Another tale of everyday life in the Department of Health and Archaeology

Strangers intrude as Health and Archaeology Minister Carolyn Bertram tours through a new, $3-million health care centre in O'Leary on Friday. Image: Guardian Heather Taweel

By Donnie St Pierre, O’Leary, PEI

La Ministre Bien Aimée was in a rage. On the gold inlaid green Italian marble of her desk lay screen captures from The Guardian’s website.

Before her grovelled the duty clerk who had printed them off. Insufferable!

She seized the priceless Quattrocento Florentine goblet with the Cloud Forest Orchid flown in that morning from Ecuador and hurled it. It shattered on the Lorenzo Ghiberti bronze of the young faun and a shard of crystal lodged in the door of the Doge’s palazzo in the Canaletto hanging by the columned portico leading to the inner waiting room.

Were they tormenting her deliberately? Or was she just surrounded by hopeless incompetents?

She had schlepped out to some God-forsaken hole called O’Leary (which the natives, who appear to suffer from congenital speech defects, unaccountably refer to as Olarry). The official excuse was the opening of some sort of clinic, but the cringing bureaucrat had promised her a photo-op and since the disaster earlier in the week with the gray dwarves could scarcely be counted, she knew her little people needed to see her picture again to be reminded where their loyalties had better lie if they knew what is good for them. This would convey a clear message: if they displease her, they could be schlepping all the way out to O’Leary the next time they need an aspirin for their mewling brat.

But when the morons of The Guardian actually ran the pic, here’s the disaster they somehow managed to create. It looks like some inmate has escaped from what must be the local equivalent of Unit 9 and is sauntering along with his hands in his pockets, a shirt several sizes too large and a blank look on his face as a woman tries to explain to him where the washroom is.

La Ministre Bien Aimée has been relegated to the far background and some practical joker has photoshopped the body of a hefty middle aged nurse from the 1950s onto her.

Those screeching mothers of Rustico must be behind this somehow, but so far even the most vigilant inquiries by her former Culture Police have failed to turn up the names of the conspirators.

Health PEI takes control of the Island’s health-care system. Keith Dewar, CEO of Health P.E.I., Leo Steven, chairman of Health P.E.I., and Health Minister Carolyn Bertram. image: Guardian Heather Taweel

Earlier in the week, that grey little man Keith Dewar suggested a photo op showing her signing responsibility for Islanders’ health over to him and some other grey nominees who can be trusted to follow the courageous public service example set by the gentlemen of the Eastern School Board. It had been necessary to remind him in no uncertain terms that she remained in complete and total charge of everything, except for making difficult or unpopular decisions and announcing bad news or cutbacks on the path to “One Island Community: One Island Hospital”. Or explaining why it’s perfectly OK for someone’s dear old grannie to die because we won’t add the drug she needs to our approved list as we spent the money on Hat Music in Cavendish and some daytime television person who travels with his own gazebo and dislikes seafood.

Or, of course, the awarding of lucrative contracts, which will be handled somewhere else altogether.

Admittedly whoever had put this photo op together had covered at least some of the basics. There was a totally appropriate and welcome absence of cute little nurses. Not a single cute little cap within sight. There was no signage in French and no suggestion of including a token French patient, or indeed any patient. The painting of Marie Curie had been tactfully removed. But whoever had chosen a room with a mucous-coloured wall for a background should be terminated immediately. The Ministerial highlights, so artistically rendered by Rudolpho, her in-house florist, hairdresser and adviser on all matters artistic, have assumed a decidedly greenish tinge. And the photographer inexcusably waited until she leaned forward before taking the shot, resulting in her normally girlish embonpoint more closely resembling the prow of a dreadnought battleship fighting a heavy sea.’

These pictures are probably the worst news she has had this week, a week already blighted by word that Tracey Vessey has begun a blog and that the dilettante who is temporarily premier has caused further outrage in Rustico by his cavalier suggestion to the whole Island French community gathered in conclave in Summerside that the outrageous insurrection against her plan to keep the French children of Rustico carefully sequestered in the basement of the Cymbria Lions Club was a mere “small bump” in the path of the mutual love-in which is, to his mind, the relationship between the provincial Liberals and the Island French community.

Bastille Day approaches. What torments can the unruly screeching mothers of Rustico have in store for her to mark the day that the revolting French peasantry rose against their social betters? There are far too many potential Madame Defarges in Rustico and even Hunter River to permit her security people to relax their vigilance for even a moment. Suppose some little person were to run up to her during the Canada Day parade to demand she account for actions so at odds with her promises? She shivered delicately at the thought.

But in the antechamber she hears a girlish giggle. The delightful Cynthia is back from Haiti with a book of curses guaranteed to help her iron out the “little bumps” in Rustico for once and for all. The mysterious depths beneath the forbidden kitchen of the Cymbria Lions Club will be the very place to explore the deeper rituals needed to regain control over les mamans insolentes et insoumises de Rustico. A servitor places an ice cold bottle of Bolly and two lead crystal flutes on the Louis XV occasional table under the Géricault’s rendering of the scene when the handful of Templars who had survived Philip IV’s treacherous massacre of October 13, 1307 and the long ocean passage arrived in Cymbria to found the Chapelle des Lions. The Noble Lions have given so much and ask so little. Who can begrudge them a token $92,000 a year to extend the hospitality of their cellars (but not, of course, their kitchen) to the squalling French brats of Rustico?

As their Chief Claw Trimmer has said: “We are really the council and town hall for Rustico. We actually spend public money much better than the provincial government. How sensible to give us taxing and policing powers so that we can do even more good works.”

But plans for the logical restructuring of community governance and even more effective Ghiz transparency and accountability lie in a happier future. For now VIP tickets for Taylor Swift beckon. The room fills with music. She begins to sway and the rhythm captures her. She leaps to her feet and begins to gyrate awkwardly. “Where are my capris?” she shrieks. A grade four classroom and a Presbyterian church choir seem a million miles and a lifetime away.

“Qu’ils mangent de la brioche!”