Like most political junkies this past week, I watched BOTH leadership debates and even taped the English language edition. So why is it that with only days to go in a campaign that is being described as “the most important Canadian election in a century” I’m thinking, “What am I missing here?”
Mere hours before the English language debate was to begin Pierre Poilievre was maintaining that one of the first actions as PM would be to introduce legislation to deny multiple murderers any hope of obtaining parole, even if he had to use the Constitution’s “Notwithstanding” clause to have the motion pass in Parliament.
Whoa! Stop, already; is that even an issue in this campaign? Who just defied public opinion by obtaining such privilege? Clifford Olson? Saskatchewan’s own John Crawford? No, they died under psychiatric care. Robert Pickton? No; someone in “G-pop” made certain he’d never get that chance at redemption. Paul Bernardo just took “strike three” in his attempt to do so, and NO, Judge Judy, Bernardo’s female companion in his rape / killing spree was allegedly classified as a “victim” and “observer” of his crimes, an activity she was also assuming while employed at a Montreal daycare centre before she, her husband (brother of her lawyer) and their three kids decided to seek the personal safety of residence on Guadalupe Island….
When I first heard this, I had to call one of my friends to see if those voters who still wanted to believe they were true “Conservatives” were taking Poilievre seriously.
“No,” he responded, laughing as he did so, “but the Maple MAGA crowd sure do…”
Now I realize what was missing from that English language debate: those who wrote out the questions for the moderator to ask our future Prime Ministers had left out too many unexplored points regarding the President of the United States attacks on our economic agenda out of the conversation. And THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is why we spent the best part of the first half of the English language debate watching Pierre Poilievre vainly attempting to portray Mark Carney as just another Justin Trudeau in blackface, a tactic that Carney handled with relative ease and hilarity.
Let’s sum up the last four years of Parliamentary history for the benefit of those who stopped reading newspapers in 2016. The Conservative Party of Canada and its THIRD leader in as many elections has spent the best part of that time trying to blame every possible “failure” of government, be it mandates implemented or vaccines developed utilizing m-RNA technology on the incompetence of the Trudeau-led and NDP-supported government, and little else. During the tenure of the “Freedom” Convoy’s Alberta-to-Ottawa journey, Poilievre even found himself rubbing elbows with some seriously disturbed far right influencers, including Diagolon leader Jeremy MacKenzie, whom despite having made some seriously threatening and crude drunken outbursts about sexually assaulting the Conservative leader’s wife, found himself being solicited by some Conservatives.
Throughout those four years, not even ONE “corrective” policy announcement or budgetary proposal was put forward to show Canadians how a Conservative government would result in a more stable economy and reduce the inflationary effects created by wide-spread layoffs, plant closures and supply management problems created by the spread of the Covid-19 virus – just a continuous onslaught that eventually created more of the same venomous “hate” protocol driving Canadians further and further apart while driving family gatherings into possible extinction.
It should not come as any surprise, then, that even heading into the last week of campaigning the Conservatives had yet to present a properly costed budget to Canadians to show how they could better handle cost of living issues, a major housing shortage crisis, and all while calming the fears of many as to what to expect would be further economic and inflationary damage once Trump had decided to embark upon his mission to make Canada the 51st state.
As last Monday’s release of that long-anticipated document showed, IF people hadn’t already realized that Poilievre’s “parole” utterances regarding multiple murderers was but a precursor to the Conservatives deciding to go all-out “MAGA” and offer up a budget devoid of options on how Canada could repel Trump’s onslaught without losing even their core supporters, I don’t know what else can be said.
The three major party’s budgetary prognostications manage to provide adequate reason to garner their base’s support, yet still fail to explain how these measures would disentangle us from this economic spider web we’re caught in by having so much of our trade tied to the United States.
Our next budget has to be an economic plan for the future, not some opportunity to plagiarize the MAGA hordes while violating more copyrights than even the Chinese.
All you’re doing is scaring the Hell out of Canadians…
