I am angry.
Not the quiet kind of angry. Not the kind that folds itself small to make other people comfortable. Not the kind that smiles through disappointment, calls it democracy and goes back to washing the dishes.
I am angry.
I am angry for the children who will inherit the consequences of decisions they were too young to make. For the youth who will learn, once again, that their safety is negotiable, that their futures are political bargaining chips, that the adults in the room will gamble with their lives and call it leadership.
I am angry for Indigenous peoples, for rights that should never have been conditional, for sovereignty that should never have been up for debate, for a province that can look at generations of genocide and injustice and still find new ways to wound.
I am angry for the queer kids who will measure their words before speaking, who will tuck away the colours of themselves, who will learn which parts of their hearts are safest left unseen. No child should have to choose between being known and being safe.
I am angry for people with disabilities, for families already drowning in waitlists and paperwork and impossible choices. For parents who have spent years begging for the bare minimum and are told to be patient while the funding shifts beneath their feet. Our children are not budget lines. Their dignity is not a discretionary expense. Their lives are not less worthy because supporting them costs more.
I am angry for the land, for the water, for the air our children will breathe. For every safeguard dismissed as an inconvenience, every protection stripped away in the name of progress that leaves the earth a little poorer and the powerful a little richer.
I am angry.
And beneath the anger, there is grief.
There is the terrible, aching sadness of watching a place you love become a place you no longer recognize. Of looking toward the future and seeing not possibility, but all the people who might be hurt before they ever get the chance to grow.
I am afraid for our children. I am afraid for our youth. For our disabled. For our Indigenous communities. For every person who has ever been told they are too different, too difficult, too much, too other.
I am afraid because I know who is asked to pay the price when compassion becomes optional.
And I am disappointed. God, I am disappointed.
This is not the province I want. Not the home I imagined for my children, for their children, for anyone who has ever dared to believe that we could build something kinder than what came before us.
But I will not make my anger polite. I will not make my grief palatable. I will not soften the truth so that those untouched by these consequences can bear to hear it.
Because anger is sometimes love with nowhere safe to go. Because grief is what happens when the world falls short of what we know it could be. Because fear does not mean we have surrendered.
So I will be angry. I will be loud. I will name the harm. I will stand beside the people who are being asked to carry it.
I will teach my children that no one's humanity is conditional. That no one's identity is a provocation. That care is not weakness. That justice is not an inconvenience. That the measure of a province is not how comfortably its powerful live, but how safely its most vulnerable can exist.
I am angry. I am sad. I am scared.
This is not the province I want.
But I will keep fighting for the one it could be.
