📢 I am getting really tired of finding out what my own government is doing from somebody else’s podium in some distant foreign land. Canadians were told Mark Carney was going to diversify our trade. He was going to find us new customers and make us less dependent on the United States so future trade disruptions have less impact. Okay… so diversify! Nobody remembers voting to blow up the relationship with the country that buys roughly two thirds of our exports, walk away from a deal because American demands supposedly threatened our “flexibility, independence, and sovereignty,” and then start sidling up to Brussels looking for something called associate membership. That was not in the Liberal election brochure. That was not on the election ballot either! And it was not explained to the people who actually live here. Three days ago, Carney was asked about reports Canada was exploring EU associate membership. No, he said. Canada was not looking to become a member of the European Union. He wanted a “unique alliance.” Then he flew to Europe. There he sat in the European Parliament while Ursula von der Leyen delivered her hour long prepared State of the Union speech and proposed that Canada become the first associate member of the EU, a position that does not even exist yet. Well… that seems to have escalated quickly. Except it didn’t. Jonathan Wilkinson, Canada’s incoming ambassador to the EU, wandered out afterward and ruined the surprise. They had already talked about it. They knew it was going to be on the table. So stop playing word games with Canadians Mark Carney. I do not care whether Carney calls it membership, associate membership, a unique alliance, or European Friendship Deluxe with free continental breakfast. What are you actually negotiating? Do we get a vote on EU rules Canada may be expected to follow? If Brussels changes those rules, can Canada say no? Can Parliament? What Canadian laws and provincial regulations are being discussed? What has Ottawa already promised? And why do we need this at all? We already have CETA. We are already negotiating a digital trade agreement. We are already cooperating with Europe on defence, critical minerals, energy and technology. So what does associate membership add? And more importantly, what does Canada give up to get it? This is where my patience finally runs out!😡 A real leader in a real democracy would put this in front of the country. A referendum with a crystal clear question requiring a simple yes or a no from the people who have to live with the answer. Instead we get word games, photo ops in Strasbourg, and a Prime Minister who treats the House like a demon treats holy water: he will not sit in it unless he has to! Carney walked away from Washington telling Canadians sovereignty was the line in the sand. If that is in fact the case - the real reason sputtered by Carney, then explain something to me like I am sitting at my kitchen table in Saskatchewan trying to pay the power bill… If another country having too much influence over Canadian economic decisions is a threat to our sovereignty, how does another political bloc having influence over Canadian economic decisions protect it? Does sovereignty expire somewhere over the Atlantic? Washington wanting a say in Canadian decisions was apparently so intolerable as to warrant walking away from the negotiating table with America. If Brussels wants a say, we are supposed to call it strategic autonomy. That is quite a parlour trick. One superpower wanting a say is tyranny. A whole bloc wanting a say is statesmanship. Huh, how convenient. And drop the piety for a minute. A lot of the people who built this country left Europe for a reason. They left class systems, imperial ministries, conscription, religious tests, and distant capitals that decided their lives without asking. They crossed an ocean so their kids would not live under somebody else’s “common space.” So why the hell are we walking back into it with a smile and a press release? Europe is not sitting around enjoying unprecedented prosperity while von der Leyen hands Canada the secret recipe. She is getting hammered inside Europe over competitiveness, sky high energy costs, poverty inducing climate policy, uncontrolled migration and the direction she is taking the bloc. EU governments are already questioning parts of this proposed Canadian relationship. Meanwhile Carney and von der Leyen sound like somebody photocopied the same economic manual and handed each of them half: carbon, climate, economic security, strategic autonomy, integration... all the things that make them indistinguishable from each other. One works from Brussels. One works from Ottawa. Maybe this arrangement is wonderful. Then show us. Tell Canadians what you have discussed, what you have promised, what we are expected to follow, and whether we actually get a vote. Do not brief Europe first. Do not announce it from a foreign parliament. Do not hide behind “unique alliance” like that phrase is a substitute for consent. Carney made sovereignty the standard. Not me… him. So I have one request for Mackenzie Gray, Judy Trinh and every other journalist who gets close enough to stick a microphone in front of the Prime Minister. Ask him. Mr. Carney, if Canada could not accept becoming a rule taker for Washington because we are a sovereign country, why should Canadians accept becoming a rule taker for Brussels? And if this is such a gift, why will you not put it to a national referendum instead of stepping around the people and the Parliament that is supposed to speak for them? Please do not let him answer a different question. Canadians have been handled enough. At the core, it’s the same country, same sovereignty, and the same test. Until we know what the hell they are signing us up for: Do not sign a damn thing! ~ Melanie ~ 🔗 melanieinsaskatchewan.substa… 🔗 buymeacoffee.com/melanieinsa…

