Every year has its share of admirable people, even 2020
Dr. Darren Markland
This fed-up Edmonton intensive care doctor told the CBC very candidly how bad the COVID-19 crisis was, and why Alberta’s “half-hashed” plan for indoor field hospitals was ludicrous. “The next step is refrigerator trucks.” Hospitals had no space, no trained staff, and as for using the military, “Does anybody really want a lance corporal putting a shell up your bum?” Markland won people over by being at his wits’ end. Waves of people will now move to Edmonton to have him as their doctor. I know I will.
Gabriel Flores Flores
This seasonal worker had spent years working on Ontario farms to support his family in Mexico. But when he raised the alarm about terrible living and working conditions at massive Scotlynn Growers during the pandemic, Scotlynn fired him. It was easy to do to a migrant who spoke no English, had no rights, and who dared to complain. The Labour Relations Board backed Flores, giving him lost wages and damages. Flores is the bravest of the brave. So is Star reporter Sara Mojtehedzadeh who does stellar work on this story and on the sorry world of gig work in general.
U.S. vice-president-elect Kamala Harris
She isn’t just smart, experienced, a marvellous debater and a great senator. She also went to high school in Montreal. That does it, she’s on the list.
Eternity Martis
It’s rare for writers to change anyone’s mind. She changed mine. I knew racism was a problem in Canada but until I read her memoir, “They Told Me This Would be Fun,” I hadn’t seen it as a crisis. Near the end she writes in blank tired pain about “the moment that I learned my father had other children.” It recalls the moment when Thomas DeQuincey in “Confessions of an English Opium Eater” realizes he has lost poor, ill Ann in London and will never find her again. “I had forgotten her surname.” Ow. It’s hurting my heart again.
Jordan Bitove, Paul Rivett
They bought the Star which, like every newspaper, had been run down by Facebook, Google, bad luck and worse management. They have money, energy and smarts and they want to bring us back to vivid life. I like to see this spirit. Go ahead with your plan.
Prince Harry and Meghan
We have to get out of here, they said. Now they live with their lovely little boy Archie in California, where people are friendly and talk about their feelings rather than zipping them up in a little hate bag for use 40 years later at Christmas at cold and dusty Sandringham.
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland
This fine woman keeps popping up in the list, each time with a new hugely important job at
which she is stunningly competent. She makes Canada shine, so of course we seek to find her flaw. Did she once serve her special almond nut surprise at the office Christmas party, turning it into anaphylactic shock night for three staffers? Does she mistreat her bees? No. In fact, bees are lining up. Pick me, pick me, they cry.
J.K. Rowling
The Harry Potter creator is the most famous and best children’s writer in the world as well as being Robert Galbraith, the author of terrifically good murder mysteries, one of which I bought after some permanently irate people on Twitter said it had a dodgy character in it (it had several). That means she became two bestselling authors. Shockingly, the Scottish feminist thinks “woman” is a good word that should exist, despite efforts to call us “people who menstruate” and such like.
Her real flaw is that she was once a desperately poor abused woman and she managed to write her way to wealth, twice. Some people don’t like that.
David Sedaris
If you like your humour dark, as I do, Sedaris is your American man. His comedy is the people around him on the street, given that he has no capacity for misfits, including himself. He watches the world agog. Recently he did a TV bit sans audience in which he called for the right to place people under citizen’s dismissal, like citizen’s arrest but for cowards. In other words, to fire them in your head. Humourless Tweeps were outraged, as if he, a former Christmas elf at Macy’s, were planning to unfairly Karen a world of salesclerks. But I do this too. In my head, I citizen’s-annihilate the unmasked on public transit. I regularly citizen’s-murder the delivery guy
who doesn’t ring the doorbell — 48 dead so far. I don’t say anything because that would be rude. Sedaris is what we need right now so leave him alone.
My new neighbours
Whether they’re protecting a neighbour against a violent and predatory eavestrougher or shovelling my sidewalk or smoking excellent weed, they are all nice Canadians, gleamingly good. I have never before lived in such a pleasant neighbourhood. It’s like waking up in a Mr. Men children’s book. Am I dreaming?