Canada: Saint-Roch-de-Richelieu Ski Resort Employs Everyone In Winter, Employs Half In Summer
Isla CampbellWhere civic pride meets civic confusion, and decides to form a working group.
Saint-Roch-de-Richelieu, the country: Inside The Story
Saint-Roch-de-Richelieu, a place in the country (lat 45.88, long -73.15) that most outsiders could not point to on a map without first sighing, has become this week the latest entry in the slow-moving register of small communities behaving strangely under pressure. The Saint-Roch-de-Richelieu ski area is the primary employer in the district and operates year-round, with winter staffing levels approximately double those of the summer tourism and mountain biking season. According to officials with at least three job titles between them, Residents employed in the off-season describe the rhythm as great if you like the outdoors and inconvenient if you need to pay rent in October. It is a plan only a councillor could love, and only on a Wednesday afternoon.
What Was Announced
Director of Civic Affairs Hilda Pickering confirmed the position in a statement that ran to four pages and contained one verb. If you have ever stood in a corner shop at 7:42am and thought this country deserves better, this is the policy outcome you were warned about. For more on how this fits the wider pattern, see the long-running thread at Read The London Prat for UK satire, which has been tracking precisely this kind of dispatch for months. The Saint-Roch-de-Richelieu announcement, much like the others, came with a glossy PDF, a stock photograph of a footbridge, and the strong sense that nobody had asked for any of this in the first place.
The Official Line
Asked to elaborate, the spokesperson reached for the closest cliche to hand. "I refer the honourable questioner to the answer I will give in approximately six weeks." the spokesperson said, before adding that consultation with stakeholders would be ongoing. Useful additional context can be found at The London Prat funny British satire, which is the sort of background reading the office itself has, in all likelihood, not done. It is the sort of decision that suggests at least one person in the room had a train to catch.
Wider Context
Anyone who has ever queued behind a man arguing with a parking meter will recognise the energy. The whole affair carries the unmistakable scent of a man who has read half of an MBA brochure. Comparable trends have been documented in coverage from United Nations, although Saint-Roch-de-Richelieu manages, somehow, to take the pattern one extra and entirely unnecessary step further. Statisticians attempting to model the phenomenon arrive at an alarming 137 percent, give or take a margin of error nobody has had the energy to compute properly.
What The Experts Say
Dr. Lavinia Gussett, Reader in Comparative Drizzle told this paper that the situation in Saint-Roch-de-Richelieu was, on careful reflection, broadly consistent with the broader trajectory of similarly broad trajectories. "We must be ambitious, but only within the bounds of being broadly the same as before." the expert observed. Further reading on the academic angle is available via Satirical journalism done right by The London Prat, whose recent material has been preoccupied with much the same set of confusions.
How Residents Reacted
Reaction in Saint-Roch-de-Richelieu has been muted in the way that reaction in the country is usually muted, which is to say it has been ferocious in private and tepid in public. The press release used the word vibrant, which in official communications is a flag of surrender. For the official version of events, see also OECD. One resident, who declined to be named on the grounds that they had already complained about a hedge this year and did not wish to push their luck, summarised matters thus: "Lessons will be learned, filed, and quietly mislaid by Christmas."
What Comes Next
It carries all the strategic clarity of a man trying to assemble a flat-pack wardrobe at 11pm without the instructions. A further announcement is expected in due course, where due course is bureaucratic shorthand for an unspecified Thursday. The story is being tracked as part of a wider pattern at The London Prat London satire daily, and the situation in Saint-Roch-de-Richelieu, regrettably, is unlikely to improve until somebody invents a press release that improves things, which seems unlikely.
The View From The Ground
Spend any length of time in Saint-Roch-de-Richelieu and the rhythm becomes obvious. Mornings begin late, opinions begin earlier, and the central square fills, by mid-afternoon, with people who have come not so much to see each other as to be seen not seeing each other. Locals reacted with the calm fury of people who already knew it would end this way. Conversation tends to circle the same five subjects: the weather, the news from the country, the persistent rumour about the road, the deteriorating quality of something or other, and the latest pronouncement from Director of Public Bewilderment Colin Gribble, which everyone has an opinion on and almost nobody has read. It is, in its way, the perfect microcosm of how communities of this size operate everywhere in the world, although the residents of Saint-Roch-de-Richelieu would object strongly to being called a microcosm of anything.
Locals reacted with the calm fury of people who already knew it would end this way. Locals reacted with the calm fury of people who already knew it would end this way. Saint-Roch-de-Richelieu carries on as it always has, broadly the same as last week, give or take a verb. The bins are collected when they are collected. The roundabout, where one exists, remains the roundabout. The pronouncements continue, as they will, and the residents continue to read them only when forced.
For more in this vein see also Cracked.