What a weird world we are living in now and it just keeps on getting stranger and stranger.
This weekend there is a full moon on Saturday, which of course is Oct. 31 and thus also Halloween, the one night of the year on which spookiness is celebrated, but it also will be the second full moon in the month which makes it also a so-called blue moon, i.e. a rarity, plus it's also the smallest full moon of the year, it will be fully illuminated by the sun and when it rises in the early evening it will be accompanied by the reddish-looking planet Mars in an unusually close proximity to Earth, and it will be the last full moon on Halloween until 2039.
So astronomically this is arguably a quite unusual weekend, and culturally it will be phenomenal too, such as it also being the end of Daylight Saving Time in B.C. (meaning everyone gets an extra hour of sleep), and politically there are many major shifts pending too, notably in B.C.'s case the still-unknown final outcome of the provincial election last Saturday (Oct. 24), which was greatly affected by the COVID-19 crisis.
It's almost certain that the B.C. New Democrats led by Premier John Horgan will emerge with a viable majority in the B.C. Legislative Assembly based on election-night vote-counting, which produced 55 seats for the NDP, 29 for the B.C. Liberals and 3 for the Green Party of B.C. from popular votes that were approximately 45 per cent for the NDP (a big gain from 39.7% in 2017), 35.4% for the Liberals (down from 41.2%), 15.3% for the Greens (down from 16.5%) and 3.7% for others (mainly 19 candidates for the Conservative Party of B.C.), up slightly.
However there may be a dozen or so of the 87 seats whose results could be changed by final counts that will include approximately 500,000 mailed-in ballots because so many people chose to vote that way to avoid the risks of catching COVID while waiting in lineups to vote, and exactly who wins and where and who loses and where will affect the makeup of the Horgan cabinet and also could hasten the departure of B.C. Liberal leader Andrew Wilkinson, who fairly quickly told the party president he would resign once a new leader is selected but who was told almost as quickly by some re-elected and former Liberal MLAs that he should step down immediately.
Even B.C. Green Party leader Sonia Furstenau faces some uncertainty this weekend because the number of mailed-in votes in her Cowichan Valley constituency reportedly appears to exceed her modest margin of victory (about 40% to 35%).
So there is a lot of uncertainty in B.C. politics this weekend, and federally there is growing uncertainty too as the whole nation struggles to cope with new outbreaks of COVID-19 (with jumps in several provinces), but compared with the rising stresses in world affairs the turmoil here in Canada and in B.C. is still minor (e.g. Russia and China are now talking about renewing their military alliance - see https://www.thetrumpet.com/
Really the main event in world affairs is the sure-to-be-pivotal U.S. Presidential election looming on Tuesday (Nov. 3), the outcome of which will greatly affect lives and nations and trade patterns all around the world, with British Columbia and Canada near the top of that list because so much of our economic activity depends on trade with the United States, but there also will be many notable political and cultural spill-overs (e.g. in what social media focus on).
The highly-charged contest between the extremely contentious incumbent Republican President Donald Trump and bumbling, mind-addled and corruption-laden Democrat retread Joe Biden has already been causing palpitations among many pundits, voters and people among nations all around the world and its outcome probably will swamp political machinations in Canada and B.C.
So what is to be done? As I emphasized in the recent B.C. election campaign (while running for the Conservatives in North Island), the best thing we can do now is strengthen our self-sufficiency in key areas of our economy and society, beginning with boosting local and provincial food production, boosting our security by reviving the B.C. Provincial Police force (alongside the RCMP and municipal police forces), and reviving a provincially-controlled Bank of B.C. able to issue a B.C. currency and thereby secure a banking system and economy in the province.
There of course are many other moves that B.C. could do and which should be done by the incoming provincial government and I'll have more to say about them in months and probably years ahead - but meanwhile let's get through this very scary weekend and coming week.
John Twigg ... is a veteran independent journalist now based in Campbell River.
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