Friday, June 3, 2011

You Go Girl!

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That is a young woman with bigger cojones than the average male in Canada! She is Brigette DePape, a recent University of Ottawa graduate. She was a page and her job was about to end anyway, so she took advantage of her position to protest the Harper Government’s agenda during the Speech from the Throne. Right in front of the Governor General. That took balls of steel and one absolutely must be impressed.

image Of course, Mike Duffy, the newly minted senator apparently from the CTV, hot off his rather nasty attack on Danny Williams, premiere of Newfoundland, had to be a sourpuss about the whole thing and characterize it as a stunt that hurt democracy rather than helped it.

I mean really … get a sense of humor. It took serious guts to stand up for her ideals in such a public manner and in such a formal circumstance, and it’s not anything that has not been said by about 60% of Canadians and most of the premieres …
Winking smile
First time house of commons member Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party, stepped in with her own sour comment … a real surprise to me considering her protest-oriented background.

She said that the protest was inappropriate and in the wrong place. And then she followed with a quick sound bite containing her entire party platform :-)

"I sympathize enormously with youth in this country who feel they've been abandoned when the single greatest threat to their future isn't mentioned in the speech from the throne, and that, of course, is the climate crisis."

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I quite agree that we need to keep control of high risks like deforestation and those nasty hydrocarbons etc, but at the same time the youth of today individually are threatened far more by employment issues and education costs than they are by something that is so slow and is not (I think) on the immediate horizon …

Anyway … good for Ms. DePape … it is refreshing to see such pluck in someone so young.

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