Quillette: “Captiongate: How a Single Zoom Call Propelled Canada’s Greens Into Pronoun Meltdown”

MANY thanks, Mr. Jonathan Kay, for your thoughtful yet both sad and absurd Quillette article about the Green Party of Canada: https://bit.ly/3xs0BRH. From your publication, Bambi learned that the interim leader of this noble Canadian federal party resigned over pronouns misuse. Can you imagine? Not over a political project meant to save species or improve our life in one way or another. Just the misuse of her pronouns… on Zoom!

Well, Bambi does not know if she should smile, laugh, or cry at the level of our collectively insane times and how they are affecting smart people like politicians of great political parties. Related to this, Bambi has a question: Why is it the case, Canada? Why are we doing this to ourselves?

Does this story make any sense to you? It does not to Bambi. Of course, this has nothing to do with our preferred pronouns, if we wish to use those and/or write them on our screens, emails, shirts, and even hearts. The problem does not seem to be the use (or non-use) of pronouns. It is rather their misuse or even abuse, sadly.

Regardless, this story seems to lack both political wisdom and common sense. Mind you, Bambi is saying so without knowing the politician in question. She would have thought the same, even if this politician had been her own sister or even daughter. She would have told the latter that she has trouble following her on this one.

This being said, Bambi will echo Mr. Jonathan Kay’s words, which appear to be sad for the poor performance of this party in Canada. As Mr. Kay wrote: ” In some nations, such as Finland, Germany, Ireland, and Austria, Greens have gained cabinet representation and membership in ruling coalitions. In Latvia, Green politicians have even served as prime minister and head of state”. Mr. Kay is right. She will even add the following, if she may: even her birth country, Lebanon, which is about to literally fall apart, has a MUCH needed Green Party (with a hardworking leader on top of that). Indeed, as Bambi once wrote on this blog, if she recalls well from a visit to Beirut in 2019, the Lebanese political spectrum also includes two smaller new parties with a responsible ecological platform. She does not know if anyone, from these parties, has been been elected in the last Lebanese Parliamentary elections.

To come back to us in Canada, isn’t it heart-breaking to see a respectable political federal party reaching such levels of absurdity, instead of focusing on the real environmental issues it should be standing up for? Why it is betraying its mission like that? Bambi recalls from an older post in June 2021 (shown further below) how members of this same party lost their time and energy fighting over the Middle East, instead of focusing on our Canadian politics. That was also a disappointing moment, at least for her who escaped the Middle East and its eternal issues 32 years ago.

To conclude this post, beyond the Green Party of Canada, can our Canadian politicians, from ALL parties at ALL levels of governance, focus on our serious national, provincial/territorial, or municipal issues please, instead of falling into the trap of sectarian (or identity-based) divisive internal politics? Thank you.

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Why are our Canadian politicians fighting over the Middle East?