Tonight is for homeless cats.

Earlier this week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s wife Laureen spoke at a TIFF Gala to raise money for homeless cats. During the Canadian First Lady’s welcoming address, a frustrated young 21-year old Canadian woman rose in the audience and spoke out these words: “Raising awareness about cat welfare is a good look for your husband’s upcoming campaign strategy….Don’t you think supporting government action on missing and murdered indigenous women in this country would be a better look?”

This made national news, being labelled by the media as an “interruption” by an “activist”. In reality, it was an epic failure by the canadian political leadership’s sweetheart during a public PR event that was supposed to bring Mrs. Harper’s good charitable heart into focus.

Luckily, someone caught it all on video and posted it to the internet for people to draw their own conclusions. In the video, the wife of the Prime Minister of Canada is wearing fuzzy black kitten ears, and begins shouting out responding to the young woman.This was a huge mistake.

Mrs. Harper replied to the young woman crying out, saying “We’re raising money for animals tonight. If you’d like to donate to animals we’d love to take your money…we’d love to take your money.” At this point the audience, who was gathered to watch a film festival about cats began to applaud Mrs. Harper’s words.

After a pause, Harper again spoke out to the young woman shouting, “That’s a great cause but that’s another night. Tonight we’re here for homeless cats.”

I’ll give you a moment to gain your composure here.

It is the understatement of the century to say that Canada is in a crisis when it comes to its relationship with the indigenous people of this land. We passed crisis about 250 years ago. Now we are simply in the Twilight Zone.

Any psychologist can tell you that it is textbook dysfunctional family behaviour for the children of parents who continually ignore them, to engage in negative attention seeking. In light of that, who is to blame here? The young woman taking advantage of a captive audience and the open fuzzy kitten ears of Mrs. Harper?

Had Mrs. Harper stayed silent and allowed security to usher out the young woman, the moment would have passed by and nothing more would come of it. However, she couldn’t hold her tongue. The pressure was on and she resorted to retaliating against the young woman, returning shame for shame by attempting to mouth off in return.

Further to that, the statement, “…we’d love to take your money…” just sounds so creepy.
It seems though that the veil was pulled back in her final statement when Mrs. Harper said that missing and murdered indigenous women was a great “cause” that could be passed over for another night; after the homeless cats are covered.

This statement is full of implications. Missing and murdered indigenous women are an issue that the Harper government continually refuses to address despite huge public outcry. Mrs. Harper was put on the spot and made a choice to respond, finally offering the Canadian population the only if even unofficial response to that outcry.

Apparantly missing and murdered indigenous women are for “another night”. Tonight is for cats.
If only we were able to peruse the federal government’s PR event schedule for causes and the timeline during which they will be addressed. What if tomorrow is reserved for homeless dogs? And what if the day after that is reserved for all the bunny rabbits?

After the federal government is done taking care of all the helpless animals in Canada, will they have enough energy to stand up and do something for indigenous women? And if not tonight, when?