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The Desperate Measures Fund
Frustrated with its lack of success in seeing conventional methods eradicate COVID-19, the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau is said to be eyeing new funding, to the tune of $50 million, for alternative approaches to the neutralization of the coronavirus.
Known among insiders as the “Desperate Measures Fund (DMF), it will make funds available to witches, wizards, sorcerers (and apprentices), spellcasters, hobgoblins and alchemists with a proven track record of success in curing medical ailments, and a clear plan for how their work will help stop the coronavirus from spreading. “The ideal applicant would be someone like Harry Potter or Hermione Granger,” said one of our sources. “Someone with a history of effective magic. I don’t go for this hocus pocus stuff myself, but some people do. It’s worth a shot.”
“We don’t want to hear from tricksters and confidence men, sleight-of-hand artists, illusionists or conjurers—people who deceive for a living. But we do want to hear from practitioners of voodoo or black magic, who are using real ingredients like eye of newt and toe of frog. Even approaches based solely on incantations would be within the purview of the Fund. If the magic community can’t use the grant money, we may also entertain applications from members of the public who believe the solution is for everybody to eat St. John’s Wort and bathe in room temperature water,” said our source.
Applicants must apply online, describing their proposed treatment, together with two references from credible sources as to the efficacy of measures they have employed to date. The proposals will not be peer reviewed before grants are made.
After rejecting an offer from the Canadian Association of Witches and Warlocks to manage the whole DMF project (“We’ve been burned once before doing that.”), the government has decided to establish an interdepartmental committee chaired by the Clerk of the Privy Council that will meet weekly in December to oversee applications and make grants. The program will be heavily advertised in the last week of November, with applications due December 1. The DMF must be spent in its entirety by the end of the government’s fiscal year on March 30, 2021. There is no upper limit on the amount an individual grantee can receive.
“I just hope I’ll have time to hang my Christmas stocking what with getting this program off the ground and doling out the money,” said a harried Department of Finance official. “Although if I don’t, it’ll still beat bailing out airlines all day. The people I’ll come across will be more interesting.”
Reaction to news of the DMF has been swift, Conservative leader Erin O’Toole blasted the government for its failure to include the western petroleum industry in the program, noting that it would “sooner empty cauldrons than oil wells.” Bloc Quebecois leader Yves-Francois Blanchet denounced the DMF as a “blatant intrusion into Quebec’s sole domain,” and called for a cash transfer to the province instead. New Democratic Party head Jasmeet Singh called for the program to guarantee that living wages would be paid to all grantee staff. And the Green Party issued a statement saying all applications under the program should be subject to an environmental impact assessment, noting that three species of bats are endangered in Canada.
News of the DMF did not go down well with provincial premiers either. Ontario premier Doug Ford was quoted as saying “This sounds just plain silly. Mind you, I am still madly in love with Chrystia Freeland. Do you know if she got that bouquet of roses I sent her last week?” And British Columbia premier John Horgan noted that his province was quite capable of coming up with its own remedies, noting the vast acreage in his domain dedicated to the growth of magic mushrooms. “Maybe Justin Trudeau would like to come to BC and see how to magically turn a minority into a majority,” he added.
Federal officials expect, however, that the DMF will go down well with the public, who may just prefer to watch the night skies for wizards zooming past on broomsticks than to suffer through a looming circuit breaker lockdown. These are desperate times, and desperate times call for desperate measures, don’t they?
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