In an otherwise pleasant evening the other day, we attended a Canadian Association of Retired People (CARP) meeting to hear the local political candidates. Since Barrie has been split in half for this federal tryst, we had to listen to the candidates from two ridings. It certainly was not double the fun.
The Green Party and New Democrats were a quartet that was loud, strident and sure of their parties’ platforms. Whether they had any personal contribution to make in Ottawa seemed to be a mute point. The Liberal candidates were interesting and brought their individual strengths to the party. What struck us though were the problems faced by the Conservative candidates in coping with the format of the meeting.
All candidates were asked the same set questions that they were expected to answer in a tightly controlled time frame. As both Conservative candidates had the same party song sheet to read from, you could understand why their party headquarters advised them to stay away from these situations. Most Conservative candidates are staying away from all all-candidate meetings. The Barrie candidates have both served on Barrie City Council and figured they could handle it. They did at first but their answers to the questions seemed similar, irrelevant and pure fiction.
By the fourth question, the Barrie-Innisfil Conservative did not feel like reading the same answer as his compatriot and got into an off-the-script diatribe against pandering to voters by going around the country bribing taxpayers with their own money. What was really funny about it was that his leader Stephen Harper was out in Vancouver at the time pretending to play bingo at a seniors’ event and offering single seniors a tax credit for voting Conservative.
What surprised the Barrie audience was that the candidate actually knew the definition of a panderer beyond offering sexual services. Mind you if he really needed a picture of pandering he only needed to consider Stephen Harper and the millions spent pandering to the Jewish vote in Canada. When some schmuck candidate was whining to him at the Temple Wall about wanting a picture for his campaign literature, Harper should have seen the error of his ways.
But he did not. Instead Harper went on to pander to Canada’s extensive Ukrainian Diaspora by insulting Russia’s Putin. He might have been right in his assessment of the Russian leader but it showed that he had a lot to learn about international diplomacy.
And all of this came to us as we sat in a pew of a funeral parlour chapel in Barrie.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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