It seems to be a growing trend in the Conservative Cabinet. Without the human understanding of the late Jim Flaherty, Harper’s hooligans have been running loose. Just one example is Joe Oliver from Toronto. He was a natural disaster as Natural Resources Minister and we are all waiting in anticipation for his first serious gaff as Finance Minister. As luck would have it, you have to do something to be wrong and so far Oliver has luckily done nothing.
But poor Jason Kenney has been in continuing trouble. How is our Employment Minister going to succeed his dear friend Stephen Harper as prime minister if he cannot run a simple foreign workers program? The program was to be used as a warning to Canadians to stifle their ambitions, not a wholesale replacement. When people found there were no low-paying jobs because they were all taken up by lower paid and, more reliable, foreigners some of them started to complain about it.
Long touted as having the ambition to replace Harper, Kenney needed more successes than he has had. This snafu will be costly. Canadians have watched Kenney lose control of the foreign workers program over an extended period. There was not just one blip on the radar, Kenney has been trying to fix this program for some time and the media has made him pay the price.
That is not like former Defence Minister Peter MacKay and now our inept Justice Minister. MacKay is the one who keeps finding cow pads to step in even when he is away from the barnyard. After seeing him show off his ignorance on the subject matter, his proposed bill on prostitution has enraged anyone who has any understanding and empathy for the sex worker. He should also be made to sit in a corner of the cabinet room with a dunce cap for his silly sexist comments on women judges last week. Harper should send MacKay back to Defence where he can play at being a pilot in F-35 mock-ups.
And yet it is people such as Calgary’s Pierre Poilievre, laughingly anointed Minister of State for Democratic Reform, who leave observers completely aghast at how far Harper will sink to achieve his objectives. Poilievre must have been sent back to his kennel after Harper finally conceded some (but not all) ground on the “Fair” Elections Act. We hardly think, Stephen Harper wants to turn that attack dog loose again in what remains of the Conservative’s time in office.
Mind you, the one cabinet incompetent that we also watch with interest is Foreign Minister John Baird. The other half of Harper’s Bobbsey Twins, Baird is a time bomb waiting to ignite. As it is, he is costing us in terms of the respect with which Canada was once held around the world.
Canadians will long rue the fallout from the Harper era.
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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