A Republican Revolution. Kevin Annett Runs For Member of Parliament In Winnipeg North by William S Annett

The New Canadian Shield Vol. 1, No. 1:

A Republican Revolution

July 29, 2019

Kevin Annett Runs For Member of Parliament In Winnipeg North

by William S. Annett

“To the folks in Kildonan, Eagle Strong Voice has spoke:

’Ere the Queen’s crown go down there are crowns to be broke;

 So each voting Canuck north of Portage and Main,

 Should up the Republic, Liz’s loss is our gain.’” 

- The ghost of Louis Riel, Sung to the tune of Bonnie Dundee

                                    ­­­­___________

Canada is holding a Federal election some time in September, whenever the Prime Minister gets around to telling the Governor General  to tell the Queen of England to tell the GG to tell the PM to drop a writ. 

Writ dropping in the Great Pale North, unlike most  other countries, means calling an election. In the Canadian Parliament, if the PM’s majority suddenly isn’t, a writ will get dropped, usually along with the dropper.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently had no dropping choice, following his confession that squeaky clean Canada has been guilty of genocide, although of the nice kind, whereby you rub out the next generation instead of the current one, as they do in all those uncivilized countries.

In comparison,  his Trump-like predecessor, Stephen Harper, in an effort to Make Canada Great Again, pointed out that killing 60,000 Indian kids in those free-tuition schools had merely been mistaken pedagogy, for which he apologized, so there was no need to drop a writ. No genocide, no colonial history, no writ  written. Which brings us to Kevin Annett, who has more or less single handedly upset the whole Canadian apple cart called Guilt Free Genocide.

Kevin is not your usual Parliamentary candidate. For instance, he has impertinently declared that if elected he won’t genuflect before That Woman in London. He also has observed that when another royal oddity called Charles No. 2 gave his drinking buddies all of the land north of Minnesota in 1670, the sorry fop was engaging in something more than impertinence himself.

This past week, during his Banned-in-Ottawa radio show called Here We Stand, Kevin Annett threw his hat in the ring, not only revealing his receding hairline but the birth of the Republican Party, whose title was hitherto believed to be a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Trump Empire.

The new party ain’t exactly a Neocon-like Canadian version of Donny Boy. The Republican Party of Kanata’s program reads like a cross between Oliver Cromwell and a latter day Rosa Luxemburg. Let’s just say if the Party ever comes to power in Canada, Bankers and Anglican Bishops better find another place to sip their martinis.

Now we get it, about giving Das Boot to an antediluvian monarch. Most Canadians actually like the idea. But why has the former Reverend chosen the north end of Winnipeg as the launching pad for his campaign for the new Republic?

Easy. North Winnipeg is not only home to the best borscht in the country but it’s the very epicenter of dissent in Canadian history. The ‘hood is drenched in a rich radical tradition dating back to Louis Riel, a mixed-blood rebel whom the great but ambivalent Canadian people elected to Parliament and then promptly hanged. It’s also home to the biggest and poorest urban native population outside Vancouver’s downtown east side: Rev Kev’s kind of folks. North Winnipeg is the city that never sleeps, because there aren’t enough flophouses to go around.

Kevin Annett shares that rich heritage. Although he was born in Edmonton, he was conceived in St. Boniface and dedicated to the proposition that River Heights stock brokers and St. Vital mink farmers are created equal. Kev’s ties to North Winnipeg reach back through the generations. The frugal bones of his maternal Scottish ancestors are housed in mausoleum solemnity in Kildonan Cemetery: the dispossessed folks who first came to the settlement the Cree locals called “dirty water”, armed conveniently with their Highland malt distillation. 

To make things even more titillating, North Winnipeg was also the incubus of Jacob Penner, the first Communist ever elected to public office in Canada - or North America, for that matter. His ascension was watched nervously by the royally-created RCMP, even though Penner’s sinecure was a relatively harmless one as a city alderman. But his putsch was enough to make that most frightened nation to the south consider arming the undefended border eight decades before the Trumpian Great Wall.

As it turned out, Jake Penner’s sole contribution to a Dictatorship of the Proletariat was his siring of his son Roland, who read law at the University of Manitoba and went on to become Attorney General in a tepidly progressive NDP government in the 1980’s. Roland’s own claim to fame was his breaking of the No Jews Allowed statute of Winnipeg’s venerable Carleton Club in 1982 with the quip, “Let’s see them keep out the Attorney General!”. So let it not be said that Canadians aren’t enlightened.

You can see that Rev Kev has a hard act to follow. But we’re trusting in the general discontent of Winnipeggers and Canucks in toto, as well as Kevin’s own Ojibway Indian name Eagle Strong Voice, given to him when he was adopted into that nation in where else but the north end of the ‘Peg.

Kevin's candidacy may be there, but his campaign and his message will be national.

Stay tuned.

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William Annett is an equally impertinent, 90 year old American who gave Kevin his lovely brown eyes one moonlit night on the banks of the Assiniboine River. He is currently in retirement in a Florida community for wayward thinkers where he campaigns on behalf of his son among the legions of Canadian Snow Birds who prefer Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Daytona Beach suntan lotion to the moral rigors of Canada. Bill also fathered two other children but he likes Kevin better