Legislature abounds in found poems
There are bits of poetry in all the verbiage that flows out of the B.C. legislature. It just takes a discerning eye to recognize it.
Here’s another collection of found poetry. All the entries are from Hansard, lightly edited to turn mundane prose into luminous works of art.
Green Party Leader Andrew Weaver’s compassion for the B.C. Liberals is surpassed only by his willingness to diagnose their problems.
As in: I Get Your Hurt “This is what happens when you have a party that’s hurting. I get that you’re hurting. In power for 16 years, now sitting in the benches there. There’s internal strife, a few inner elite from the past Still dictate the way it will be Others don’t know what’s happening until they’re surprised, And it frustrates them … Nobody wrote my speech. I’m actually just going from the cuff there.” Liberal MLA Mike Bernier recited a pithy little sonnet about heckling. Or democracy. Or something. Nobody’s Laughing “This is no laughing matter They’re the ones willing to ruin democracy … They finally came in because I was getting bored by not being heckled They’re the ones that said we need to stop heckling. It’s interesting. The member likes to be the loudest. Do as I say, not as I do. It’s hypocrisy again with the Green Party.
I feel that I’m heckling myself now.”
Liberal MLA Marvin Hunt wrote a lengthy epic about proportional representation that moved him so much he delivered it twice. Let’s List Them “There are 86 countries who use some form of proportional representation. Let me read them. Let me read them to you: Albania, Algeria, Angola… I’m doing it in alphabetical order, please … East Timor, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea … Mozambique, Namibia. I’m at 60, so we’ve still got a few more to go … ” Premier John Horgan delivered a touching soliloquy on his profound relationship with Weaver. Cultural Touchpoints “The relationship between the leader of the third party and myself has never been better. We come from the same area. We grew up with the same cultural touchpoints. No one is more surprised than he and I that we get on as well as we do. It’s working like a finely oiled machine. There have been no references to the dispute-resolution mechanism.” He also came up with a riveting adventure on the theme of highway maintenance: That Was Cool “My son and I were driving up Highway 19 … We watched a boulder, Star Trek-sized, as big as this desk, Bouncing down as we were driving. We were doing the trajectory, just kept on driving, kept on driving. This boulder kept coming down. There was a cement barrier, and thank goodness, The barrier held. Just as we were passing where the boulder hit, it ran into the cement. We kept on going and said: ‘That was cool.’ ”
Let’s List Them (II) “I think it’s really enlightening to find out who these 87 countries are. We have Albania, Algeria, Angola, Argentina … I’ll keep going until … Oh, You’re here. You usually sit over in the corner there. Well, then, noting the hour, I move adjournment.”
You wouldn’t think changing the voting system was like changing the game of hockey. Unless you were Liberal MLA Michelle Stilwell.
She delivered an ode on that theme: Changing How We Choose “Let’s take the great game of Canadian hockey As an example … Revolutionary ideas like helmets, visors have made the game safer
Players like Bobby Orr changed the way the game was played. Who would have thought that a defenceman Would lead the league in points? The elimination of the two-line pass rule Made the long-used defensive trap approach obsolete … What if, instead of changing the way we choose people, We were brave enough to change the way things happened here?
Imagine if the NDP embraced this concept. Think of what could be accomplished.”