The following satirical take on life in Ontario is a guest column by Colin McKim, a former reporter and columnist at three Orillia newspapers.
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The whine of electric drills woke me at dawn.
As I suspected it was workers from the RightLight Corporation boarding up the windows of a family home across the street. Just like they did to my house last month. Half the houses in the neighbourhood have been completely blacked out by sheets of plywood.
It was all predictable when the Conservative government gave one of their major donors the rights to sell sunlight in urban areas.
A deal is still in the works for rural residents, who, as loyal Tory voters, had been temporarily spared.
Protestors had argued that sunlight was a resource that belonged to everyone free of charge. But a clause, tucked inside a thousand page omnibus bill, gave the Conservative government the authority to treat sunlight as a commodity that could be purchased from the Ministry of Natural Resources by corporations and resold to consumers.
RightLight is an offshoot of MoneyBelt, which made a fortune developing land formerly identified by the Liberals as Greenbelt. Naturally MoneyBelt didn't skimp on contributions to the Big Blue Machine.
So homeowners, already being gouged by the gas and electric companies, now have to pay premium prices for sunlight, calculated by the number and size of the windows on their houses and apartments.
It wasn't long before residents, already stretched to the breaking point, got behind on their sunlight payments. That's when the RightLight trucks with the smiling sun logos showed up to screw plywood on all the windows.
Of course, this only added to the electrical bill since enclosed residences now needed lights on in the daytime.
With more and more customers being cut off, RightLight has delayed plans to charge for light used on flower and vegetable gardens. But free light will not be available forever, the company has cautioned.
It is depressing walking past one blind house after another. And seeing the ornate, stained-glass windows of the downtown churches being boarded up seems sacreligious.
But I believe it was God himself who instructed his human creatures to have dominion over the earth. So He really set the ball in motion.
That's all I can write for now since my last candle just burned out and I'm sitting in the all too familiar darkness thinking that's the last time, God forgive me, that I vote Conservative.
