...big government: a tragedy in three movements...

i) May was supposed to be exciting for me, a combination of Census Excitement and Employee Survey. When I was little all I wanted to do was fill out the little forms that fell out of new magazines. For some reason I was obsessed even then with making my presence known, filling in my name and address in block-letters, black/blue ink. I never sent it in, but at 5 that was hardly the point. The census, in my mind, was going to be something similar. My love-hate relationship with adulthood rears it's ugly head at this point: it turns out that I was a little fuzzy on what "The Census" actually is, this is my first one after all. Naive Me imagined something like a retail-comment questionnaire: what do you think of us? what can we do to improve your opinion? how was your service today?

It isn't. Anything like that. It's a number crunching tool on falsely cheery yellow paper. The yellow may have been the biggest betrayal. My heart hurts. What happened to accountable government? What about democracy!

ii) Harper is the anti-christ. The per-child allowance in his budget is geared towards high-income families, meaning that the families with incomes higher than $106,000 AND one parent stay-at-home would get close to the promised $1,200. Everyone else gets increasingly less as the incomes go down. Because the families with the most money... need to get the most back from the government. Right wing sucks butt.

iii) Earlier was watching the funeral of Bob Hunter on City TV. This broke my heart, as a longtime fan of everything City. I used to watch him every day in his silly bathrobe, reading the day's big highlights. He succumbed to cancer, and he will be missed. Part of his eulogy was given by Dalton McGuinty, our stalwart premier. My respect for him increases by day - between that beautiful speech, this week's $3mil. to an anti-gun program developed by faith leaders, and his jaunty smile, he makes me rather happy. Now if he would only deliver on some of those tiny things he promised... autism treatment past age 6, stopping development on the Morraine, health care reform...