Can you imagine being a receptionist at one of the UCP MLA offices right now? It would be a task almost as impossible as being a teacher in Alberta.
I made my first-ever phone call to my MLA at 8:55 on October 28, the morning his party introduced Bill 2. ‘My constituency’ office phone rolled through nine rings before I received a message that the mailbox of the person I was trying to reach was full and to try again later.
Try, I did. Three more times before I began to ponder, as I do in all moments of unrest, what a Raging Granny would do. Perhaps I could whip up a batch of homemade cookies and deliver it to My constituency office with a little poem: Roses are red, violets are blue, using the notwithstanding clause is a great big pile of poo.
But for the time being, I would have to put it all aside and carry on with my plans for the day. I was driving down to Calgary to visit my dear friend who is fighting for her life at the cancer centre. The drive, as always, required full alert as I navigated among the traffic careening down the QEII at high speeds. Life is really hard at times, I thought, and we really should be looking for ways to simplify things and support one another moving forward. We should pass only in the left lane, only when it’s safe to do so, and without flipping the bird on the way by. We should stop the divide and conquer approach.
I arrived at the cancer centre in one piece and was bracing myself in the elevator for the emotional wave I was about to be swept up in, when someone jumped into the closing doors at the last moment. It was a young woman shouldering both a stethoscope and her cell phone on one side and grabbing a notepad from her white lab coat, while trying to balance a sandwich with her other hand as she ate her lunch on the fly. I had merely stepped from one bubble into another, but with exactly the same structure: professionals scurrying against the chaos to provide service for the people in their care under circumstances that are a shambles.
This province needs to stop its hunter and prey chaos so we can meet the even bigger challenges coming at us, and I returned home more determined than ever to discuss this with My MLA. So much so that I filled out my own little pink message slip, to save his war-weary receptionist at least that step, and dropped it off at My constituency office on my way to senior’s yoga. This raging senior wants to know his next steps in supporting not just teachers, but all professionals who are performing herculean work in this province despite the obstacles his party is hammering them with. I am hopeful I might hear back from him one day, lack of cookies notwithstanding.
(Photo: StockCake)