit screws through my brown siding to hold the pieces together. Apparently he was unaware that vinyl siding locks into each other, and then you attach it to the house via the nail strip. So now it looks like Home Depot bedazzled my house. And I couldn't even get mad. Well, not in a way he could notice. What was I supposed to do? Yell at a man with cancer who dragged a dialysis machine across Canada because he loves my kid and me like his own, and has the emotional maturity of a 15 year old? I hugged him when I dropped him at the airport, then went and parked at Home Depot until they opened to start the arduous task of sourcing and finding affordable materials like cement board, thinset, grout and tile. Then I started repairing the repairs. I forked out close to another $800 for materials, plus $1,500 for the contractor's wages to have the tub and shower properly rebuilt. And that $1,500 was only about half what the labour should have cost me. I ran out of money so his wife came over and spent an entire day just on grout and absolutely refuses compensation for it. The contractor, who only moved here from Ontario this year and already has more work than he can handle, knew my circumstances and charged me half price because, as he put it, the Bible says to help the widow. He has since solemnly promised that whenever I need him, he will make himself available and will never charge me more than half price. That is the best news for me, because I have some much that needs doing. So I started selling things. Some of Dave's tools went first. Then his turntable, CD player, hundreds of DVDs and CDs. Eventually, I sold his record collection too, just three weeks ago. There were more than 1,200 albums packed into fourteen milk crates, all alphabetized. Decades of rock music he'd collected from the '60s right up until he died. It was his pride and joy, and I got $150 for the whole thing. Not because it was worth $150. It wasn't. I got $150 because I needed $150 immediately. That one hurt. And now the roof is leaking again, and the basement is wet again. My existing sump pit isn't deep enough. There's plywood subflooring downstairs that still needs to be pulled up. I can smell that damp, rotten smell starting underneath my bedroom, right beside the cold-air returns, which is handy if the objective is to circulate it through the entire house. I've now been told there are four critical things that need to be dealt with before they become much bigger problems that will break the bank and find me comparing prices between matches or repairs. And winter is coming. Of course it iis.Ots always coming. Then yesterday one of my cats appeared with a broken foot. She isn't even originally my cat. She belonged to my neighbour who died two years ago after taking a tumble off her second story roof. I took her cats in. She spent last night beside me, growling and howling whenever anything in the room dared to move because she's hurting. And I can't fix it. That's the part that gets me. I can put a bucket under a leak. I can pump water out of a hole. I can sell something when I need money, though not so much now since I've sold pretty much everything of value. Somehow, I can usually figure something out. But I can't explain to an animal why I can't just make her stop hurting. She doesn't understand money, or vet bills, or why sometimes wanting desperately to fix something isn't enough. She just knows her foot hurts like hell. And then there's DaVida, and that's the one I really don't know what to do with. I've found out she's being bullied at school. Not just kids being kids, either. Someone is deliberately telling other children not to be friends with her. She's being talked about, insulted and told to shut up when she's sitting there minding her own business. Her bully's father happens to be a Minister in the Sask parliament. And she hasn't been telling me. She's been hiding it. She's eleven years old. She's high functioning autistic. She went back to school barely two weeks after losing her dad, and now, a year later, she's withdrawing into herself while apparently trying to carry this without bothering me with it. I can deal with the damn basement. I can deal with the roof, and I can deal with losing things. They're things. Eventually I find some half-assed way to deal with them because that's what I've been doing my entire life. But finding out my kid has been quietly hurting while I've been running around trying to keep everything else from falling apart is something else entirely, and is destroying my soul. In March of 2024 I wrote a letter to Justin Trudeau when I was at my wit's end trying to understand how an ordinary working family was supposed to keep doing this. A lot of you found me because of that post. Back then there were two of us adults here. Now there's one. And after eleven years of Liberal government, I'm still doing the same arithmetic I was doing then: What can wait? What can't? What can I fix myself? What can I sell? I own my dump of a house. I don't have a mortgage. I work, and I don't take vacations be ause I can't. I don't buy clothes because DaVida needs clothes first. I don't have expensive hobbies, because who has time when daily survival is the time consuming activity