It must be the high turnover in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). Did nobody notice when the last speechwriters left? Yesterday we found out that the Hair needs until October 16 to finish writing a new throne speech. We appreciate that a speech of this magnitude requires broad input and lots of approvals but more than a week for the job is excessive. Unless, what you are really doing is stalling?
One possibility is that the office is waiting to hear from President Obama about the Keystone XL pipeline. The Hair has asked Obama for an environmental to-do list so that the American President can approve the $5 billion project to take Athabasca tar sands bitumen to the Texas Gulf Coast shipping ports. This wait might be in vain as Mr. Obama currently has his hands full with questions about Syria.
Is the Hair so really bereft of ideas? Can the Fraser Institute not help him? Has Finance Minister Jim Flaherty run out of corporate taxes to cut? Cannot the government find some new boats for the navy? How about solving the need for modern helicopters? How about scrapping Statistics Canada altogether so we do not have to hear how the gap between rich and poor keeps widening? And then there is Environment Canada. Can we not put it out of its misery? And could not the Hair replace the National Energy Board with a simple rubber stamp?
Cost savings are so simple for ignorant people. The Hair and his Conservatives are very good at saving money. It is the smart person who knows how to invest in the future. That is why there is no future for the Hair and his friends.
But a speech will be cobbled. That is what governments do, eventually. This will be a geared-to-election speech full of platitudes and promises of the nirvana to come. The Governor General will read the speech as though he wrote it himself. This unelected representative of the Queen will tell us what his government is going to do about the unelected Senate. We are going to hear more about the government’s battle with the telecommunications companies to bring order and lower prices to cell phone usage.
The problem we have with forecasting what will be in the throne speech is that the Hair and his friends have an entirely different set of priorities than someone who cares about people and how the rest of the world feels about our Canada.
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Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry
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