Category Archives: Politicians

that's no mushroom

The Toadstool Covid Briefing Bingo

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Good rainy morning, Possums. We are coming to you live from Ottawa, although today CPAC is apparently not covering Trudeau’s briefing so we are going with the CBC video instead, as the actual PMO team doesn’t get the video up for eight or ten hours and never includes other people’s speeches or the questions from the media. This should be jarring, and bad for my French, but here goes.

If you want to take a guess at our arbitrary nomenclature convention, we’re still going. One theme unifies all our briefing titles lately and we have had:

Guesses in the comments section to win fabulous, completely imaginary prizes. Our choice today is not completely arbitrary, however, as toadstools and politics could well be more interconnected than most people think. Forget mind control chips in vaccines and fluoride in the water supply: how about dosing the entire population with shrooms to fight fascism? Or at least the Alberta and Ontario legislatures?

Researchers found unlikely heroes in keeping the world from authoritarianism – magic mushrooms. Scientists from the Psychedelic Research Group at Imperial College London showed that psilocybin, the active compound in psychedelic mushrooms, makes people less likely to embrace authoritarian views like fascism and more connected with nature.

The study, authored by Taylor Lyons and Robin L. Carhart-Harris, a leading researcher in this field, shows that psilocybin treatment can lead to lasting changes in such mindsets.

that's no mushroom
that’s no mushroom

Here’s our CBC video, and I’m wondering about the backstory here. Did he piss off CPAC? Is Their Person sick today? I see they’re covering Question Period but not this. Come, let us overthink it together! [later: CPAC did in fact cover the briefing, although they didn’t have their placeholder in place on YouTube in advance like usual, and it wasn’t there five minutes into the briefing either].

The CBC does not go in for descriptive captions, they only promote their other channels.

And our Bingo cards are here. Play one or play the whole set or play a completely random and arbitrarily chosen subset, because it’s 2021 and arbitrary absurdism is where we are at now in Canadian politics.

https://twitter.com/sick_crab/status/1387956083684257794
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Ella-Grace and Justin Trudeau from https://dad.ceo/article/exclusive-interview-with-justin-trudeau

The Kiddy Covid Briefing Bingo

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Good afternoon, Possums. We were so busy doing taxes this morning that we didn’t even think to cover the Covid briefing. We didn’t even think to check if there was one, although there always is on Tuesdays and Fridays.

Possums, there was. And here it is. Action begins at the 23 minute mark, so right off the bat tick your “Begins more than ten minutes late” square:

On Parliament Hill, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau discusses the federal government’s response to the ongoing COVID-19 (coronavirus disease) pandemic. He is joined virtually by federal ministers Dominic LeBlanc (intergovernmental affairs), Anita Anand (procurement) and Bill Blair (public safety), as well as by Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, and Dr. Howard Njoo, deputy chief public health officer. The previous day, the government announced that the Canadian Armed Forces will deploy medical personnel to Ontario, where hospital resources are being taxed by a surge in cases of COVID-19. The deployment of personnel comes following a formal request by the Ontario government.
https://twitter.com/owlerine/status/1387197414071750672
Ella-Grace and Justin Trudeau from https://dad.ceo/article/exclusive-interview-with-justin-trudeau
I’m assuming this was Bring Our Daughters to Work Day

And here are our cards:

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The Pokey Covid Briefing Bingo

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Morning, Possums! I wasn’t sure we were going to cover this particular briefing, because we did get poked yesterday and we weren’t sure how we’d be feeling (this is the Vice-Regelian “we” you understand) today. But we are good, other than feeling like we’ve been sleeping in a pair of too-tight goggles and somewhat creaky in the joints but then, it’s a glimpse of the inevitable gimpy future for which we should be grateful, I suppose.

In related news, I am also feeling relatively invulnerable from an invisible and ubiquitous deadly enemy, but then if you know anything about the fights I get into online you’ll know this is basically just standard operating procedure.

Let’s get right into it, shall we? We are still doing our Completely Arbitrary Mystery Nomenclature Theme, and so far we’ve featured:

Our video is here:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau provides an update in Ottawa on the federal government’s response to the ongoing COVID-19 (coronavirus disease) pandemic. He is joined by Procurement Minister Anita Anand.

And our bingo cards are thusly:

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Trudeau at church

The Sunday Covid Briefing Bingo

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Good afternoon, Possums, and welcome back to another episode of the Justin Trudeau Power Hour Although This Time A Scant Eleven Minutes and Forty-Nine Seconds. Yes, it was a Covid briefing from the PM, but on a Sunday, a radical departure from the relentless Tuesday/Friday schedule we’ve come to expect.

