Commentary

…of shoes and ships and sealing wax…

August 21, 2025   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

Said the Walrus in Lewis Carroll’s humorous poem, The Walrus and the Carpenter, in his novel, Through the Looking Glass, “Of why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings…” was the Walrus’ recipe for enlightened conversation. He would be right up there with the chaos of conversation that rules the waves nowadays.

The Walrus’s launch into what he is offering as a diversion is directed to the many oysters he and the Carpenter have persuaded to leave their safe ocean bed and go for a walk but at this juncture, he declares that he and his companion are going to eat them all!

During the course of devouring “every one” of the oysters, the Walrus says how sorry he is, and Carroll writes: “I weep for you,” the Walrus said; “I deeply sympathize/ With sobs and tears, he sorted out/ those of the largest size/ holding his pocket handkerchief/ before his streaming eyes.”

Carroll’s ironic mocking works as well for the modern-day politician as it did in his own Victorian times.

The pandering and hypocrisy of politicians in Carroll’s time and ours is almost indistinguishably alike. Bar how they dressed, the messages are the same, born of favouring the rich with privileges and opportunities and victimizing the poor and disabled, well, here in Canada, with the choice of MAID. MAID is all too frequently used as a means to escape their pain of being disabled and the help they need by way of food and shelter being withheld.

A documented disabled person here in Ontario has to have a conversation with a government agent that includes a survey of anyone with whom the person might be living.

They are asked questions like, “How much money do you have in your pocket? What jewellery do you have?”

When the much vaunted and intensely pursued Canada Disability Benefit (CDB) was meant to “bring the disabled out of poverty,” it was hammered out through intense debate in Parliament. This included the comment by one well-heeled parliamentarian that he did not want the benefit to “disincentivized the disabled from working.”

There was equally intense campaigning on the part of disabled people and their advocates, calling for a figure that would make sense, that would release the disabled from scraping their poor lives together. Give them enough freedom to deal with their disabilities and allow them a safe space to live reasonably.

Following an 86-day public comment period during which disabled people really began to feel optimistic that they would see enough money to actually pay their rent and eat healthy food, in July of this year, the act became law.

An amount of $200 a month or $2,400 per year was settled as the value of the benefit.

How far could $200 take your monthly budget?

The biggest difference between Carroll’s cartoonish representation of the leaders and influencers of his time and now is that the hypocrisy and cronyism that existed then and exists now, while they are so close as to be identical, today’s privileges are much more dangerous.

Take the plans for Highway 413, a boon to developers, to finally crash into the Green Belt as they have been trying to do for years. Indeed, that seems to be the whole point of the 413, for it has been shown many times that the usefulness of the 413 as a highway does not exist.

With the Ford government’s passing of Bill 5, stripping the environmental laws protecting land, water, and natural habitats, his plans for this $10 billion project lasting 10 years to build the completely unnecessary projected 51 wandering kilometres of the 413 are a disaster that will ruin this green and pleasant land once and for all.

It truly makes one wonder how our local MPP feels about the destruction of her own backyard, as one might say, how is it not a problem for her?

Protesters have been on the ground with their signs and common sense, but they have been dismissed by Ford (except for his watchful sniper). What better bite can we apply to this and Ford’s many plans for thoughtless and free-wheeling development?

There is so much more, and the Walrus and his companion, the Carpenter, did eat all the oysters without compassion or thought about more than their own satisfaction. They are the embodiment of what is happening right here in Dufferin–Caledon – terrifying stuff, but the real question is, how do we change behaviour that has been our pattern nearly forever?

In spite of how we think our world and social standards have changed with the total opening of the internet, here we still are with our own Walruses and Carpenters, still sorting out their tears and still wanting it all for themselves without regard for the consequences.

Do the avaricious developers really not see that to destroy such an environment must have consequences, must contribute to the ruination of much more than just this corner of the earth?

When we are digging, fracking, developing more oil fields, when we are building houses that are poorly designed and made of indifferent materials, do we not care about the waste and harm?

When we purposefully kill off our precious waterways and the habitats of the essential life on this planet, is there any place in our minds that understands that no financial gain can possibly be worth the loss of the irreplaceable?

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