Well, happy 139th Canada. I'll try not to let this past year's antics ruin my perceptions of you entirely, even though you've done nothing but parade around reveling in how outdated value sets, if used correctly, can get you loads and loads of stuff! With 1990s era Alberta in your head, you've had a long year of big boxes, "family values," and horse shit. Everything hits Alberta a decade late; what we're having to re-adjust to is Alberta running smack into Ottawa and trying to govern things.

In the past year you've elected a neckless Dr. Evil to run the most fragile and beautiful machine I know of, and the situation is unsettling. As a stalwart protector of democratic rights, the good doctor has embedded 2000+ of our youth in a massive opium-and-AKs quagmire in Afghanistan (the country the rest of the Middle East looks at to feel good about themselves) in order to restore a stability that has yet to be located, and right here at home has begun to clawback not freedom of the press, but access of the press. It's not that they're not free to print whatever they want, just that they're no longer allowed anywhere near the government and are increasingly being reduced to a bunch of "what lindsey lohan ate for lunch" useless tabloid-y piles of rubbish who can be raked across society to spread a value set as fresh as last year's forgotten compost pile from the latest unfunded DTES community garden. Ohhh the smell.

I'd like to raise my glass and say some lofty tripe about this day marking the beginning of some shiny new utopia, and blah blah blah, but let's face it, these things usually get better before they get worse and with no other political party in this country even willing to pretend to be electable, this birthday is far more likely to resemble when a 15 year old meth head finally turns 16 and runs away to realize their dreams of endless partying in some crack house downtown where no one can stay sober long enough to decide whether the rats or fleas should be exterminated first than the starry-eyed first steps of a recent graduate from the school of hard knocks. What I mean is that things will probably get worse before they get better. It's the Canadian way to elect a government that does nothing until we get frustrated by a lack of progress, elect someone who only pedals backwards and scares the shit out of us, only to collapse, twitch, and re-elect the guys who do nothing. I'm not sure that we fear change, but we sure as hell aren't willing to take responsibility for it.

Okay Canada, I'd better wrap this up quickly since the glaciers on your cake are melting quickly, and projections show I live in one of those places that will end up under water. Canada, you've learned to talk the talk. Inventor of peacekeeping, that lovely charter, your whole progressive rhetoric of multiculturalism, it all sounds so good. But now, on this the 139th eve of your inception, it's time to walk the walk. Constitutionally protecting the rights of your indigenous citizens while in reality consigning them to live in 3rd world squalor and die before they turn 50 is, frankly, just embarrassing for a country your age. Constantly spewing the highest per capita greenhouse gas emissions doesn't look so great either. Time to grow up, lay off the drive-thru and learn how to cook. I hear Norway makes a great wind-power soup and I'll bet they'd teach you the recipe if you asked nicely. I know making it on your own, and living up to all of that talk might sound scary, but it's not nearly as bad as the alternatives. Canada, as the first lesson of your adult life, I offer you this: you are responsible both for what you do, and for what happens because of what you do. Consider your actions carefully, or the results may be more nationally unbalancing than an Albertan politician with BSE. Arusha-arusha, they all fall down.

Blow out your candles Canada, and may this be the last time this year that you really blow.