By G.D. Maxwell
"I am Canadian!"
Well, I’m not. Not really. Not truly. Not by birth. By choice perhaps. By dint of living here voluntarily for the past 25 years, through the End of Trudeau, the Glimpse of Clark, the Dark Years of Mulroney and the incomprehensible Age of Chrétien. Or, more accurately, living here to avoid the swaggering tide of Republicanism that’s kept my home and native land gripped in a born-again, fundamentalist crusade against humanity for 16 of those years.
I’ve dutifully fetched and ignored applications for Canadian citizenship twice now, letting them compost their way to the bottom of my in basket. I’ve let the photographs taken to accompany them slide past their best before date into permanent Mañanaville. Maybe someday. Maybe sooner if George W gets re-elected.
But Little Pauly Martin, boy he’s a Canadian. He said so on the campaign trail this week. (Note to the terminally apathetic: In case you slept through it, our unelected Prime Minister called a federal election two Sundays ago. Voting day is June 28, not that you really care.)
Little Pauly said he’s a Canadian… and a liberal… and in favour of high taxes if high taxes are what it takes to keep this country from being like – gasp – America. By which he meant the USofA. He said he was a Canadian and Canadians, real Canadians, love taxes because more than anything in the world, real Canadians love their Health Care System.
He said it as though he was completely unaware of how decrepit that beloved system had become, more or less directly as a result of cuts to funding he proudly made when he was Big Jean’s budget axeman. That’s a-x-e-man. Get your mind out of the gutter.
He said it as though he’s never heard of waitlists for surgery so long people with one bad hip magically transform into people with two bad hips while they wait for the first bad hip to be replaced. He said it as though he’s never heard of people whose leg fell off waiting for the country’s one aging MRI machine to take a picture of their knee to find out the screws were loose. He said it like a guy with a cushy executive health plan.
Mostly though, he said it to cast aspersions on the Canadianness of Stevie Hapless, leader of the… of the… wait a minute, let me look it up… of the Conservative Party. In what can only be considered a completely unCanadian move, Stevie wants to lower taxes rather than run big budget surpluses to fund false election promises like the Liberals.
In Little Pauly’s world, cutting taxes is Secret Political Code for privatizing health care, locking up criminals with punitive revisions to the penal code, toadying up to the U.S., weaponizing space, scrapping the Much Beloved gun registry, oppressing minorities, limiting a woman’s access to abortion and selling our natural resources to the highest bidder. In the absence of an official platform, it probably means the same thing to Mr. Hapless.
But that’s beside the point. As things stand right now, all a voter needs to know about the election is this: Vote for Little Pauly and you’re a Real Canadian who likes high taxes and thinks he or she enjoys Socialized Medicine Paradise and if they play their cards right, might grow up to live the high life embodied by Real Canadian Beer commercials. Vote for Stevie Hapless and you’re on your way to becoming a jackbooted American swillin’ Bud Lite.
If that seems too simplistic, let’s take a look at the party’s Official Election Platform. Oops! Seems as of the middle of this week, nearly two weeks into the race, neither party had one.
Now, I can almost forgive the Conservatives for not having a party platform. Hell, up until a few months ago, they weren’t even a party. We all pretty much know what the old Alliance platform was – if you have any questions about it, reread the Secret Political Code paragraph above. And we kinda knew what the Progressive Conservative platform was. Survival.
But since the duplicitous, lying, backstabbing mongrel Peter McKay sold the PC’s down the river after promising he wouldn’t do exactly that if the dupes elected him leader – serves ’em right – it would be unseemly for Stevie Hapless to just roll out the old Alliance platform until after he’d had a chance to completely and officially ignore the more moderate voices from the PCs who still haven’t figured out they’ve been assimilated by the Borg. I say give him another week.
The Liberals are another, more disturbing matter though. Little Pauly has waited his whole life to be Prime Minister. He had the Totally Irrelevant Ms. Clarkson deliver an extravaganza Throne Speech after Big Jean left him holding the bag for the sponsorship scandal, et.al., last December. For the last six months he’s been waiting, like an expectant father, to drop the writ. His whole being has led to this moment in history. Everything he’s lived for, the past six months of unofficial campaigning, his whole future is resting on this ill-advised roll of the dice. HOW CAN HE NOT HAVE A PLATFORM YET?
It boggles the mind.
Okay, in fairness, there are a couple of other parties flailing limply about the political landscape. There’s the Bloc Quebecois party. I think that just about runs their clock out on equal time.
And there’s the NDP. What can you say about the NDP? They’re the conscience of the country. They’re the wellspring of Great Canadian Ideas; universal health care for example. And….
Diamond Jack Layton is the leader of the NDP. Jack – who was clearly and unduly influenced by those slick Robert Palmer videos in the late ’80s – is single-handedly transforming the NDP into the Nattily Dressed Party. Jack has reinvented himself from the bike-riding gadfly of municipal Toronto politics into the Leader Without a Seat. He may also be Leader Without a Seat after the election, having chosen to slug it out with some heavyweight competition instead of parachuting into a safe NDP – oxymoron since Svend turned criminal – riding like any good Liberal or Conservative would do.
The only thing you really need to know about Diamond Jack and the NDP is this: no one in their right mind would trust them to govern.
With the polls heading south for Little Pauly, who grows more ashen every day as he watches his dream slip away, we might finally get treated to a minority government. A government where Liberals have to play well with the NDP to get something done, thereby allowing the NDP to ascend to their highest place in the Natural Pecking Order. A government where the unlikely alliance of Conservative, Bloc and NDP could defeat the more draconian porkbarreling so favoured by Liberals. In other words, an inclusive, consensus-building government.
How Canadian, eh?
