September 22, 2015
Quebec, Canada
Source: Shutterstock
What if you got arrested for violating a restraining order taken out in 1989 against somebody else?
So now you”re in jail again for, among other things, causing a disturbance and blocking a sidewalk, even though”since you weigh considerably less than 900 pounds and hadn”t raised your voice”it seems like a pretty big stretch.
“Again” because you keep getting jailed for this “crime” over and over, to the point where you”ve spent more time behind bars than one of your country’s most viscerally despised serial killers (who now lives in Caribbean climes with her three kids”the same number of other peoples” she helped murder).
Luckily, this isn”t you. But it is Canada’s Linda Gibbons.
The 67-year-old grandmother doesn”t sing or chant or harass anyone outside Toronto’s Morgentaler Clinic, the abortion provider founded by a guy who later got Canada’s highest civilian honor. As these things go, Gibbons” never-changing protest sign is surprisingly tasteful. She never resists arrest.
Gibbons can”t even be said to be protesting Canada’s abortion law, because we don”t actually have one.
At least in America, you guys all know who Kim Davis is, love her or hate her. Until respected journalist Christie Blatchford wrote about Gibbons earlier this month, though, I”d bet that 95% of Canadians had never heard of her, and those who bothered to read Blatchford’s sympathetic piece forgot her name after they turned the page.
Welcome to my world!
So, hey, what else has been going on up here lately?
We”ve got a federal election a month from now. The three parties are in a statistical tie as I write this. Which seems odd because Liberal leader Justin “We have to rethink elements as basic as space and time“ Trudeau is 11 points behind in his own riding, the socialist NDP’s Thomas Mulcair is still a citizen of France, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper is all, like, “(Friends), can you believe I have to deal with these two?”
Back when Canada still bothered making its own game shows, the grand prize was never a new car or a trip to Tahiti, but something like a year’s supply of Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum. Our political “scandals” are a lot like that. The media is still trying to turn a guy writing a cheque“I mean, “check””to help another guy pay back taxpayers” money into the equivalent of Watergate North.
I doubt the Liberals will get anywhere with their attack on Mulcair for using the word “Newfie” in 1996. Newfies call each other “Newfies” and don”t care if you call them that, either; they cared even less 20 years ago. The only way to turn “Newfie” into an insult is to squint, curl your upper lip, and say it in a really pissed-off voice. Mulcair’s nickname is “Angry Tom,” but even I can”t imagine him managing that many facial contortions.
Meanwhile, on the topic of vaguely racial-sounding “gaffes,” Harper’s latest crime in the media’s eyes is saying that “old stock” Canadians should get better medical treatment than fake refugees. Like “Newfie,” I”ve heard the expression “old stock” all my life, and being nominally sane, I applaud Harper’s commonsense triage priorities. So naturally leftists are doing that irritating thing where they get offended by a phrase that they also insist they”ve never heard before this very moment and”“Can someone please explain to me…?”“don”t quite understand. (See: Gavin McInnes” masterful treatment of “I can”t even.“)
Immigrant man of the left Tarek Fatah points out, amusingly, that the same journalists attacking Harper for using that “racist” phrase are “old stock” themselves””fit for Downton Abbey.“ Indeed, Maclean’s“which recently demanded more “diversity” in Parliament”has only two nonwhite staffers out of 39.