ecery day. I'm not trying to live some grand lifestyle. I'm trying to keep a roof from leaking and water out of my basement, and somehow even THAT is becoming physically, mentally and financially impossible. That's what I think gets lost when politicians talk about affordability. They talk about percentages and programs and billions of dollars like ordinary Canadians live inside spreadsheets. We don't. We live in houses where the sump pump breaks. We have cars that need tires, kids who need shoes, pets that get hurt and furnaces that quit in January. And sometimes we sell something worth considerably more for $150 because what we actually need is $150 right now, today. There are millions of Canadians doing some version of that calculation. That's the part nobody in Ottawa or Toronto/Montreal/Vancouver seems to understand. And please don't remind me I'm strong. I know I'm strong. I'm tough. I'm smart. I'm resourceful. I've always been those tthings.But sometimes... I don't feel like being strong. I just want to scream and cry and feel sorry for myself while I curl up in a ball, preferably amongst a bunch a cute adorable calves in a field where no one can witness my breakdown. However, none of those qualities of personal fortitude and strength appear to have any waterproofing properties. Strength doesn't fix my roof. Intelligence doesn't pump water from my basement. Resilience doesn't make my cat stop hurting. And being tough doesn't make my little girl understand why other kids don't want to be her friend. I'll get up tomorrow. I'll drive my bus. I'll take care of DaVida. I'll feed the animals. I'll pump the basement. I'll probably get angry about something happening in Ottawa and write about that too. I'll keep going. I always do. But I'm tired... really tired. I've had enough character development for one lifetime. I have character coming out my ass so I don't need another lesson about how much I can survive... I already know. I just need life to stop asking me to prove it on a daily basis for even just a little while. God only knows how many others in Canada are navigating the same stressors.

He doesn’t even have a drivers license, were you surprised?

BC Conservative members, I am honoured and humbled to be chosen as your next leader of the BC Conservative Party. Thank you to every member who placed their trust in me. Together we will defeat the NDP and restore prosperity to British Columbia. Join me, findlay4bc.ca

Why would anyone be proud of their achievement in the increasing of the carbon tax ? Are they truly that far removed from reality ??

How many previous Prime Minister's of Canada or even Premiers have had their very own umbrella holder? The answer is zero. Little Lord Flauntleroy is the first.

Accurate

For the love of all things carbon! Listen, @MarkJCarney, there are weeks in Canadian politics where ordinary people merely roll their eyes and carry on. Then there are weeks like this one! Weeks where the federal Liberal government unleashes such a blizzard of polished jargon, climate catechisms, managerial buzzwords, consultant dialects, and carefully rehearsed statesmanship that the average Canadian is left standing in the kitchen holding a grocery receipt like a battlefield telegram wondering what in God’s name these people are even talking about anymore! Pipelines. Electrification. Industrial transition frameworks. Nation building. Strategic corridors. Carbon competitiveness. It's Malarkey!  At one point the entire thing sounded less like a government announcement and more like a CBC panel discussion hosted by people who think inflation is caused by Canadians misunderstanding how fortunate they are. Meanwhile out here in the less fashionable parts of Canada where we KNOW affordability is NOT the best its been in a decade, people are trying to figure out whether they can afford fuel, mortgage renewals, groceries, summer sports for their kids, or the increasingly extravagant luxury of owning both a vehicle and dignity at the same time. So let’s translate what your government actually announced this week into language spoken by human beings instead of public affairs consultants. You stood beside Danielle Smith and announced support for a potential West Coast pipeline capable of shipping over a million barrels of oil per day to Asian markets. Now politically, that is a remarkable moment. Because for years your broader movement treated pipelines as though they were giant steel climate crimes stretching across the countryside. Oil and gas workers were routinely spoken about with the same tone downtown activists reserve for offshore tax havens and people who don’t separate recycling properly. Canadians questioning carbon taxes or energy restrictions were portrayed as backwards holdouts resisting inevitable progress. Entire sectors of the economy were moralized against by people whose understanding of "hard work" largely involves forwarding emails between catered conferences. Then suddenly, after years of weak productivity, stagnant wages, capital flight, soaring debt costs, collapsing affordability, and an American economy aggressively pulling investment southward like an industrial vacuum cleaner... your government rediscovers oil. Remarkable! 