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Turtle Derby North Posting Date: Sep 14 2008 1:13AM If the American race for the White House is a one-on-one (OK, so it’s kind of two-on-two, but you can’t really count John McCain and Joe Biden because they don’t have personalities) duel for the hearts of America, the Canadian election is like a game of Go Fish with six-year-olds; there’s a lot of guessing, a few impromptu rule changes and the outcome of the game depends on luck far more than skill.
The luckiest man in the history of Canadian politics was Jean Chrétien. Barely articulate in both official languages, Chrétien made some good decisions (keeping Canada out of Iraq) and some bad decisions (screwing over his own party because he never felt loved), but history will show that his greatest contribution to the nation was unveiling the future of Canadian politics. Chrétien, you see, was the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada when Preston Manning got uppity and started a new party called Reform. The Reform Party was wildly successful at skimming off the lunatic fringe of the then-Progressive Conservatives’ voting base. Thus eroded, the PC’s were powerless against Chrétien’s centrist Liberals and Preston Manning handed the kingship of Canada to lucky old Jean Chrétien for a decade, a tenure that ended only because the king’s own party got tired of him.
The same thing is happening now with Stephen Harper. SundayMonkey is predicting a Conservative majority in October for no other reason than all the parties suck and Harper finds himself in the Jean Chrétien Memorial Driver’s Seat. The road to power in Canadian politics is now paved with the incompetence and ingloriousness of your competitors. Aspire not, would-be politicians. Dare not to dream, prospective members of parliament. The best way into office is to lay low and run against morons.
Harper’s main competition is, and will always be, the Liberals. Long the safe haven of the middle class who don’t want anything to change, but don’t want the dirty feeling that comes from voting Conservative to selfishly protect your money, the Liberals are – in theory at least – poised to win every general election. Unless they shoot themselves in the head first. They did that in 2003 with the sloppy school-yard transfer of power from Chrétien to the hangdog Paul Martin and they did it again in 2006 when they elected Stéphane Dion, a man who includes a childhood photo of himself in his official biography. No kidding - check it out at www.liberal.ca.
SundayMonkey has actually met Dion and found him to be an extremely nice man with no sense of ego, a great deal of generosity and a startling ability to listen to everything people tell him. He is polite, informed, accomplished and almost bilingual. In short, he is everything that we Canadians like to think we are despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Too bad he couldn’t lead a hungry cat to a bowl of tuna.
He listens too well to too many people and can’t make a decision. He spends so much time being a nice guy, he can’t find the time to watch a little Rick Mercer and copy the accent. Even when he criticizes his opponents, he does so in a way that makes it sound like he actually agrees with them. Stéphane Dion is the person everyone in this country should want in politics; he just shouldn’t be in charge and everyone knows it as soon as they see his grade six photo.
Next week, SundayMonkey continues its preview of the upcoming election in Canada by examining Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party, along with the Green Party’s Elizabeth May (polls show that 46% of Canadians think she’s a crossing guard), Gilles Duceppe of the Bloc Québécois (a man running for prime minister of Canada based on the platform of wanting to carve off a large chunk of the country … except, wait a second, that’s not such a popular idea anymore, so let’s not mention it) and of course, Jack Layton of the New Democrats who represents a significant improvement on the Old Democrats if for no other reason than it’s nice to have some orange election signs to remind me that Halloween is coming. |
