Prime Minister Harper is feeling the heat. You can almost see him mumbling to himself about his cabinet ministers and caucus as he rambles around 24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa. It is not as though he runs with the smartest people. Run with idiots, you can get fleas! After all, what can you expect from ideologues?
It is not that believing in an ideology, in itself, is necessarily a bad thing. It is those who put their ideology ahead of common sense and common decency that worry the rest of us. Take Stockwell Day for example. Mr. Day is a religious zealot and considered a quite devoted member of the right wing of Canadian politics. He is the only guy to ever actually implement a flat tax rate as Treasurer of a Canadian province. Of course, it was in Alberta. It was hardly likely that he would get away with it in any other province.
Many of Harper’s caucus are flat-tax advocates and we have been saved from any discussion of such a tax as long as the Harper Conservatives are a minority government. Day, who failed to graduate even from North West Bible College, is not one of the smarter members of Harper’s cabinet. He once told reporters that the Niagara River flows south and when they tried to correct him, he said he would have it looked into.
Stockwell Day is the one who Harper put in as leader of the temporary Canadian Alliance back in 2000. When he showed up for his first media scrum in a wet suit on a Seadoo, we knew that he was not heading for fame. He lasted less than a year in the job.
One of the brighter lights in Harper’s cabinet was Maxime Bernier, a member from Quebec who showed up at the Governor General’s to be sworn in, along with an attractive date. As he is single, there is nothing wrong with him bringing the current lady friend. It was her choice of bra and décolletage that attracted the admiration of many men and condemnation of many women. That secret did not stay just with Victoria. He later had to resign because of taking secret documents along on a sleep-over.
We could also get into the Helena Guergis affair but that has already been worked to death here in Babel. The Guergis’ are a prominent family here and whether the sundry offspring have ever been properly potty trained is not something we discuss.
North of here is Tony Clement country. Tony is the boy genius in the Harper cabinet who as Minister of Industry is responsible for Statistics Canada. He has not done well by the good folks at StatsCan. He recently decided that the census long form should be cancelled but there were so many objections to that, he said he would just make it optional. He did this so that nobody would go to jail for not filling out the long form. Since nobody has ever gone to jail for not filling out the form, the chief statistician quit in a huff and Tony has been made to look even sillier.
Mr. Harper had stayed away from Ottawa most of July in hopes that the kids would mind the store for him without getting into any trouble. He needs a new breed of conservatives for that to happen.
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