It looks like the kids have forgotten their manners since finance minister Chrystia Freeland was at home in Alberta. For someone to accost her and spew invective at her is not the Alberta that I know.
But, just as bad as the manners of the stupid fool who caused the scene was the ignorant woman who raced to the door of the elevator with her phone to record the deputy prime minister’s reaction. It took the man in his undershirt and that woman to make a lie of Alberta hospitality, for all to see.
It reminds me of my late friend, MP Bob Caplan, when he was solicitor general of Canada. I bumped into him at Ottawa airport, one time, when we were both headed for Toronto. I noted that he had an RCMP constable with him, carrying a couple cases. I nodded towards the Mountie and asked Bob if he was in custody?
It turned out he was taking some seriously secret stuff with him to Toronto and had to have the Mountie for protection, and to carry the files. It was one of the very few times I had seen any protection arranged for any member of the cabinet, other than the prime minister.
And did you know that when Lester Pearson was prime minister, he drove himself to work from Sussex Drive to parliament in the old family car?
That all changed with prime minister Pierre Trudeau. He was most annoyed when he was told he had to have a driver, rather than drive his Mercedes-Benz 300SL to the parliament buildings. That was when he was still single and the joke was that little car was his chick bait back then.
My role in the prime minister functions in Toronto was usually to set up facilities for the media, do on-site media briefings and do all the things that somebody had forgotten. For some reason, I was often doing the liaison with the Toronto-based Mounties and police.
One time when the PM was doing a major announcement at the Royal York Hotel, we had invited local liberals and general public. When the prime minister got to the microphone, I was standing at the first step to the stage and one of the plain-clothes RCMP was stationed on the next step up. When the prime minister was well into his speech, I got shoved aside and I looked at the Mountie and shrugged. He then got shoved aside and he looked at me and shrugged back. We were both outranked by a news photographer getting his pictures.
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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry
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