😲 It is rather like watching a man spend ten years denouncing cheeseburgers before quietly opening a steakhouse once the electricity bill arrives. But here is where the performance begins collapsing under the weight of its own absurd contradictions: There is no actual company officially lined up to build this pipeline yet. Tiny issue there it seems. 🤔 That matters because announcing support for a pipeline and finding investors willing to risk billions inside Canada’s regulatory labyrinth are not even remotely the same thing. One is performative theatre. The other involves engineers, accountants, financing, timelines, permits, insurance, labour shortages, activist opposition, court challenges, and the lingering suspicion that Ottawa may simply change the rules halfway through construction because somebody at a climate summit gets emotionally hysterical. And then came the truly Canadian flourish. Your government tied the proposal to escalating industrial carbon pricing. Mr. Carney, this is the part where ordinary citizens stop nodding politely and begin rubbing their temples vigorously.  You are simultaneously trying to encourage massive energy investment while steadily increasing the future cost burdens attached to the very industry expected to build the infrastructure. So what industry hears is: "Please invest billions while we continue making your operating environment progressively less competitive over time. At YOUR expense!" That is not economic certainty. That is not investor confidence. That is Ottawa handing somebody a shovel while quietly pouring concrete around their boots. And let us stop pretending your political coalition is united around this because it ckearly is not. There is a schism, or as you like to say, a "rupture" forming inside Liberal circles whether your communications team wishes to admit it publicly or not. Half your ideological ecosystem spent years insisting fossil fuel expansion was morally indefensible. Net Zero timelines became less a policy goal and more a secular article of faith repeated with the intensity of medieval monks guarding sacred scripture. Now suddenly your government is speaking the language of pipelines, exports, energy corridors, industrial competitiveness, and economic sovereignty. To climate hardliners inside your own movement, this sounds suspiciously like backpedalling. Because it is. And honestly, one can almost sympathize with their confusion. For years Canadians were told there could be no compromise. No nuance. No balancing of economic realities against climate ambition. The rhetoric was thunderous and absolute. Civilization itself supposedly hung by a thread attached to suburban thermostats and pickup trucks in Saskatchewan. Anyone questioning affordability, competitiveness, or energy reliability was treated as though they had personally clubbed a baby seal with a diesel generator. And speaking of discomfort inside Liberal circles, Mr. Carney, you now have another rather entertaining complication sitting inside your own tent: Nate Erskine-Smith. A man so devoted to climate orthodoxy and carbon taxation that if Ottawa ever proposed taxing sighs during exhalation, Nate would probably ask whether the levy was ambitious enough. But Nate is also a wildcard. One of those Liberal MPs who occasionally wanders off script and votes according to personal conviction rather than whatever laminated talking points arrived from the PMO that morning. And now, after his spectacular defeat in the Ontario Liberal nomination battle in Scarborough Southwest, the irony has become almost painful to watch. Because suddenly a politician who spent years inside a movement dismissing Conservative concerns about questionable voting systems and loosely regulated participation rules is now openly wondering whether the process was fair at all. Funny how quickly "conspiracy theories" evolve into "serious democratic concerns" once your own political ambitions get run over by the Liberal voting machine. It seems Scarborough doesn’t care for your climate and carbon market mechanisms and schemes. If they did, Nate would have won.  Conservatives spent years warning that poorly controlled voting systems, climate alarmism, temporary memberships, weak verification standards, and organizational manipulation could undermine confidence in political processes. They were mocked as paranoid, anti diversity, or "MAGA adjacent" for even raising the issue. Then Nate loses by 19 votes and suddenly we are hearing concerns about irregularities, ID problems, questionable memberships, and whether the process itself was rigged. Remarkable transformation. Almost biblical in speed. And honestly, Mr. Carney, the shift is becoming impossible not to notice internationally as well. Even Bill Gates, who spent years treated as one of the patron saints of climate orthodoxy, has started openly acknowledging that the entire climate discussion was framed poorly for years. Not that environmental stewardship does not matter. Not that pollution is imaginary. But that the apocalyptic sermonizing used to fearmonger in election campaigns, #emissions absolutism, and economically detached policymaking created a political and practical disaster of its own. One we are living through in real time.  