Down at Tosca Rock

I just got back from the opera, and boy… Okay, no finish for that one. I continue to love the promotional materials of the Opéra de Montréal (above).

Once again, the sets would have made a nice apartment, if you could keep the crazy diva from tossing a life-sized doll off the parapet. And I was appreciating the solemn silent soldiers, but that might be because it’s been a while…

The action, it seems, was in the crowd.

Two rows ahead of us, there was a woman wearing quite a dazzling feather coat. She took off the part that looked like it had been made of the plucked tail feathers of a thousand tiny pheasant babies and she still had on a feather collar and a stylish hat, itself adorned with feathers. My companions decided to call her the Fraggle, as those characters were the last to be able to pull off that degree of featheredness.

We also saw an Angelica Houston look-alike (complete with bangs) and someone else in a red leather skirt that would have looked at home on Tina Turner.

The funniest sight might have been the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. Not the fact that he was there, but the manner of his arrival.

"Can anybody tell me where my seat is?"

It seems that the guy who thinks he ought to be in charge of charting our way over the next years arrived in the wrong row and had to climb over a couple of rows to get to his seat. It’s not every day you see a political leader climbing over theatre seats.

Calculating in my tiny head from where we were sitting to where he was, I figure that he was supposed to be in row Q, but entered row O instead. Hmmm… Ontario starts with an O and Québec with a Q, and he headed instinctively to the O. I wonder if there are any conclusions to be drawn from that?

Just asking.

Govertainment

We've all seen the seemingly unstoppable development of 'infotainment' shows — ET, E, Etalk, TMZ — the list goes on to unfortunate lengths. What seems to characterize these shows is an endless stream of teasers for the content that is 'ahead' or (eventually) 'up next.' When we get to the item in question, the content seems to be somewhat less than the sum of the promotional elements.

Now it looks like our federal government is trying to move governing in the same direction. They ceaselessly announce the same spending programs, slightly repackaged each time, without actually sending the money out to where it belongs. When it does go out, it is going to the projects so late that they couldn't possibly spend the money before the end of the fiscal year, let alone actually accomplish the whole of the project that was submitted. The excess money goes back and the job is half done, through no fault of the project managers.

When the infotainment people don't like the way their program is turning out, they yell 'Cut!' and start over. Our federal government has just done the same thing by proroguing Parliament, not intending to call it back to work (and all work must restart after prorogation) until March.

The Prime Minister would have us believe that this is a normal course of events. It's true that this seemed a little more panicked when he did it last year to avoid being defeated and possibly being forced to cede power to a coalition of the opposition parties, but it is not supposed to be an annual or even a regular event.

The first Wiktionary definition of prorogue is: "To suspend a parliamentary session or to discontinue the meetings of a parliament without formally ending the session." The real effect is that all legislation that has not received royal assent dies, the work of the committees is suspended and generally that business of government that already moves at a rather slow pace slows further. At the same time, this is less than dissolving Parliament, which would bring about an election.

So I ask you, when the government offers us an endless stream of promotional announcements with underwhelming concrete results and then yells "Cut!" when they feel that things are not going their way, are we being governed or 'govertained'?

Ungrateful

Today, 4 January 2010, marks the end of the US HIV travel ban.

For those who might not be familiar with this story — and there are a disturbing number of people who didn't know about this — the United States banned the entry of people living with HIV to its territory from 1993 until today. Oh, yes, there were ways around this, either by getting a waiver (meaning disclosing your status and applying for permission to enter the country for treatment or on compassionate grounds, acceptance not guaranteed), by hiding your HIV medications (more difficult in the post-9-11 era), or by taking a holiday from your treatment (not the best of ideas for the efficacy of your treatment). The rule, however, was as clear as the message: if you have HIV we don't want you.

So now, after a year-and-a-half process that actually started under George W. Bush (but wasn't likely his idea), the ban is gone and the country has gone one step further than that, eliminating the HIV test as a part of required medical testing for immigration purposes. I realize that when a country doesn't have subsidized health care this is probably easier to do, but I wish Canada would follow that particular lead and stop testing immigrants and refugees.

So why am I ungrateful? I refuse to be grateful when someone finally stops doing something they should not have started doing in the first place. If I'm being punched in the face and the bully stops, should I thank him? I'm not grateful for that. It is the right thing to do, but it is not praiseworthy.

So now let's get on with eliminating other countries' various absolute and conditional barriers to the free movement of people living with HIV, maybe starting with our own.