YELLOWKNIFE – With the Trudeau government having restored some $67 million in transfer payments to the North last Spring, the Territories are hoping only 10-15% of their populations will be eaten by wolves this winter.
“Bill Morneau gets a lot of flack, but I’m sure grateful to him,” said Yellowknife resident Dwayne Forbes, putting a new edge on his publicly-subsidized de-wolfing hatchet. “You can fend off a heck of a lot of wolves with 67 million, and Lord knows we’ll need to.”
Much of the money has been spent on wolf-proofing the territories’ major population centers, through measures such as spike pits and tripwire flamethrowers, and chainmail for dogs, and portable speakers playing the clarinet music wolves hate so much, and juicy steaks with a stick of dynamite in them, and anything, anything that could possibly stop the relentless tide of wolves.
But with wolf season already in full swing, the story is different in less-developed parts of the North.
“All the funding goes to Whitehorse, where the wolves only outnumber people 50 to one,” said Griff McCrae, of Mayo, YT, using hockey tape to strap a fresh kitchen knife to the end of his grandfather’s wolf stick. “I hate those downtown elites.”
In the midst of this distribution crisis, a leaked budget has shown that half the renewed transfer payments have been spent, not on wolf repellent or treatment of wolf-borne diseases, such as lycanthropy or wolf malaria, but on the ‘wolfgeld’, a series of payments to buy off the wolves.
“Typical Liberal politicking,” said McCrae, doing everything in his power to keep a 160-pound arctic wolf from tearing out his jugular, as he has to do every time he goes to the outhouse. “Too concerned about maintaining good relations with the damn wolves to ever make an unpopular decision.”
“Why, oh why, did we ever give the wolves the vote.”
There will be a public meeting to discuss the wolfgeld this Saturday in Whitehorse, if the city still stands.
