It was 22 years ago when this writer almost ran as one of Hurtig’s Hooligans. Do you remember when the Edmonton book seller, publisher and Canadian nationalist formed the National Party? A bunch of us Toronto politicos immediately started calling it the National Socialist Party. Mel was horrified but it was too late to change the name.
Mel is a very fine fellow but he knows squat about leading, motivating or running a political party. We would have been much better off if he had convinced Maude Barlow to be party leader. She has the sense to know what she does not know.
Mel picked a guy in Winnipeg as party president because he thought the guy had enough money to fund it. He might have but he knew more about making money than running a political party. He sent each potential candidate for the party a certified cheque for $1000 made out to the Receiver General to cover acceptance as candidates for the party. He was horrified when some of us told him we were going to frame them instead of giving them to our riding returning officer. They had to be used for him to get his money back from the government. Under the election funding rules at the time, he was going to make money off all the losing candidates.
But it was Mel himself who convinced this writer to get as far as possible from his losing cause. You learn a lot about a person you are shepherding around town to all the different media commitments you have made for him. Mel had just released a very thin book about how he was going to save Canada after the Mulroney years of excess. It was nothing but statistics and even nationalist Maude Barlow turned her nose up at it. It was Mel’s confused solutions that day we spent that convinced us that he was going nowhere.
And now he has told us how to save Canada again. You would think at 82 that Mel would be mature enough to reason out the best way to defeat the Hair. Mel’s new book is called The Arrogant Autocrat: Stephen Harper’s Takeover of Canada. He could have had more meat for his book by just copying all the blogs Babel-on-the-Bay has posted about Canada’s Prime Minister. He does not understand why people swallow the bilge fed to them by the Hair and his party. Mel should be tied in a chair and forced to listen to the collected speeches of the Hair’s current chief gunslinger MP Pierre Poilievre.
Mel uses reason and statistics to try to convince people to defeat the Hair. What he has to realize is that to defeat a conman, you need a better con.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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