I wasn't going to write this. Then again, I wasn't going to write the one in March 2024 either. That post changed my life because, for once, I stopped pretending I was managing and simply told people what was actually happening and how ideological liberal policies affected my household. Two and a half years later, I'm doing it still. I kept telling myself I could handle one more thing. Then one more thing arrived. And another. Eventually you run out of things to sell, things you can fix yourself and creative ways to rearrange $14.37. You don't necessarily fall apart no matter how much you may want to. Sometimes, you just sit down and tell the truth. So here it is... My mother along with the other 7 assorted guardians in my first 15 years of life always said there'd be hard days like this. They all really should have been more specific about their frequency though. September 8 would have been mine and Dave's 30th anniversary. I knew that date was coming. I thought I was prepared for it. Apparently I wasn't. Maybe that's why everything feels heavier right now. Or maybe it's because everything actually IS heavier right now. I don't know anymore. Since losing Dave, I've been trying to keep the life we built running on my school bus income of less than $24,000 a year while still fighting the life insurance claim. I can't afford a lawyer so it's a tedious process. As well, I lost a secondary gig earning $550 a month for managing a social media account for an organization whose founder seems to have lost their mind and sensibilities, and went on a kneecapping spree. And now the house is not cooperating. The sewer line collapsed in the spring after a guy I hired to power auger it apparently did more than auger it. Sixty-some feet of sewer line had to be dug up and replaced. And no. I do not have house insurance. I can't get it with the electrical problem in the basement and what I can get is exceptionally expensive and out of reach for me. Thank God Saskatchewan has an emergency home repair program and I qualified, because I honestly don't know what I would have done. I did have to pay a lawyer hundreds of dollars to get Dave's name removed from the title of the house first, back in April this year. The man on the phone felt horrified telling me a mere 7 months after I lose him that I need to have his name removed. I found myself consoling the gentleman and reassuring him he was simply doing his job and I know he wasn't personally involved in that policy. But he was very distressed asking a fresh widow to sever one more tie to her deceased spouse. Poor guy was inconsolable. That was a strange day. Your husband dies, and a few months later you're paying somebody to take his name off the house you bought together so you can qualify for government assistance to replace the sewer. Nobody puts that part in the "So You're A Widow Now" brochure. Then my family friend finally came in June. He'd been telling me for months not to worry. He'd take his three week vacation, come down and he'd help me finish the things Dave didn't get to. He swore up and down that he knew how to do this stuff. And I believed him. I had no reason not to. I need to be very clear about something because I don't want anyone thinking badly of this man. He's 60. He has recurring cancers from blood to bone and skin. He's on dialysis. He got on an airplane and dragged that dialysis machine across the country to spend three weeks on vacation helping DaVida and me. He bought the materials himself. He did it because he loves us. Unfortunately, love does not a dry shower make. The whole tub surround and shower had to be redone after he left. All of it. Regular drywall had been installed in the shower. Vertically AND backwards. Brown paper facing the bathtub. The tub surround was glued over it and left 2 inches of exposed drywall all around the top. I made him cut that out, and he solved it by using 3/8 pvc quarter round molding to bridge the half inch gap at the top. He used butt joints to bboot. For anyone not aware, a butt joint in a corner not only looks terrible and unprofessional, but it still allows water to enter and destroy the drywall and grow mold. My basement flooded twice while he was here, both times as a result of him or something innocuous that he did. Once because his dialysis machine kept tripping a breaker and nobody realized my sump pump was on it, but would have been avoided if he had just listened when I told him to plug the camper he was using for three weeks into the house, not my garage. The second time, he had been kneeling on my basement floor and grabbed the sump discharge pipe to pull himself back up. In the process, he completely dislodged it from the wall and pulled the outside end of the pipe back through the hole and into the basement. I didn't realize what had happened, so for about a week my sump pump was faithfully pumping water out of my basement and directly back into my basement. The pump worked perfectly. The water just kept coming back. Nobody noticed. Including me. I'm not sure whether that technically qualifies as a sump pump anymore or an indoor water feature. Keep in mind, this was barely eight weeks ago. Then he finished some siding on the back of the house using white soffit screws through my brown siding to hold the pieces together. Apparently he was unaware that vinyl siding locks into each other, and then you attach it to the house via the nail strip. So now it looks like Home Depot bedazzled my house. And I couldn't even get mad. Well, not in a way he could notice. What was I supposed to do? Yell at a man with cancer who dragged a dialysis machine across Canada because he loves my kid and me like his own, and has the emotional maturity of a 15 year old? I hugged him when I dropped him at the airport, then went and parked at Home Depot until they opened to start the arduous task of sourcing and finding affordable materials like cement board, thinset, grout and tile. Then I started repairing the repairs. I forked out close to another $800 for materials, plus $1,500 for the contractor's wages to have the tub and shower properly rebuilt. And that $1,500 was only about half what the labour should have cost me. I ran out of money so his wife came over and spent an entire day just on grout and absolutely refuses compensation for it. The contractor, who only moved here from Ontario this year and already has more work than he can handle, knew my circumstances