Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse(22)

Hon. Cedric Vilandré (Minister of Foreign Affairs, CPC) Madam Speaker, the opposition keeps moving the goalposts. First they are angry with the prime minister for advocating on behalf of Canadians in Africa and the Middle East. Now they are inventing imaginary disaster scenarios for those other countries and complaining that the prime minister is not calling up every university in North America looking for solutions to these made-up problems, which are suddenly more important than the churn that has killed, wounded, or displaced so many of our fellow citizens here at home. If this is what the opposition wants to hear so badly, then very well, I’ll say it for their benefit: our prime minister is not solving imaginary made-up problems in Nigeria or sitting on the phone with some intellectual who wrote a dissertation on Belgian fossils. Instead she is making sure that our oil supply is uninterrupted and that Canada continues to deal with her business partners growthfully and with integrity. I hope that confession makes the parties across the way happy over there.

GOVERNMENT ORDERS

Message from the Senate

The Speaker (Hon. Katherine Elk Hoof): I have the honour to inform the House that a message has been received from the Senate informing this House that the Senate has passed the following public bill to which the concurrence of this House is desired: Bill S-9, An Act to amend the Cancer Screening Act.

Gasoline Rationing Act

The House resumed from May 9 consideration of the motion that Bill C-11, An Act to amend the Canada Transportation Act (Gasoline Rationing), be read the third time and passed.

The Speaker (Hon. Katherine Elk Hoof): The motion to adjourn the House is now deemed to have been adopted. Accordingly, this House stands adjourned until tomorrow at 10 a.m., pursuant to an order made on Monday, April 26, 2027 and Standing Order 24(1).

(The House adjourned at 3:44 p.m.)





THE BODY POLITIC


John Jantunen

The body appeared in the first week of August. It was already hot that morning even though it was too early for anyone else to be about, except for maybe the boy who brought the paper. The paperboy, yes, the very reason I was out before the sun had had a chance to colour the sky in reds and orange. I wanted to stop him, yes, to catch him, so that I could have a word with him about the state that my dailies were in when they arrived. More and more they looked, well – and this was the odd thing – they looked like someone had already read them. Or really, if I wanted to get to the crux of the matter, they looked like a lot of people had read them. With their curling edges and their torn pages, their smudged ink and smears of brown that could have been coffee but could just as easily have been something else, they looked, in fact, like they’d been passed from one end of a city bus to the other with each person in between taking what they needed and discarding the rest on the seat beside them, or on the floor, where they would sit until the driver, at the end of his shift, tired and too grumpy to take any care about it, would come along and gather them up, which would go a long way to explaining why sometimes the pages were out of order, like I’d found with yesterday’s paper, pages out of order and one page out of order and in the wrong section.

So I was up early waiting for the boy to arrive and when he did?

—Be nice, dear.

That was my wife, the eternal her to my him, and it was good advice, excellent advice, just the kind of advice that I’d always relied on her for. She had sound judgment, if nothing else (and that’s not to say that she had nothing else; she had all the regular charms of the opposite sex; had all the smells, all the curves and all the softness that made my fingers dance too lightly when we were lying together, making her laugh and tell me to be more firm, always more firm). And it was her judgement, since I’d retired, that I’d retreated into, telling myself, for a start, that it was easier that way. Easier because I no longer had anywhere to hide; no more job, no more quick nips on the way home, no more ways of pretending I was listening while my mind was on other things. Now my mind was always on one thing and one thing only. But what was it? The house? No, not that. It wasn’t something as tangible as that, though I wished that it was as tangible as an old farmhouse at the end of a lane that was dirt when we moved in but was now paved right up to the driveway, the last on the road, the last, if anyone wanted to know, in the town itself, its back to a ravine and a wall of cedar hedges surrounding its front so that it was possible to believe that we were the only ones left. And if it weren’t for the odd phone call, and the even odder visit from our son, it’d be almost impossible to believe there was anyone else, but he hadn’t visited for… How long was it? Last Christmas? I’d have to ask her, she’d know. Right after I talked to the paperboy I’d ask her, ask her, I’d ask her?

First we’d have eggs and toast and we’d drink that stuff that came out of a bottle and didn’t taste like coffee but which I was supposed to pretend did. Then I’d ask her?

—Damn it, where’s that paperboy?

I hadn’t meant to say it out loud but there she was behind me, holding the paper. Its edges were curled up and I could see a rip on the first page, a rip right through the lead article, an intolerable rip that had no place severing the head of the prime minister, a man who, granted, I hadn’t voted for, but a man who still didn’t deserve his head flapping off to one side, his body clenched tightly against her fingers. Her nails yellowing, flecks of red dotting the surface, dotting the surface like, like, dotting the surface?