Pigs R Us

by Tricia Dower

'Tis I, wearing a plastic snout – your roving reporter at the Corporate Golden Piggy Awards in Victoria last Sunday. The 11^th annual, but my first. An afternoon of skits and songs dedicated to award-winning examples of “Let them eat cake” behaviour by big business. The show had the feel of what I imagine the common folk would have enjoyed in “merry old” in the 1500s. It opened with the performers marching down one aisle and up another in an incongruous setting: the stained-glassed auditorium of St. Anne’s Academy. As they marched, the cast sang, “Assholes on Parade.” During the five skits that followed, the audience snorted like pigs and called out “sooey” and “shame.”

The first skit roasted Private Public Pork Partnerships nominees Coca-Cola, Apple Computers, Sprott-Shaw, Kodak, and Halliburton for “expanding market share at the expense of public education.”

The second took us to a Taserware Party and a demonstration of “personal protectors” like a leopard skin taser with an MP3 player as it presented the nominees for the Paranoid Pig Award: Taser International, Texas Instruments, and Sony Entertainment.

The third had law officials entering a house after a family’s Christmas dinner and impounding everything that had been recalled by manufacturers: the kids’ toys, grandma’s pacemaker, the turkey, the tree, the dog’s food, and even the adopted twins. Nominees for the Total Recall Award were Mattel, Menu Foods, and Merck-Frosst.

The Great Panther Silver Company, a Canadian company that operates in Mexico, was the only genuine nominee for the Hu-Mine-itarian Award and was taken to task for a number of things, including allegedly violating Mexican law by not paying pensions to their workers and polluting the land with mercury-laden tailings.

My favourite skit was the Green with Envy Award in which a man and woman visited a travel agency to book a trip to Bora Bora, hoping there wouldn't be a carbon tax on the trip. The travel agent had horns and a tail and, at some point, God’s voice told this metaphorical Adam and Eve they were banished from the good earth to dwell in environmental jeopardy the rest of their days. Exxon was nominated “for destroying Alberta,” but the winner was Air Canada for its carbon offset program that seeks to ease your guilt about taking a flight by letting you buy trees.

The Piggy Awards aren’t run by any particular organization. The performers are the same folks you see advocating on behalf of the homeless, sitting in trees to protest deforestation, protesting Canada’s military presence in Afghanistan, and speaking out about any number of other social issues. It’s work that never ends and sees little positive result. The “Piggies” are a rare opportunity for them to have fun by skewering the big business interests they see at the bottom of those issues. As a part of our collective conscience, they’re skewering us, as well. Schools rely on corporate dollars because we’re not funding public education sufficiently. Other corporate “crimes” are committed because we allow them to happen. We’re the Assholes on Parade.