Newly elected 26-year-old Alberta MLA Deborah Drever is facing calls for her removal after scandalous photos circulated the internet. To the disappointment of perverts everywhere, these photos are not explicit in the style of “Carlos Danger” a.k.a. the U.S representative Anthony Weiner, who had to resign over a sexting scandal. The Calgary-Bow representative instead had a photo of her with a marijuana leaf t-shirt, posted a picture of a middle finger in front of a Canadian flag, and posed for an album cover with Calgary metal band Gatekrashor. Disheveled and revolted Calgarians are channeling 1984’s Revenge of the Nerds to try to bring down one of Canada’s coolest politicians.
Drever, an undergraduate student at Mount Royal University, has been involved long term Calgary’s music scene and has been, among other things, a volunteer at the Calgary Folk Music Festival. The change.org petition requesting Drever to step down now has over 900 signatures. The petition’s headline photo, taken from Drever’s Facebook account, shows her posing beside a t- shirt with a pot leaf on it.
Drever: making stoners and wizards proud.
Facebook
This photo is one of the top reasons that the petition refers to her as a “female Rob Ford.” That makes a lot of sense because it is well documented that posing for photos with t-shirts bearing pot leaves on them leads to a slippery slope on which the next logical step is smoking crack-cocaine.
Another Facebook post from 2010 shows Drever flipping off the Canadian flag. The photo has drawn angry responses from real red-blooded, hockey loving, steak eating, and maple syrup guzzling Canadians, perhaps due to the convenient cropping which excludes the immediate and unprompted first comment/caption from Drever “JKJKJKJKJK LOVE CANADA!” That’s four “just kiddings” and an exclamation point, people, turn your boiling-over pots down to simmer!
Spearheading the campaign to bring down Drevor is Jesse Robitaille, a braces-faced 10th grader who resembles that one kid we all went to high school with who won’t get laid till his mid-30s. He claims that Drever has neither the “proper skills, nor the proper attitude to govern.” Robitaille is handing out flyers in his community demanding that his representatives have a stick placed as far and as firmly up their butt as he does.
A protest is set for this Sunday in Calgary, when, except from friendless dweebs like Robitaille, all other young people in Calgary should be sleeping in and watching sports over a hung-over breakfast.
Drinking, what Jesse Robitaille will only do alone.
Imgur
The only set of complaints that deserves any real attention and that doesn’t read like a series of Rob Delaney #420NO parody tweets is an album cover Deborah Drever appeared on. Firstly, it needs to be acknowledged that she did apologise for the album cover, recognising the unfortunate portrayal of abuse on it. Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, Drever has been involved with human rights and feminist activism. She understands issues of domestic abuse and was herself forced into foster care after being raised in a household where her mother was a victim of abuse. The energy and ire of those who wish to eliminate violence against women is undoubtedly wasted when directed at a woman who will, in all likelihood, champion the cause. In fact, to make amends for the photo that Premier-designate Rachel Notley called “highly inappropriate,” the young MLA Drevor will be working with groups to help vulnerable women.
No one is claiming Drever is an inspirational figure, even though she represents a breath of fresh air in a Canadian political world filled with pampered, upper-class whose only exposure to the awful reality of drug and domestic abuse that affect so many lives was in classrooms, on TV, or in political briefings with the express purpose of honing their rhetoric skills to feign an interest and appear to relate to the commoners.
Wake up Alberta. Bill Clinton inhaled. So this woman had a few racy pictures online. She also has an impressive resume and has overcome a tremendous amount of adversity to get to where she is. Let’s judge our young politicians by their content of their policy, not the content of their Facebook timelines.
*Update: As yet another scandalous social media post surfaced in which Drever makes a homophobic joke in poor taste, two things have become clear: (1) she is actually a female Rob Ford and (2) Alberta politics are the biggest goldmine for Canadian comedy since Rob Ford.