There is a ‘tell all’ photo in the Ottawa Citizen today. It was provided to the Citizen by Canadian Press. It is sure to be in many other Canadian newspapers. The picture is about the Hair doing what the military calls ‘trooping the line.’ You often see the Queen doing it—going up and down the lines of well-turned out troops, stopping at intervals to make some minor pleasantry. It is as close as the Conservative backbenchers are allowed to get to the Prime Minister.
What the Prime Minister and the Hair are doing back in Canada, we are not sure. Maybe he is filling in for Finance Minister Flaherty who is off for his annual holiday in Davos, Switzerland. When not attending the World Economic Conference in Davos yesterday, Minister Flaherty could have been entertained by a group of ladies staging a topless demonstration. We are not sure what these ladies were protesting but, according to the news photos, they were certainly well equipped for it.
But we digress from the Hair. As he trooped the line, you could imagine the backbenchers peering quizzically at the Hair, trying to determine where the real hair ends and the world famous hairpiece begins. The consensus of the caucus is that probably only his staff hairdresser knows for sure.
Protecting the secret of the Hair is becoming quite an elaborate process and there were serious questions in the House about these expenses. The cost, for example, of shipping armoured limousines to India last year was just one incident. To have the Canadian Forces use a C47 Globemaster to fly the two limousines to India was claimed by the NDP critic to have cost more than a million dollars. That does seem like a lot of money to protect the Hair.
When Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird put down the protest, he pointed out that India has a poor reputation for protecting Prime Ministers. He failed to note that India has a good reputation for protecting tourists. It is just their own Prime Ministers whom they sometimes assassinate. Most Indians wave respectfully to limousines with a Canadian flag on the fender. Frankly, the RCM Police can rest assured that the people of India have too many relatives here to want to mess with the Hair.
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Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry
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