Why Trudeau needs a friendly gargoyle to ward off strife
The flaw in new year’s resolutions is that people are expected to do ethereal high-minded things, which is amusing because that’s not going to happen.
My promise for 2018 could not have been less demanding. Each morning I would drink the healthful glass of water that sat beside the bed all night. I was literally to “reach out,” the only time the phrase has ever been appropriate. I could do it in my sleep. I remain parched. Much better to make resolutions for other people, the kind where they stop doing something. Subtracted effort works. After telling myself to stop drinking the water, I’m now fully hydrated. 1. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau: The medieval gargoyles of Notre-Dame de Paris exist to protect the cathedral and scare away harmful spirits, a rather spousal role for those mini-dragons and spitting grotesques. The PM needs a personal gargoyle, one from out of town.
Find him an adviser — an outsider — who can warn him off dodgy people and events. Joshua Boyle, facing 15 serious charges including sexual assault, was already seen as dubious, having taken his second wife, Caitlan Coleman, on a mysterious trip that ended in the couple’s five-year kidnapping in Afghanistan.
Does Trudeau really want to be photographed with a man who made his wife pregnant at least three times in captivity? She gave birth without sanitation, painkillers or good health. In the photo, Trudeau looks a bit grim — though he’s always good with babies — but he’s clearly keeping his distance from Boyle.
Only Coleman is smiling, but that’s basic for all women, hostage or otherwise. I wonder if Coleman might have had a chance at a private chat with Trudeau. Blink twice for help, ma’am.
Equally, the prime minister should not have attended the funeral service for Honey and Barry Sherman, found hanged in their home. It’s not clear whether it was a double suicide or a double murder, but a possible scenario remains murder-suicide.
I do not wish to see our feminist PM anywhere near a service for a serially litigious and unprincipled businessman who may have killed his own wife. Trudeau is entitled to do it, just as the admirable Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan is allowed to fly a government jet from Ottawa to Trenton for $6,358, as the Globe reported. But why do it?
Get thee a gargoyle. 2. Stop saying “nuanced,” “problematic” and “incredible.” Writing is hard. Easy shortcuts make it unreadable. 3. Tim Hortons, don’t stiff your staff in 2018. Jobs, however exhausting, are done best by workers who are treated fairly. The children of the chain’s co-founders, the Joyce family heirs who run the Cobourg franchise, are punishing their staff for Ontario’s new $14-an-hour wage by cutting wages and benefits.
Other Tim franchisors and fast food places — including Sunset Grill and East Side Mario’s, the CBC reports — are doing the same.
People go to Tim Hortons not for the coffee (boiled) or the food (leaden) but the intangibles: they’re open, friendly and predictable refuges. So why not raise prices? I’d pay 14 per cent more for bad coffee. 4. Don’t keep guns in the house if you have a teenage son with autism. If I wrote for an American audience, I would end that sentence after the first three words. For a Canadian audience, I add “in the house.”
But a family massacre in New Jersey, 20 minutes before New Year’s, has a lesson for gun-owners who missed 1,000 other lessons. The boy, 16, is accused of killing a loving father, the mother who home-schooled him, his sister and a 70-year-old woman who was a family friend. He used a semi-automatic rifle belonging to his dad.
Family homes should never contain the means of their own annihilation.
U.S. gun slaughter is so commonplace that even after their annihilation, this family was described as “picturesque.” In what way?
Rifles shouldn’t be kept at home unless every family member is stable to the point of being emotionally marbleized. Autism is an exhausting family problem at the best of times. If we learned nothing from Nancy Lanza in Sandy Hook, who bought guns for her autistic son and took him to shooting ranges, it’s this: autism and guns don’t mix.
I look forward to seeing your wisdom and caution flower this year. I’m sure we shall, as always, get along famously.