7 May 2015

Doing It Right In Alberta



All of the ridings I worked in (I was one of a corsair's crew of union brothers brought in charged with making sure all Edmonton went Orange) were scarce on resources. Fair amount of volunteers were about but you can never have enough of those. But not a lot of money for signs, stationary, paid staff or any of that. We tried to fill that gap as much as we could and still leave enough money in our jeans to fill up on good Alberta rye once each day's work was done.

If you have never worked, really worked, a campaign, I am talking 14 hour days. We had to drink fast in the evenings because you cannot drink and sleep at the same time so far as I know.

Who we met in one campaign headquarters after another were people who really care about their province's future and backed that up by being willing to do something about it. They were no different from most of the Albertans I met. They care, they are responsible and they are willing to put in the work to do a job right.

On Election Day (which should be a paid holiday by the way) after our work door to door reminding people to get the fuck to the polls we spent an hour or so on the phone making our last voter contact before the corsair captain in charge of our zone house set us free.

"Go get drunk you dirty pirate motherfuckers," she told us before she returned to campaign headquarters to watch the vote tallies come in with the other captains and the candidate.

We went straight to the party. Were driven there by Eddy resident and well known city working people's advocate Mr. Beer N. Morebeer. "The car should be fine here," he said as he parked in an area that looked like it had been transplanted from the Syrian civil war. "I sure as fuck am not driving tonight."

The two of us took to the cold windswept street with fellow corsair hands Santa, Connor and Ralph. We were like boxers who had severely injured an opponent in the ring waiting to see if the other fighter would ever get out of hospital once he had been treated there.

There must have been a thousand people there already. Mercifully the line-up to get liquor tickets was short. We each bought an arm's length of tickets. The liquor line-ups, we knew, would test our patience later - fuck the ticket line-up.

More and more people came, first testing, then exceeding the great hall's capacity. We decided to get out while we could and found a table outside the hall by the bar already claimed by our recently arrived corsair captains and candidate to party at.

Enough numbers had rolled in for television's talking heads to declare the Orange Corsair government, the Wild Boys and their William H. Macy fucking near lookalike leader opposition and the nearly universally despised Conservatives dead last save the seats the Liberal and Alberta Party leaders managed to win for themselves.

We partied like John A. MacDonald. We partied decadent and depraved. We partied like pirates on board a ship full of rum. We partied straight on to our planes.

The people have taken Alberta. Long may they run, motherfuckers.

2 comments:

ib said...

I've been following your excursion into the front line avidly, albeit without any thorough understanding of those nuances involved. A few thousand miles away we are of course ourselves poised on a general election. I just cast my vote. The campaign proper coincided with my personal system crashing and its prompting me to perform a clean install. This is pretty much where I stand on matters political.

Better to burn it down and rebuild from the ground up. Those spikes in random memory access need to be ironed out.

Congratulations. Continue to give 'em hell on the trail.

Mr. Beer N. Hockey said...

Have not yet checked the British results. Hope it went well. At least Maggie is dead if her ghost lingers on.