And you thought the Hair had already hit the wall in his search for talent in his Conservative caucus. When you have a guy like Pierre Poilievre on your team, the possibilities are endless. He can easily add Employment to his workload. Then there is Rob Nicholson, the Defence Minister who was ready to step into John Baird’s fashionable shoes in Foreign Affairs. And then there is Mr. Fix-It Jason Kenney, ready and able to add another portfolio, Defence, to his task of getting the Conservative Party re-elected in 2015.
And what do you think the Department of Defence and Multiculturalism have in common? When you can use Multiculturalism to pan for votes among the ethnic make-up of Canada’s voters, do you then use the military to convince the rest? It is bad enough that the Conservatives seem to have decided they do not need Muslim votes but that combined with the lack of safeguards on the anti-terrorism laws it is a bit frightening.
And if you thought John Baird was a disaster as Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister, you have not seen anything yet. Rob Nicholson’s only experience in foreign affairs was in meetings with counterparts in Niagara Falls, New York when he was in municipal politics on the Canadian side of the Falls. Luckily the Americans spoke English so Nicholson got away with not speaking the language of diplomacy: French.
Nicholson is one of the few Conservative dinosaurs from the Mulroney era in Ottawa. Mind you he spent eleven years in municipal and school board politics in between.
But it is Pierre Poilievre that best explains Stephen Harper’s genius in making do with what you have got. This is the guy who brought election reform to its knees with his Fair Elections Act of 2014. A year later it is still in parliamentary limbo and everyone hopes it stays there. His intransigence in the face of expert and Elections Canada objections to the act showed a level of ignorance and lack of common sense that stunned opposition and some Conservative colleagues alike. He was obviously following the Hair’s orders to the point that he was embarrassing the government. When the Hair told him to pull back and allow amendments to the act, his eagerness to recant and comply was equally embarrassing.
But for the Hair, it is all in a day’s work. What everyone in Ottawa is waiting for is the American decision on sending troops to Iraq and Syria to deal with the brigands who are posing as the New Caliphate in the Levant. It is clear now that air strikes alone are unable to resolve the problem. Canada has already had specialist troops on the ground directing air strikes and it is a very short step to direct military force. The Hair wants to be a hero.
-30-
Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]