There seems to be no limits to what the Hair will do to win votes next year. Like penguins shoving one of their number into the sea to see if he gets eaten, he sent Foreign Minister John Baird to Ukraine first and now he can go. Whatever he thinks he is going to achieve there is very much open to question.
We have no idea who he is taking on that Airbus A310 besides the hairdresser. Maybe he will include some heavily armed members of the Canadian Military’s elite Joint Task Force 2 for protection. They might even be helpful when he gets back to Ottawa.
This is all part of an extended spring holiday in Europe. One of his stops is in Germany where someone might give him some insight into what is really happening in Crimea. Why he would still be curious after he has been in Ukraine is because there are well over a million Canadian voters of Ukranian extraction.
One of those Canadians of Ukrainian heritage is the Member of Parliament for Toronto-Centre, Chrystia Freeland. As an experienced journalist she has spent time writing and reporting on Ukraine, Freeland should have waited to fly to Ukraine with the Hair. Well, she would have if she had been a Conservative MP instead of a Liberal.
But while Freeland was able to stay with an uncle’s family in Kyiv, the Hair will just have to stay at the best hotel the city has to offer. Where Freeland would have been able to question people in Kyiv about what is really going on, the Hair will only hear what the current government wants him to hear.
Whether the current government of Ukraine set off the events in Crimea is something that the Hair is not going to hear in Kyiv. Maybe Chancellor Merkel in Germany can tell him the background. Germany would have fairly good intelligence in that area. Whether the knowledge would help the Hair win votes next year is questionable. He might not find it important.
Of all the visits in this trip, the Hair probably wishes he had the opportunity to drop in on Vladimir Putin in Moscow. Mr. Putin is busy tallying the take on his Olympics and adding territory to his Russian empire. Maybe a visit with Putin might be bad optics back home but the Hair would surely like to hear Vladimirovitch’s thoughts on getting around these inconvenient elections.
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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