| Merry Christmas to all the good people who would be made to look bad A Merry Christmas to all the good people whom the Harper Government would make look bad, people like Theresa Spence, Chief of Attawapiskat whose governance is as transparent as his government's is opaque. Merry Christmas to the good people of Attawapiskat, many who must live in third world conditions beneath the Arctic Circle, and are made to look bad by a government which would rather spend billions on new prisons, and super expensive high tech jet fighters for the defence of a foreign country, than pay for adequate housing for Canada's native people as is required by treaties signed in good faith. Merry Christmas to the farmers of Western Canada who are made to look bad because they want to keep their cooperative, the Canadian Wheat Board, to sell their wheat to the world instead of paying large agro-businesses to get what they grow to market. Merry Christmas to the good people who, because of the recklessness of youth, will do something they will regret and will be made to look bad for perhaps the rest of their lives by an unforgiving sanctimonious Prime Minister with new prisons to fill. Merry Christmas to the unemployed who are made to look bad by a mean-spirited government, who, with rising joblessness, deliberately cut back on the personnel needed to process their unemployment insurance claims; some of whom could not contain their frustrations at being left nearly penniless at Christmas time. Merry Christmas to the more than one thousand good people at the G20/G8, many bruised and battered by police, who were thrown in jail for peacefully demonstrating for a better world. Good people, who Harper’s Minister of Public Safety and former Justice Minister would have us believe are bad people who deserved what they got from Toronto’s Finest. Merry Christmas to the millions of good people in Canada and the United States who care for the environment and the future of life on our fragile home in space, and who are slandered and libeled daily as bad people by the government, and the oil interest it serves, for wanting to stop the scourge and the clear and imminent danger to all life on earth that is the exploitation of the Alberta tar-sands. Merry Christmas to all the good people of the world who lived, and are living in tents to protest against the unscrupulous money lenders and market manipulators and their political enablers in government who have become filthy rich while making it impossible for millions of honest men and women to earn a living. Merry Christmas to all the poor and powerless who the rich and powerful say are bad people because they are poor and powerless. Take heart all you good people, your time will come, and when it does, don’t be like them, don’t become a bad person. Bernard Payeur, 2011
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