One Opinion

Election crazies

It's no great surprise that there are some strange people with even stranger ideas running for office. The job pays well, the days of public service are long gone, and yet who in their right mind would want to run!
The scrutiny, the exposure, the ego crushing comments from bloggers and media types, not to mention the hecklers in the back of the room, are all just too much for most sane people.
So we get a guy with 30 joints in his mouth running, a cabinet minister who suggested business shouldn't invest in Ontario running in Ontario and now the crème de la crème a Mr. Lee Richardson running (again, he was elected before) in Calgary.
Richardson is a conservative (notice they don't even call themselves Tories anymore) who stated recently that immigrants are largely to blame for crime.
They just don't have the same values and traditions, suggested Mr. Richardson.
If someone with ideas like those, or indeed any ideas at all, is running for office, as a voter I would like to hear them before election day. So thanks for giving us a peek inside your tiny, little mind Mr. Richardson.
Freedom of speech argument anyone? OK. Go ahead, say whatever you like. Personally, one thinks the entire human rights code should be scrapped, a topic for another time.
Judge them as you will. Be grateful to those candidates who forget, even momentarily, that this is a world where someone is always watching, always recording, always filming.

Someone has gas

Harper: “What are you guys doing to me!”
Oil Baron: “Just trying to help you out, buddy.”
Harper: “Help me out! Are you crazy.”
Oil Baron: “We jacked the price of gas just for you. Dion’s plane uses tons of the stuff. It’s going to cost him a fortune to keep that gas guzzler in the air.”
Harper: “I appreciate the thought, but my minions, sorry candidates, are going nuts. Their phones are ringing off the hook with people screaming about the price jump. The commies in Toronto, and you know just about all of those idiots are commies, are talking about nationalizing the industry.”
Oil Baron: “Nationalizing? Really? We’re going to have to do something about this. Let me have an informal, no price fixing or anything like that, chat with the other oil barons and we’ll see what we can do.
“At least until after the election”.

Same old, same old

One does not often agree with Stephen Harper, but he’s correct when he suggests, in his new warm and fuzzy style (which by the way Stephen, is just a bit creepy) that this election is about leadership.
He out and out fibbed when he said this recently dissolved government was dysfunctional. It just wasn’t functioning the way he would like. Harper is a bully boy with a take no prisoners approach. He wants to run the show his way.
That is leadership. Might not be the style of leadership Canadians are accustomed to, but it is most definitely leadership – in a rather Mussolini style.
He is socially awkward, not the kind of guy one wants to get cornered by at a party, and soft blue sweaters and supercilious smiling won’t change that.
He’s more than a little intimidating, not in a Trudeau intellectual way, and comes across as cold and deliberate, and he rules his cabinet, and backbenchers, with an iron fist. Not a collaborative type of guy.
Stephane Dion has major language issues, compounded by the fact he and his colleagues were appalling silent, and or absent, during the last Parliament. For him and his party to now try and make election hay out of issues they acquiesced to for the past few years is challenging to say the least.
He has charm and while obviously very bright, he doesn’t flaunt it.
He is in fact the flip side of Harper. Where Harper does not seem to be sophisticated, Dion oozes sophistication. Where Harper is cold, Dion is warm. Where Harper is a dictator, Dion is a collaborative democrat. Where Harper always seems just a little uncomfortable in his own skin, Dion appears very comfortable.
Harper’s handicap is that despite his handlers’ best efforts he is still frightening to many Canadians. Dion’s handicap, apart from the language issue, is that he hasn’t shown any mettle. Where’s the steel? Where’s the “Just watch me” confidence that Trudeau and Jean Chrétien had in spades?
As for the others in this race, Jack Layton should go hide his head in shame. By refusing to debate Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party, at the televised national debate, he showed himself as a mean spirited, camera hog. More face time for Jack! He then turned and pointed to the TV execs, who should be taken out and horse whipped, as the decision makers.
As for Gilles Duceppe, he looks tired and bored. Go fishing, Gilles. It’s over.
Every election is now being billed as “the most important in Canada’s history”, perhaps every election is. This one is no more, and no less, important than any other. As the Tories write the cheques, (the Liberals taught them everything they know) and the Liberals scurry to get their old, dirty plane off the runway, there is an element of the same old, same old.
What will matter is who will take the Prime Minister’s chair, or in Harper’s case throne, after the election. So like it or not, we all have to pay attention.