Gates himself began warning that climate policy became too politically focused on ideological purity and rigid near term emissions targets while losing sight of development, affordability, resilience, poverty reduction, and actual human realities. Which is politically awkward for governments like yours, Mr. Carney, because it becomes difficult to spend years treating skeptics of #NetZero timelines like backward heretics only to slowly start adopting their language once economic conditions deteriorate badly enough. Funny how "dangerous misinformation" keeps evolving into "emerging consensus" about three years later. Now suddenly your government sounds deeply interested in economic growth again because reality, stubborn old beast that it is, keeps barging into the conversation carrying invoices. And then came the electrification announcement. Which somehow managed to sound simultaneously futuristic and completely detached from physical practicality. Canada, we are told, must effectively double its electrical grid by 2050. Double it! Mark, this is the same country where replacing a bridge can take so long that half the politicians involved are either pushing up daisies or retired before the ribbon cutting. This is a country where #infrastructure projects disappear into environmental assessments with the same finality of medieval ships vanishing into sea fog. Now Canadians are expected to believe Ottawa can coordinate the largest electrical transformation in modern Canadian history while people are already struggling under housing costs, grocery #inflation, stagnant private sector wages, rising taxes, and #hydro bills that increasingly resemble ransom notes. And somehow you expect us to believe we will SAVE money like we have a national collective IQ just north of a bedroom slipper.  And every time somebody raises concerns about feasibility or cost, they are told this is all part of "the transition." Always with the transition rhetoric. Canadians are beginning to notice that the transition somehow always involves them paying more while government officials reassure them everything is visionary and historic between applause breaks and planes to climate conferences. Electric vehicles require infrastructure. Heat pumps require reliable grids. Industrial electrification requires enormous generation capacity, mining expansion, transmission networks, skilled labour, maintenance, financing, and years of construction.  Huge amounts of it. HUGE! And none of it magically appears because a minister says "clean economy" into a microphone beside a backdrop printed on recycled cardboard while some rented cellist serenely plays beside a leisurely spinning wind turbine.  Your daughter Cleo's expertise in strategic #mining for critical minerals needed for clean energy technologies for the great transition likely provides you some bargain basement insight no one else is privy to.  But perhaps your greatest political problem, Mr. Carney, is this: Ordinary #Canadians are beginning to realize they have spent years being governed by slogans masquerading as Liberal economic strategy. You cannot spend years demonizing pipelines and fossil fuel development… then abruptly pivot toward "nation building" resource projects once the economy starts wheezing… without people noticing. You cannot insist aggressive climate policies would lower costs and strengthen prosperity while living standards visibly deteriorate in real time… then suddenly rediscover #industrial competitiveness and energy exports… without Canadians asking why they were lectured for so long in the first place. Because people are tired now. Tired of being spoken to like children. Tired of hearing that declining living standards are somehow sophisticated, modern, and our natuonal duty. Tired of watching politicians announce trillion dollar transformations while ordinary households quietly drown under the cost of existential existence. And right now your government is attempting to reassure climate activists, oil producers, environmental NGOs, investors, unions, struggling workers, and international green finance circles all at the same time. That balancing act may impress people sipping sparkling water at conferences in Brussels, but out here in the real economy, people eventually want something much simpler. Straight answers and certainty.  Not another polished sermon about pathways and frameworks while the country slowly discovers that slogans, however elegant, cannot power an economy on their own. Because eventually, Mr. Prime Minister, a country reaches the point where it can no longer survive on branding workshops disguised as leadership.  Where citizens stop applauding announcements because they are too busy calculating what those announcements will cost them personally. Where "historic transitions" start looking suspiciously like managed decline wrapped in designer vocabulary. And when that moment fully arrives, Canadians are going to ask a brutally simple question your government has spent years trying desperately to avoid: If all these experts, summits, taxes, frameworks, consultants, climate sermons, and trillion dollar visions were truly signs of competent leadership… why does the country suddenly feel poorer, weaker, more divided, more exhausted, and less functional with every passing year? Because at some point, even the most polished illusion collides headfirst with the brutal honesty of lived reality. And reality, unlike #Liberal political messaging, does not care how elegant the press release sounded. You would do well to remember that before you continue your gaslighting campaign.  Melanie “The Pipeline That Comes Pre-Strangled” 👇🇨🇦 melanieinsaskatchewan.substa… 👇🏻 buymeacoffee.com/melanieinsa… ##cdnpoli #Carney #NetZero #CarbonTax #EnergyCrisis #Canada (Image created with AI as if you cant tell🤦🏼‍♀️)

