Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff is taking some holidays.  He needs to renew himself before girding for battle with Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the new year.  Before the battle starts we need to know just what momentous plans for Canada these two lead combatants are going to fight about.  So far, there hardly seems to be any traditional liberal-conservative battle lines forming.

There is little question that Mr. Harper’s strategy is to belittle and defame anything that the Liberal’s propose.  That man will leave no rock unturned or unthrown in his quest for a majority Conservative government.  And if he gets it, God help us.

Poor Michael has more complex problems.  Half his fractious caucus dislike him and the other half distrust him.  He is a compromise on top of a compromising position.  Here is a man more at home in Paris than in Montreal.  He has roamed the Boston Common more often than the Canadian Prairies,  He is more suited to learned discussion than to the raucous arguments of Question Period in Parliament.  He has had two years to find his sea legs as captain of the Liberal ship and he still has not figured out how to get the damn tug out of the harbour.

This writer is still waiting to find out what Michael Ignatieff stands for.  The last time we saw him he was giving a very inspiring talk about the big red tent.  The only thing is that we are all standing around in that big red tent wondering where the circus parade has gone.  While celebrating 50 years as a capital “L” Liberal next year, we have no clue as to what the hell that means today.

The Liberal Party used to stand for something other than just feeling superior to the ignorant Tories.  Liberals used to make plans.  We were going to save the world.  We had the answers.  We fought the reactionaries in our own party to bring Medicare to fruition.  We have watched over the years while others gutted and demeaned our dream.  We campaigned repeatedly for national daycare and are still waiting.  We believed in the National Energy Policy.  We watched it die. We cheered the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and watched as others showed it as an allusion.  We had dreams.  And maybe it was a dream.

Susan Delacourt of the Toronto Star tells us today that Michael Ignatieff thinks the voters in Etobicoke who voted for Rob Ford for mayor of Toronto are the same voters who will elect him in the coming election.  That is not a dream.  That is a nightmare.  That is certainly not political reality.

Rob Ford was pre-ordained.  You had a suburban loud-mouth, a downtown gay and a downtown socialist still standing after months of jockeying for position in a crowded mayoralty race.  Just what would you expect suburban voters to do?  Did you really think they wanted bicycle lanes?  They held their noses and voted for the guy who best represented their interests.  Do you want to test that theory federally?

Michael Ignatieff thinks he can beat Harper with a smorgasbord of middle-class goodies. Daycare is good.  Does he think the voters will suddenly believe?  So he wants to support post-secondary education?  That is nice.  And the list goes on.  What will we call it?  Is it the Liberal Cafeteria?  If you are a senior, there is something for you.  If you are a tree-hugger, we’ve got something for you too.

But we are screwing ourselves over supporting the opium dealers in Afghanistan.  We are doing nothing to restore Canada’s prestige abroad.  We have no great idea that people can get behind and cheer to victory.  We forget that people expect leadership.  Enjoy your holiday Michael.  There will be a Liberal Party to lead when you return.

But is it the Liberal Party you want to lead?

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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

The sewage works contractors were to take leave,

Before the cool of the autumn would you believe?

Now they’re hunkered down, frozen in their huts,

Can we not do anything to get rid of these mutts?

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There is no such thing as an impenetrable wall.  That is an axiom that has come to us from the dawn of time.  And yet we learn nothing from history and we continue into a foggy future, dragging our silly trust in walls as a tombstone around our necks. Whether dealing with the walls of ancient Babylon or the wall at Toronto’s G20 summit, we only divide the good people.  We only challenge the bad.

The truth is that weak and foolish people build walls.  Since ancient times, the weak have built walls to defend themselves from their neighbours while the strong have built alliances.  Those ancient walls fell to dust while alliances built empires.

Walls are too easily beaten by weight of numbers or by stealth.  They fall to the ravages of pestilence and starvation.  Walls can crumble in economic failure.  They are defeated by tunnelling and through the air.  They are vanquished by siege machines and by trickery.  No walls are safe.  Every wall has a gate and there is where it is at its weakest.