And no-one was as surprised, Possums, as Ontario Premier Doug Ford.

In an unexpected yet somewhat foreshadowed move…

[aforesaid foreshadowing goes here]

See which premier is not mentioned there? The premier of Ontario.

On Sunday, Justin Trudeau made an elegant end run around the floridly hapless and rapidly disintegrating premier of Ontario, Doug “Buck-A-Beer” Ford, and announced that the federal government, along with several provinces, is stepping in and providing direct support to Covid-hit communities in Ontario without bothering to wait for the province to request help.

Trudeau at church
We’re all praying for an election these days.

This neatly avoids invoking the Emergencies Act, which gives the federal government sweeping powers to act within a province’s borders without regard to that provincial government. Justin Trudeau’s father, Pierre Trudeau, famously invoked the War Measures Act, which itself would be fingered by a paternity test on the Emergencies Act. Diagram that sentence out if it helps.

The Kennedys. The Bushes. The Trudeaus. The Windsor-Mountbattens. Yes, the Trumps. Even the Fords. And the War Measures Act and the Emergencies Act. All politics is intergenerational these days. And it always was a little incestuous. Just ask the Borgias.

Some jokes just never get old
The FLQ fucked around and found out

Anyhoodle, as astute observers pointed out pretty quickly, it was clever of Trudeau The Younger to make his move on a Sunday, as Dougie always heads up to Fordlandia-on-the-Lake (which is what we imagine he calls his cottage in Muskoka) on the weekends.

Muskoka is too a real word, spellcheck.

Which, under his own lockdown rules, he’s not supposed to visit except for emergencies or maintenance. Unless he went even farther afield, which we do not entirely rule out. It would be so totally Doug Ford to get arrested in a Walmart parking lot in PEI for breaking quarantine while vacationing against Covid guidelines.

So, yeah, Canada’s most populous province is facing the uncontrolled spread of deadly variants of a deadly plague, with the mortality rate of hospitalized cases up 38% in one week THIRTY-EIGHT PERCENT IN ONE WEEK. And the premier faffs off to grill some burgers and down a few pops by the lake, earning his administration the touching nickname of “Murder clowns.”

So, without the formality or even necessity of invoking the jackbooted Emergency Act (in what is unquestionably exactly the kind of emergency it was meant to handle) Trudeau just stepped into the void and got shit done on Doug’s day off.

Trudeau’s cottage, I will remind you, is nicer than Doug’s, but unless someone at Harrington Lake created an elaborate mockup of his Ottawa office for the purposes of filming this, Justin Trudeau stayed home in Ottawa this weekend. Seymour told us.

In case you’re wondering why Trudeau doesn’t want to use the Emergency Act, it’s because doing so will make him look like The Fascist Jackboot Of Big Government and enable both the nominally-leftist NDP and the increasingly-MAGA Conservatives to paint him as evil and cost him popular support. Meanwhile the worse the pandemic is in their own areas of responsibility, the more deaths they can blame on Ottawa. Yes, it really is that cynical.

And there’s an election coming and I say (like the return of King Arthur) the sooner the better.

Where were we, other than rambling at the tail end of a 34-hour-long workday? Oh right, about to give you your video and bingo cards. Let’s play, Possums!

First of all, we are still naming these Briefing Bingos after an unspecified and thus mysterious, arbitrarily-chosen convention which nobody has guessed yet. So far we have had:

Here’s our video:

And here are our cards. Dear god, we thought we’d never see Seymour again!

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It's not easy being green

The Woody Covid Briefing Bingo

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Good morning, possums, and welcome to the latest in our Completely Arbitrarily Named Briefing Bingos. There is a unifying concept, if a completely arbitrary one because everything is meaningless and nothing matters anymore, and also because the post needs a title in order to go live, but the title has to be chosen before the briefing happens because time is linear, but nobody has guessed it so far. The concept, not the nature of Time.

So far we have had:

Your guesses can go in the comment section for a chance to win fabulous, completely imaginary prizes. Nobody has even attempted this yet, but we’re getting to the point where there’s no excuse. Gonna get pretty obvious soon. Much like whether or not we’re getting an election this year.

It's not easy being green
It’s not easy being green

Here’s our video, starting fifteen minutes late today so you get to mark your “Starts more than ten minutes late” square right off the bat. 557 people watching right now. By 2pm that’s gotten up to 1500, but Fridays are always lower than Tuesdays for some reason. It’s not like people are off to the cottage on Fridays these days.

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