I wasn’t supposed to find this. Most of you know what’s been going on. The sewer backed up. The line is shot. Seventy feet from the basement to the street that I somehow have to replace on an income that barely keeps the lights on. Then came the mold. Creeping in quietly where the air doesn’t move. The kind that doesn’t care that I have COPD. The kind that doesn’t care that I physically can’t fight it. So the basement had to come apart. Piece by piece, some of the new life on the Prairies I built with my husband getting stripped back to studs because there is no other option. Funny how life works sometimes. The guy helping me do it is connected to a moment I’ll never forget. A year ago I found a woman barefoot in January, standing in the snow watching her home burn down with her child beside her. I pulled over in my school bus, brought them in, took them to my house, gave her warm clothes, got her somewhere safe. Now I’m the one standing in the wreckage of my own home, and her husband is here helping me tear it apart in exchange for some things I no longer need, like the extra television and blue ray player and about 100 DVDs and blue rays. Man cave stuff I won't use since I already have those things in triplicate. There’s something poetic in that. Or maybe just painfully human. But none of that prepared me for what he found. When we bought this house in December 2019 Dave built me a canning kitchen downstairs. He built it with his hands, like he built everything. Like he built our life. It’s gone now. It has to be. The mold took it. He was never a man of big words. Thirty years together and “I love you” wasn’t something he said often. That wasn’t how he was raised. He showed it instead. In the fixing. In the protecting. In the quiet ways that don’t announce themselves but hold everything together. He was my hero in work boots. My spider removal specialist. The unplugger of toilets, the one who said its just shit and washes off, the reacher of all things over 6 feet. The man who would drop everything to help anything that needed it, especially animals, wild or domesticated. You didn’t need to hear it from him. You just knew. Or at least I thought I did. Until today. The guy called me downstairs. I thought something was wrong from the look on his face. It wasn’t panic. It wasn’t damage. It was something softer. Something heavier. Empathy, perhaps. Because behind the wall, hidden between two studs where no one was meant to look, Dave had written something in black marker. “Dave & Melanie 2020 For Vida. Xoxo.” He never said it easily. So he put it somewhere permanent instead. Somewhere it would stay long after everything else wore out. I don’t know if he ever meant for me to find it. Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe it was just his way of saying it without having to say it out loud. But there it was. Waiting. Like an unexpected gut punch. Behind a wall I never would have opened if everything hadn’t gone wrong. And somehow, in the middle of all this mess, all this loss, all this stress I don’t know how I’m going to survive… I found it. And I will carry that for the rest of my life. ❤️

From Crossing Floors To Crossing Lines: Dear Michael Ma, There are missteps in politics. Then there are moments so pristine in their execution that one almost wants to thank you for the demonstration. Your appearance at the House of Commons Standing Committee on International Trade was one of those moments. Not because it advanced anything. But because it clarified everything. You were questioning Margaret McCuaig-Johnston, a senior fellow at the University of Ottawa and a long-established expert on China, global supply chains, international trade, and the forced labour risks tied to Uyghur slavery. If ever there was a witness purpose-built to speak on that exact subject, she was it. Credentials aligned. Expertise aligned. Topic aligned. A rare moment where the system actually put the right person in the right chair. And then you arrived. Faced with Margaret McCuaig-Johnston’s level of expertise, you chose not to engage her evidence, but to sidestep it. “Anti China,” you suggested, as though documenting labour camps were a personality flaw rather than a matter of record. A neat little label, deployed with the confidence of someone hoping it would do the heavy lifting. It didn’t. Then came the tempo. The rapid-fire questioning. The insistence on short answers. The carefully managed interruptions that ensure just enough of a response is heard to pivot away from it. It had all the hallmarks of a strategy, in the same way a cardboard cutout has all the hallmarks of a person. You were