top of page

Groundhog Day Cancelled?Wiarton Willie's Old Tweets Resurface

Fionn McPhee

Beloved Ontario icon Wiarton Willie is in hot water after several controversial posts made on X (the former twitter) surfaced this weekend. The posts, written between 1956 and 2022, have been condemned by numerous animal rights groups for expressing “speciesist rhetoric.” The situation has been compared to a modern day, Canadian Watergate.


“Those goddam beavers are always blocking my kayaking,” said Willie in one post, “What do we even need dams for? The ecosystem? Pfft. There’s too much biodiversity nowadays,” he continued, blatantly ignoring the importance of species richness and genetic variety in ecosystems for sustainability and resilience against disasters and stresses. He also protested the inclusion of marmot species other than groundhogs in the Biannual Hypothetical Wood-Chucking Contest, claiming that the Vancouver Island Marmot “would chuck much less wood than a real woodchuck, if they could even chuck wood.”


The community of Wiarton has yet to announce whether Willie will be replaced as official prognosticator, but as of Saturday afternoon, several hundred internet think pieces have already been published in response to this controversy asking whether we as a society could “separate the weather predictions from the predictor.”


The Boundary contacted Wiarton Willie to comment on his cancellation, but he seemed to be distracted by a female groundhog, on which he commented that she had, “extra fur in all the right places.”

7 views

Comments


The Boundary is the University of Toronto's Satire Paper

bottom of page