Excerpt from Distressed Pavement coming in July.
She was regarded as a both an expert on environmental policy and a communications guru who had more than a million Instagram followers. But she was also a human lightning rod, adored by the left and abhorred by the right.
Her head was on the block now that the Tories had taken over the reins of power, and she knew it.
Soon this office would be inhabited by some oil-loving, environment-gouging creep from Alberta. She had heard that her job was being shopped around at the Petroleum Club in Calgary and at Tory think tanks.
She’d heard even Ezra Levant had been consulted.
A soft knock came at the door.
Her assistant, Amy Brent, poked her head through the door. Katrina waved her in and was delighted to see that her long- time loyalist came armed with coffee and Timbits.
The public service ran on sugar, what with all the bake sales that took place as part of ongoing fundraising efforts for a variety of causes.
Since Katrina had arrived at the department ten years ago, she had gained fifty pounds and had resorted to wearing suits with elastic waistbands.
She had tried to shed the weight over the years, joining in lunch-time yoga and aerobics as well as cross-country skiing and walking adventures. But her job set her up for failure.
She worked eleven-hour days, so it was difficult for her to find time for the personal trainer she had employed at a whopping forty bucks an hour, and she was considering a liquid diet that was being shopped around the department by one of the executive assistants who was getting rich as part of a nutritional pyramid scheme.
While Katrina was horrified that the Conservatives had won the election, she was secretly delighted by a forty-pound stress weight loss she had experienced over the summer. Her face looked like hell, but she had a banging body all of a sudden. By the time she was escorted out the door in a few months, on administrative leave, she reckoned she would be a size zero and could get a job waiting tables somewhere.
“Amy, can you round up the executive crew this afternoon, and order in the usual selection of phyllo sandwiches, pastries, and a case, maybe two, of wine?”
Amy nodded. “Domestic or imported?”
“Pffft. Imported. Why should we drink swill when we can drink the good stuff! We don’t have to pretend anymore, right?”
Amy nodded, and closed the door, then opened it again.
“Katrina? Whose tab is this going on?”
“I think Marty can pay for this. He’s the one most likely to keep his job.”
Marty Felton was one of the older members of her staff. At fifty, he was also one of the oldest employees in the department. He remembered fondly his younger days when he was just an analyst when the Stephen Harper government came in and all the older workers quit or were packaged.
Now, finally, he was a big shot with tenuous Tory roots, and was destined, if not for greatness, at least not to get fired.
He had been careful to keep his powder dry during the Trudeau years by always disappearing on international trips, where he could still use his good contacts to help get trade agreements.
He was the only guy on those trips whom Trump’s people didn’t outright hate because he could do right-speak.
At 4 p.m., Katrina met with her team in her executive boardroom. This was one of the few face-to-face meetings she’d had since the pandemic hit. Most public servants were instructed to go home to “work,” which was code for renovating their cottages and building additions onto their houses.
She was glad to see everyone, even Marty.
It was time for a frank talk, she mused to herself, and time to get shit faced.
The lineup for food was small, but the one for wine snaked out into the hallway. Everybody was two-fisting, just so they didn’t have to go back for refills.
“Well, folks, it’s the witching hour. We all know what that means, right? How many of you have finished your briefing books?”
She looked around.
“Anyone?”
“Well, we all just got back to the office, so no, there are no briefing books,” her ADM Administration, Balfour Smith-Wasynski explained.
“What do you mean? You’ve had weeks!”
“Yes, that’s true,” said Balfour. “But we weren’t in the office, so we didn’t have printers.”
“Or pens!” piped in Amy.
“So you mean, you did nothing for the last year and a half?”
Heads nodded all round.
“In our defence, Katrina, we only got four hundred bucks in tax credits for office supplies, and so on,” said Balfour, digging himself in deeper. “We usually spend that amount in a month!”
“Let me get this straight,” Katrina muttered, sipping a fine glass of Barolo. “I have nothing at all to present to the new minister?”
“Well sure,” volunteered Sasha Ilk, the head of provincial and territorial relations. “We still have the briefing books for the next minister; we just didn’t realize it would be a Conservative.”
Katrina put her head in her hands. How did she not know what her staff were doing? Truth was, the last months were a complete blur, the result of her new dependency on anti-depressants and pot gummies.
Like many hunker downers, she had been in excruciating emotional pain.
About halfway through the mighty pandemic, her husband Richie had moved to the cottage, and basically never came back. She hadn’t seen her elderly mother or sister back in B.C. because, well, pandemic. And her labradoodle got heartsick because she desperately missed her dog sitter.
When she wasn’t on Zoom, Katrina bounced from bedroom to bedroom mooning over pictures of her lost loves, and travels to far-off places. She was stuck alone, in her ritzy condo over-looking the Rideau Canal, eating chips and pastries.
“All right,” Katrina finally looked up. “Get. Busy.”
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