Would you invite this man into your party? Conservatives urge caution. (Courtesy, www.conservative.ca)
So Dean del Mastro came over to sit beside me at my desk in the House, looking profoundly unhappy. He said he knew I was trying to humiliate him, because he was in the car business.
The MP for Peterborough is usually dishing it out loudly from his seat at the back of the Conservative benches, but as I blogged hours ago, he was apparently wounded when I reminded MPs that we are as trusted by Canadians as used car salesguys. Don’t be, I told him. It’s a fact, demonstrated by several surveys. And so long as politicians like Stephen Harper keep lying to people, it will stay that way.
Dean was also upset I published a picture of his car, which I only noticed because it was taking up half the parking lot at the Justice Building. Well, I said, it would never had made it onto the blog if you had not tried to disrupt my speech in the House. Apparently the word “consequences” has not been covered yet in the Tory caucus.
Dean went back to his desk, and his laptop, and pounded out the defence that I published here.
Meanwhile, despite Mr. del Mastro’s long face, I actually had a good day. The Conservative Party web site (which is only about Liberals) decided to attack me again, publishing an out-of-context quote which evidently proves I hate my colleagues. It was accompanied by an extreme closeup of a publicity picture I had done for a speaking tour in 1995. I guess they have yet to learn about Google down there in the basement of the CPC world headquarters. Or, gee, maybe they were trying to make me look like a crazed dork.
Concurrent with that was an unusual flaring of anti-Garth sentiment on a number of ther prominent pro-Harper sites, where I was called both dog crap and a stalker. Always a good sign of being effective, I would say.
Hey, and requests for Town Hall meetings have flooded in from Alberta, BC and across Ontario in the last 24 hours, which all have Esther scrambling. Already she’s plotting the logistics of nine of them in the next few weeks, and just firmed up an Ottawa gig – Tuesday June 5th. Just to make that one more interesting, the two of us have booked a meeting room in the Parliament Buildings themselves, so people from the region can come and talk about income trusts, taxes and politics. Yes, I will be inviting Mr. Flaherty.
Meanwhile, Parliament is spinning out of control. Question Period is a series of incendiary questions which provoke personal and professional insults. Virtually no worthwhile legislation is being seriously debated. Committees are disintegrating as the poison of partisan politics spreads. Conservatives walked out entirely on one, and today Mike Wallace, the Tory whose riding abuts mine, made a fool of himself by talking for three hours in order to prevent a committee from hearing witnesses that might have dissed the government. So much for openness and accountability.
The place is a mess. Summer will come and put it out of its misery, but I wonder what the Harper Administration – clearly out of gas now that an election could not be called – will be offering as its vision when September rolls around. Already they’ve burned through three slogans (“The Five Priorities,” “Canada’s New Government” and “Getting Things Done for All of Us”), had one major cabinet shuffle, two tax-increasing budgets, as many failed environment plans and broken more promises than John Baird has teeth. They’ve spent more money than any government in history, and just declared the second-largest province to be a nation – all to get votes. And yet, Canadians ain’t buying. They’re not in a mood to give anybody more power.
So, yeah, it’s a great time to get out of town. Once we all start believing anything that happens in the House of Commons matters we’re all, well, dog residue.
