Living in Ford’s Ontario: got houseplants?
As the premier ignores climate change, I can find solace in my own green space
After Doug Ford was elected the new premier of Ontario, my main coping mechanism was to buy houseplants. I had never owned a houseplant before. But Ontario had never been helmed by a premier like Ford before, either.
Sometime over the summer, I watched an episode of my beloved Gardener’s World in which a guest extolled the virtues of the Sansevieria (also known as a Snake Plant, Mother-in-Law’s Tongue and … wait for it … Viper’s Bowstring Hemp), which is particularly good for producing oxygen at night, and thus makes an excellent plant for the bedroom. Shortly after that, Ford cancelled all the environmental programs in Ontario. The planets seemed to be aligning.
You see, I live in the country but, relatively speaking, it’s a tiny piece of green hemmed in by the 401, the 403 and Hwy. 6 — three of the busiest highways in Canada. I’m no fool — I know that all the leafy green is no match for the smog that cloaks south central Ontario. When our new premier’s actions pointed toward the smog getting thicker, I started to think more about the Sansevieria. I Googled “best houseplants for cleaning the air” and “best plants for producing oxygen at night.” Did you know that NASA is the expert on this stuff ? Outer space NASA! You can even find a chart online that tells you which plants are best at cleaning the air according to their various light requirements! Oh, like a bloodhound that had found a trail, my pulse quickened: I was going to save my family from Doug Ford. And NASA was going to help me do it.
But this is all in hindsight, of course. Back then, in The Time Before Houseplants, cause and effect weren’t nearly as clear. I just knew I needed houseplants, and I needed
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don’t You you? get quite You potter attached, around though, the house with your jug of water and your spray bottle, testing which plants need a drink and which could do with a bit of a misting. You cut off any dried brown bits, and you wipe the dust from the leaves with a dampened cloth. You tend your own inner space garden, admiring all the shades of green, appreciating the lilt of this leaf and the cascade of that frond.
And yet I know there’s something deeply sad underlying my new preoccupation.
When the public world feels alien and threatening, and you feel powerless to change it, it’s soothing to concentrate on making one’s own home feel safer. Alien and threatening is certainly how I would describe our politics now: in Ontario, the majority of us identify as centre or left-ofcenter, but we have a right-wing conservative government elected by only 20 per cent of the province’s population. It has been this way for as long as I can remember: the liberal vote is split between three parties while the conservative vote is concentrated in one. But I can’t remember a conservative government ever wreaking this much destruction with this much disrespect for not only the health of our citizens and our environment (as if the two could be separate), but for the political and legal structures of our country.
There was considerable overlap between the NDP and Liberal platforms in the last election (pharmacare, a higher minimum wage, etc.), but rather than work together and form one party for the good of the province, the old lines of division and competition persist. It all feels so hopeless — no wonder so few of us vote.
Perhaps that will be me in four years. Perhaps I’ll decide that I’d rather stay home and water my plants, doing something that actually makes me feel like there’s some hope in my private space, if not in the public space.