Tariffied

By The Marine Detective on April 27, 2025

Tomorrow, as so many of you know and feel, is Canada’s federal election. And, I’m tariffied. That’s not a typo.

The Canadian election has been dominated by the results of the election on the other side of the border. So many of us are left thinking HOW and WHY did our neighbours ever make that choice?

We feel the global shock waves that are the result – from finance, to human decency, to national security, to consideration of the environment that sustains us.

How and why? Dear Canadian neighbours, now we are there ourselves.

Tomorrow will mirror back to us who we are and what we value (acknowledging and deeply feeling the realities of our non-proportional voting system).

The ugly in the world is not in the shadows.

This is how it began on the other side of the border. He who “says it like it is” – an invitation for more of the ugly to creep out from the dark.

I sense in myself the want to disengage; that I feel disoriented, wounded and even targeted. The leader on the other side of the border is the embodiment of what I have stood against since, as a child, I stepped between a bully and his target.

The gag-inducing hairball, the recoil, the violations of attempted autocracy come together with technology that creates further vertigo about reality, truth, and even who we are.

What to do?

To swing far to the right, is wrong. To create a party that invites and fosters violations of humanity/equality and the environment is wrong.

Feel what you feel and identify your response to it – fading, disengaging, hurting, despairing, scrolling away?

And then say, hell no.

Hell no to the bullying, the attempts to overwhelm, violate, disorient, disempower.

Hell no to handing over our power, identity, values, and the further resources that sustain life (which is exactly the attempted strategy of using the blunt tools of fear and lies).

Tomorrow we vote.

And then we live with the reality, in all cases putting good into the world, having empathy for those who are being sucked under in this vortex of ugly and their inability to see clearly.

Stay afloat, know the way forward, guided by the values that will serve future generations.

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I have struggled with whether I will share who I am voting for.

We in the riding of North Island-Powell River have the following reality:

• A candidate that has attracted and emboldened the far right.
• The alternative choices of three other candidates.
• Having to consider strategic voting because the vote for those who do not want the Conservative candidate, will be split three ways.
• This has led to the decision to vote for the NDP candidate despite the Liberal candidate being someone I know.

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Background on the quote I present here from Rita Leon, Sts’ailes, Nation.

It was provided as a comment on a social media post I made by Wendy Burton: “A dear friend, who is an Indigenous elder, told me many years ago, when knowledge of the Residential school system began to seep into my world: Despair is a position of the privileged. I have no time for despair. It stops me from doing my part to heal this magnificent world. Do I sit in the dark and weep sometimes? Yes. Do I rise up? Always.”

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Photo: The epicentre of the place I love, learn, and work in the Territory of the Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw (the Kwak̕wala-speaking Peoples).©Jackie Hildering