and charged me half price because, as he put it, the Bible says to help the widow. He has since solemnly promised that whenever I need him, he will make himself available and will never charge me more than half price. That is the best news for me, because I have some much that needs doing. So I started selling things. Some of Dave's tools went first. Then his turntable, CD player, hundreds of DVDs and CDs. Eventually, I sold his record collection too, just three weeks ago. There were more than 1,200 albums packed into fourteen milk crates, all alphabetized. Decades of rock music he'd collected from the '60s right up until he died. It was his pride and joy, and I got $150 for the whole thing. Not because it was worth $150. It wasn't. I got $150 because I needed $150 immediately. That one hurt. And now the roof is leaking again, and the basement is wet again. My existing sump pit isn't deep enough. There's plywood subflooring downstairs that still needs to be pulled up. I can smell that damp, rotten smell starting underneath my bedroom, right beside the cold-air returns, which is handy if the objective is to circulate it through the entire house. I've now been told there are four critical things that need to be dealt with before they become much bigger problems that will break the bank and find me comparing prices between matches or repairs. And winter is coming. Of course it iis.Ots always coming. Then yesterday one of my cats appeared with a broken foot. She isn't even originally my cat. She belonged to my neighbour who died two years ago after taking a tumble off her second story roof. I took her cats in. She spent last night beside me, growling and howling whenever anything in the room dared to move because she's hurting. And I can't fix it. That's the part that gets me. I can put a bucket under a leak. I can pump water out of a hole. I can sell something when I need money, though not so much now since I've sold pretty much everything of value. Somehow, I can usually figure something out. But I can't explain to an animal why I can't just make her stop hurting. She doesn't understand money, or vet bills, or why sometimes wanting desperately to fix something isn't enough. She just knows her foot hurts like hell. And then there's DaVida, and that's the one I really don't know what to do with. I've found out she's being bullied at school. Not just kids being kids, either. Someone is deliberately telling other children not to be friends with her. She's being talked about, insulted and told to shut up when she's sitting there minding her own business. Her bully's father happens to be a Minister in the Sask parliament. And she hasn't been telling me. She's been hiding it. She's eleven years old. She's high functioning autistic. She went back to school barely two weeks after losing her dad, and now, a year later, she's withdrawing into herself while apparently trying to carry this without bothering me with it. I can deal with the damn basement. I can deal with the roof, and I can deal with losing things. They're things. Eventually I find some half-assed way to deal with them because that's what I've been doing my entire life. But finding out my kid has been quietly hurting while I've been running around trying to keep everything else from falling apart is something else entirely, and is destroying my soul. In March of 2024 I wrote a letter to Justin Trudeau when I was at my wit's end trying to understand how an ordinary working family was supposed to keep doing this. A lot of you found me because of that post. Back then there were two of us adults here. Now there's one. And after eleven years of Liberal government, I'm still doing the same arithmetic I was doing then: What can wait? What can't? What can I fix myself? What can I sell? I own my dump of a house. I don't have a mortgage. I work, and I don't take vacations be ause I can't. I don't buy clothes because DaVida needs clothes first. I don't have expensive hobbies, because who has time when daily survival is the time consuming activity ecery day. I'm not trying to live some grand lifestyle. I'm trying to keep a roof from leaking and water out of my basement, and somehow even THAT is becoming physically, mentally and financially impossible. That's what I think gets lost when politicians talk about affordability. They talk about percentages and programs and billions of dollars like ordinary Canadians live inside spreadsheets. We don't. We live in houses where the sump pump breaks. We have cars that need tires, kids who need shoes, pets that get hurt and furnaces that quit in January. And sometimes we sell something worth considerably more for $150 because what we actually need is $150 right now, today. There are millions of Canadians doing some version of that calculation. That's the part nobody in Ottawa or Toronto/Montreal/Vancouver seems to understand. And please don't remind me I'm strong. I know I'm strong. I'm tough. I'm smart. I'm resourceful. I've always been those tthings.But sometimes... I don't feel like being strong. I just want to scream and cry and feel sorry for myself while I curl up in a ball, preferably amongst a bunch a cute adorable calves in a field where no one can witness my breakdown. However, none of those qualities of personal fortitude and strength appear to have any waterproofing properties. Strength doesn't fix my roof. Intelligence doesn't pump water from my basement. Resilience doesn't make my cat stop hurting. And being tough doesn't make my little girl understand why other kids don't want to be her friend. I'll get up tomorrow. I'll drive my bus. I'll take care of DaVida. I'll feed the animals. I'll pump the basement. I'll probably get angry about something happening in Ottawa and write about that too. I'll keep going. I always do. But I'm tired... really tired. I've had enough character development for one lifetime. I have character coming out my ass so I don't need another lesson about how much I can survive... I already know. I just need life to stop asking me to prove it on a daily basis for even just a little while. God only knows how many others in Canada are navigating the same stressors.