The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house
and laying up supplies for the winter.
The grasshopper thinks he's a fool, and laughs and dances and plays the
summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The shivering
grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold.
THE CANADIAN MODERN VERSION:
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house
and laying up supplies for the winter.
The grasshopper thinks he's a fool, and laughs and dances and plays the
summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The shivering
grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should
be allowed to be warm and well fed while others less fortunate like him are
cold and starving.
CBC shows up to provide live coverage of the shivering grasshopper, with
cuts to a video of the ant in his comfortable warm home with a table filled
with food. Canadians are stunned that in country of such wealth, this poor
grasshopper is allowed to suffer so while others have plenty.
The NDP, the CAW and the Coalition Against Poverty demonstrate in front of
the ant's house. The CBC, interrupting an Inuit cultural festival special
from Nunavua with breaking news, broadcasts them singing "We Shall
Overcome."
Svend Robinson rants in an interview with Pamela Wallin that the ant has
gotten rich off the backs of grasshoppers, and calls for an immediate tax
hike on the ant to make him pay his "fair share." In response to polls, the
Liberal Government drafts the Economic Equity and Grasshopper
Anti-Discrimination Act, retroactive to the beginning of the summer.
The ant's taxes are reassessed and he is also fined for failing to hire
grasshoppers as helpers.
Without enough money to pay both the fine and his newly imposed retroactive
taxes, his home is confiscated by the government.
The ant moves to the US, starts a successful agribiz company.
The CBC later shows the now fat grasshopper finishing up the last of the
ant's food though Spring is still months away, while the government house he
is in, which just happens to be the ant's old house, crumbles around him
because he hadn't maintained it.
Inadequate government funding is blamed, Roy Romanow is appointed to head a
commission of enquiry that will cost $10,000,000.
The grasshopper is soon dead of a drug overdose, the
Toronto Star blames it on obvious failure of government to address the root
causes of despair arising from social inequity.
The abandoned house is taken over by a gang of immigrant spiders, praised by
the government for enriching Canada's multicultural
diversity, who promptly terrorize the community.
THE END
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