Dear Christy Clark,
I can’t say that I was surprised to see your reaction to Linda when she approached you in the grocery store. The fact that you couldn’t carry on a two-minute conversation with an average citizen simply because she won’t be voting for you is a pretty clear example of how you feel about the majority of citizens in B.C. You know, us middle- and lower-class folk.
However, I do know that you were quite surprised to see the subsequent backlash that spawned the #IamLinda social media storm. You were so shocked, in fact, that you retreated to your go-to move which is blaming the NDP for the whole thing. A move that almost seems to be a knee-jerk reaction for you these days. You say it before even thinking about how absurd you sound or how easily it can be proven to be untrue.
Remember just recently when you blamed the NDP for hacking into your party’s website — only for it to be proven that in fact it was a mistake from your party. When you were asked questions at the debates about current and urgent issues today almost every time you would start talking about what the NDP was doing almost two decades ago.
So naturally when you show up at a grocery store and a citizen approaches you and says she won’t vote for you (she didn’t get to say much more than that because you cut her off and walked away), it must be the NDP. I imagine they have nothing better to do with less than two weeks before the election than to have workers waiting at every grocery store across the province in case you show up.
Your insistence on deflecting blame to try and make yourself look like some kind of victim is made even more ridiculous by the fact that you are currently paying employees to drive around in a troll truck and John Horgan around. Their main goal is to follow Horgan in a giant truck covered with smear campaign posters and do anything they can to disrupt and harass the NDP and their supporters at events and rallies. But yeah, it must have been really tough having to hear a citizen say to your face that they wouldn’t vote for you.
What you have failed to realize about the #IamLinda movement is that your reaction to her remind so many of us the many ways you have failed to hear us.
Those of us who are fundraising tens of thousands of dollars every year to provide our children’s schools with basic supplies. Or the parents fighting school closures and cuts to services.
Teachers who, after a 15-year battle with you and your government, finally won with at Supreme Court of Canada, forcing you to reinstate all the support positions for our children that you yourself illegally stripped of their contracts when you were the Minister of Education.
Those of us who have lived through the previous “Debt Free B.C.” and “Families First” campaigns, neither of which proved to be true by a long shot.
People whose parents are being neglected in a care homes because nine out of 10 of them are understaffed.
Anyone working in health care and the patients that depend on those services — all of which have been experienced funding cuts, and others, like cleaning and food services have even been privatized.
People who can’t even access a doctor or are sitting on a long wait list for surgery.
Parents, relatives and friends of the many children that have died or been seriously injured under the Ministry’s care.
The large majority of us who will never be able to afford to buy a house because your government’s inaction.
The thousands of parents who either cannot find daycare or have daycare but pay a large portion of our income to cover it.
All of these people and so many more feel like you have quite literally turned your back on us. At this point it’s like you’re not even trying to pretend you care.
You could have avoided this if you had just taken two minutes out of your day to talk to someone who didn’t agree with you — you could have used that opportunity to try to change her mind or learn why she isn’t supporting you so you could try to be a better candidate. Instead you rudely cut her off and walked away. That struck a cord for a lot of us. Only you alone are responsible for your reaction to Linda.
You look at all those people sharing #IamLinda tweets and see a bunch of NDP plants. But most of us are smart enough to see the truth, which is there are citizens across this province that have been failed repeatedly by you and your government and they are mad. We have watched you erode every public service that we depend on and we know that your level of corruption and corporate influence is so bad that even the New York Times is taking notice.
Well guess what, Ms. Clark. We are ready for a change and in nine days we might just get our wish. Maybe then you will understand the reality behind #IamLinda.
Image: Flickr/UFV
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