March 2004
by Barry Stagg
"You have sat too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!"
"No one rises so high as he who knows not whither he is going. Not only strike while the iron is hot, but make it hot by striking. Do not trust the cheering, for those persons would shout as much if you or I were going to be hanged."
Oliver Cromwell called me up earlier this week and implored me to pass on these quotes as talking points on the current Liberal advertizing scandal. When pressed on the matter, this veteran parliamentarian demurred about any similarities between Paul Martin and the late Charles I. However, his eyes took on a peculiarly bright sparkle when he was asked about any comparison between the Stuart regent and former prime minister Jean Chretien but he just mumbled something about separation. It was unclear as to whether the reference was to separation of executive and parliamentary roles or even to separation in the purely physiological sense.
The venerable father of British politics left, leaving only this pithy comment for further discussion and application to the present bunch of Liberal rapscallions still lurking in and around the troughs and sloughs of wintry Ottawa:"Subtlety may deceive you; integrity never will" .
What then is there to be made of the onslaught of outrage in Canada , coast to coast, over the $100 million outflow of taxpayers' money to Liberal-selected and Liberal-groomed advertizing companies? The desperate bailing effort of concerned careerist Liberals has, for the moment, righted that good ship, the S.S. Martin, with its flag of procedural convenience flying so freely and boldly in the humid breeze produced by masses of hyperventilating Liberal officeholders. Look forward to more sonorous piety, mixed ever so significantly with partisan belligerence, sent forth in baritone measures by Reg Alcock, Martin's minister for damage control.
One interesting tactic, ventured forth by the Toronto Star, a Liberal weather vane if there ever was one, is to tout the comely but callow Belinda Stronach as the next leader of the Conservative Party. Candy store rapture envelopes Liberal lifers at the prospect of the novice leader, adrift in a snap spring election, being ripped with great relish and efficiency by the cartilaginous crowd of operatives so closely aligned to the levers of Liberal oligarchy. Procedure, tactics, planning, polling and the negative potential of pulchritude are some of the last refuges of the federal Liberals, all looking fearfully at the spectre of the deluge that befell the post-Mulroney Tories in 1993.
Madame Lafarge may yet knit political epitaphs for the party of Alfonso Gagliano and Jean Pelletier. No word is in yet on whether Olympic champion Myriam Bedard will stand in for the legendary Lafarge, if the lady has visa problems coming from her usual Parisian haunts. Of course, the dismissive insult,"pitiful single mother", spewed forth by Monsieur Pelletier to Olympic sharpshooter Bedard may do more to focus the disgust of Canadians for Liberal fatcats than any Manolo Blahnik equipped mischief conceived by the Toronto Star's counter-insurgency desk, temporarily seconded from the permanent department of Liberal hagiography.
The soundest plan for the new and surging Conservative Party is to elect the experienced and battle-tested Stephen Harper on March 20, while his formidable internecine rivals, Belinda Stronach and Tony Clement, unite with him to make up a young, talented and virtuous front bench for the next government-in-waiting. It behooves all Canadian politicians, Conservative and Liberal alike, to accept the collective wisdom, good eyesight and strong sense of smell possessed by the voters of Canada. Canadians are now permanently alert to the stodgy decay,uncontrollably and terminally leaking through the clogging arteries of the Liberal Party. On the other hand, Myriam Bedard would make a wondrous and most agreeable Quebec lieutenant for Belinda Stronach, Leader of the Official Opposition.
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