not examining. You were staging. And layered over it all was that faint, unmistakable throwback tone. The kind that treats a highly qualified woman not as an authority to be reckoned with, but as something to be contained, redirected, and talked over until the room forgets why she was invited in the first place. A little early-1900s patriarchy, lightly polished and rolled into committee procedure. Very modern. Very progressive. Very on brand for a man who crossed the floor only to immediately begin crossing lines. There was, however, a second performance worth appreciating. In most committee rooms, when a Conservative so much as nudges a witness toward brevity, Liberals react as though parliamentary norms have been dragged into a ditch. Objections fly. Hands wave. Faces tighten. And the chair intervenes with great theatrical concern to ensure the witness is allowed to answer. A well-practised ritual. Which made the sudden outbreak of tranquility under Ben Carr feel almost experimental. No intervention. No reminders. No concern. Just a serene confidence that everything unfolding was, somehow, entirely appropriate. One assumes the rulebook was merely resting. Because this is the part that lingers. You crossed the floor from Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party to Mark Carney’s Liberal Party. A move presented, as these things always are, as thoughtful. Strategic. Necessary. You would be more effective, we were told, aligned with power. It is a compelling narrative. It does, however, rely on the assumption that effectiveness is transferable. What we saw instead suggests something else made the trip. Not improved. Not recalibrated. Just relocated. The Conservatives, for their part, have been handed a rather elegant escape. Not through foresight, but through timing. A problem that walks out the door is still a problem, just no longer yours to explain. That explanation now belongs to the Liberals. And here the irony becomes almost too generous. This is a party that never tires of informing Canadians that it will take no lessons from Conservatives. Yet when it came to you, the apparent vetting model seems to have been: well, he was over there, so surely somebody checked. A touching faith in invisible homework. Sadly, the Conservatives clearly did not do enough homework either. They just happened to unload the assignment before it exploded in someone else’s locker. The Liberals, however, cannot even claim surprise. They took a floor crosser from a rival party, apparently made sweeping assumptions, and then acted shocked when the package turned out to contain exactly what the label should have warned them about. Which brings us, inevitably, to Mark Carney. Because leadership is not tested by the decisions that go smoothly. It is tested by the ones that arrive with consequences attached. And you have arrived fully assembled. He now faces a choice. He can sideline you. Quietly reduce your profile. Remove the conditions under which this kind of performance becomes a recurring feature. In doing so, he also quietly dismantles the entire excuse for your floor crossing, that proximity to power would somehow make you more useful to your riding. Or he can do what his own track record suggests he may well do. Stand firm. Close ranks. Pretend the whole thing is overblown. Preserve appearances. Protect the ego that made the bad decision in the first place. Because to admit error would mean admitting that courting you over was not a show of strength, but a lapse in judgment dressed up as strategy. And that, politically, is where the trap closes. If Carney turfs you to the back benches, he blows a hole in your own justification for crossing. Suddenly the man who claimed he had to switch parties to get closer to power is left nowhere near it. But if Carney keeps you up front and keeps defending you, then he is not merely tolerating the behaviour. He is feeding it. He is teaching you that protection follows performance, no matter how boorish, how transparently partisan, or how steeped in old-school misogyny it may be. And people who feel protected rarely become more restrained. They become more confident. More willing. More asshole-ish. More certain that the room will adjust around them. So here we are. You crossed the floor in search of influence. And in short order, crossed a line by trying to discredit Margaret McCuaig-Johnston, a woman whose expertise on China and Uyghur forced labour far exceeded anything you brought to that exchange. If ever there was a witness who could speak to Uyghur slavery, she was it. And Michael Ma’s answer to that was not substance. It was swagger, interruption, and the kind of stale patriarchal toxicity that should have been left somewhere around the invention of the typewriter. As for Mr. Carney, he may soon discover that in the pursuit of numbers, he acquired something far less cooperative. Not an asset. Not a coup. A stinking, rotting albatross now hanging around the Liberal Party’s neck like a garland of decaying principles. And if he chooses to keep feeding it rather than cut it loose, he can keep it. Sincerely, Melanie in Saskatchewan, A citizen who was paying attention 👇🏻 buymeacoffee.com/melanieinsa… 👇🏻 open.substack.com/pub/melani…