the-canadian-federal-election-is-on-track-to-be-a-meaningless-scripted-joke-body-image-1438708577The Canadian Federal Election is On Track To Be A Meaningless, Scripted Joke

Justin Ling

The Vice

(…) That campaign bus, by the way, is currently housing less than half a dozen journalists. (Five, at last count.) To be there, they’re shelling out $3,000-a-day, $12,500-a-week, or $78,000 for the whole campaign (plus tax.) When Harper shows up at an event, media gaggle in tow, those paying journalists will get four-of-the-five questions Harper will answer. Local media will get one. Someone like me—travelling on my own, occasionally showing up at Harper’s events—will get, ostensibly, none.

(…) Harper, breaking with tradition he’s set for himself, took five questions from media. They all centered around two ideas: how much will this election cost, and won’t the extra-long campaign benefit you the most?

“A worthwhile amount,” and “I wouldn’t say so at all.” Those were the answers.

(…)  While in the first week I got scoffed at by Conservative staffers — people who carry more weight in our political system than the entire population of PEI combined — tomorrow it will be NDP staffers, and the day after it’ll be Liberal tykes.

One way or the other, I’m loading up the car and heading cross-country, in the ill-begotten hope that I can find a reason to actually tell people to go out and vote. Because, right now, I don’t have one.

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Five Questions I Wanted To Ask Stephen Harper Last Night, But Couldn’t

Can we pave over the Senate and turn it into a Denny’s?

Last night, May offered the most coherent reason to burn down the Senate and salt the earth on which it sits, so no future lifetime Senators can grow from its ashes.

“The single biggest scandal that has yet occurred in the Canadian Senate was not the misspending,” May began. She was referring to the Climate Accountability Act, a bill designed to push the government to align its policy-making to the goal of reducing carbon emissions. Then the Senate voted it down. “This is the first time in the history of this country that appointed senators have killed a bill without a single day of study in the Senate of Canada.”

Then there was a pause. Moderator Paul Wells rounds on Harper.

“Mr. Harper, did you ask the senators to stop that bill?”

Awkward.

“We cannot force them to do anything,” said the prime minister. “What we ask them to do, Paul, is we ask them to support the party’s position.”

In other words: we forced them to kill the bill.

Conservatives in the Senate, by the way, did the same thing to a bill that would afford human rights protections to transgender people so, sincerely, fuck them.

The idea that a cabal of unelected, unaccountable, and unbelievably arrogant party bagmen in the Senate—who are offset slightly by genuinely good and hardworking people from both parties that are trying to make an inherently unworkable institution workable—can kill legislation passed by a majority of the House of Commons would have made 2004 Stephen Harper very mad. I want to see that 2004-vintage Stephen Harper.

I also want a Denny’s in my building.