People in gated communities today live with the same falsehoods that fooled the lord of the manor with his castle keep.  A gated community is an insult to neighbours with a false sense of prestige, strength and security.

The Nazis built a wall around the Warsaw Ghetto and yet the occupants of that ghetto held off one of the fiercest armies in the world for almost a month.  The Russians build a wall across an occupied Berlin.  We watched it crumble in the reality of glasnost. The Israelis call their wall on the West Bank a barrier.  Have they forgotten what their hero Joshua did to the barriers of Jericho?

We built a wall in Toronto’s downtown to pen the G20 Summit attendees and kept them from seeing a friendly, clean and open city.  That wall attracted the anarchists and the crazies, the law breakers and the protestors, the civil-rights advocates and the concerned, the curious and the questioners.  They came like moths to a flame.  They were indiscriminately trapped and beaten and unlawfully imprisoned in a brutal, out-of-control police deception and sting that has shamed Canadians for years to come.  And nobody ever tested the stupid wall in Toronto’s downtown.

America is building walls today along its northern and southern borders to keep out people from Canada and Mexico.  The walls are just an inconvenience to America’s enemies.  They are turning away their friends.

It is neither the height of your wall that matters, nor is it the choice between razor or barbed wire on top.  Nor can it be the modern sensors or combinations of deterrents that matter.  You can build better walls but it will always be the ones you tear down that build better friendships.

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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Why is it that nothing in Babel is finished on time,

It isn’t as though I come from some place sublime,

But I’m having trouble getting used to Babel Time!

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Babel’s mayor wants to change how council does business,

Opposition is forming, they say his changes will be useless.

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“Just watch me” might have been the first G20 plan,

But he isn’t Trudeau, Dalton McGinty lacks the élan.

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For many years it used to be so easy to laugh at the antics of former hockey coach and broadcaster Don Cherry.  My wife does not like him because, as she complains, he shouts when he talks.  She is also not all that impressed with his sartorial choices.  She thinks of him as that loud buffoon in the loud outfits.  It should be also noted that she is not an enthusiastic fan of hockey.  He normally talks to hockey fans.  That is why when he moved out of his area of expertise—hockey—that he started to lose friends and no longer amused followers.

Cherry’s hockey knowledge is accepted and respected.  His knowledge of politics is not.  He can make an outrageous statement in the context of hockey and people will laugh and say, ‘That’s Don Cherry.’  They will cringe at some of his less politically correct comments and then forgive him.  It is when he makes an outrageous comment about politics that he can alienate many who see that he does not know what he is talking about.  Very few of us, for example, appreciate being called ‘left-wing kooks.’

In his speech to Toronto City Council at its inauguration this year, Cherry decided to tell us ‘left-wing kooks’ what he thought. ‘Left-wing’ is not an epithet.  ‘Kook’ is an insult.  It means a crazy or eccentric person.  While Cherry might have been directing his comments at the Toronto Star, he included a broad swath of annoyed people en route to his joke.  Cherry crossed the line.

Cherry had already demonstrated his political naiveté with his lending his well-known voice to Julian Fantino’s Conservative campaign in a bye-election in the Vaughan riding.  He lost some fans there.

Cherry’s persona as a commentator was built on the style used by Howard Cosell, the American football commentator in the 1970s.  Cosell’s brashness and loud style was offset by his warmth as an individual and his unstinting support for his charities.  You could agree or disagree with him about the capabilities of this or that football player and his loud voice but you had to like the guy for what he stood for.

It was always obvious that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation deliberately paired Cherry with announcer Ron MacLean to enable the corporation to have an immediate counter to Cherry’s excesses.  Without MacLean in attendance, Cherry is a loose cannon.  He seems to need a keeper.

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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to   [email protected]

Ombudsman Marin said ‘It was the most massive

Compromise of civil liberties in Canadian history.’

And our Premier McGinty says ‘What, me worry?’

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