Aloha to a passionless election

         I doubt with all my heart and elbows if anyone, anywhere, would have used the word ‘passion’ when describing the recent federal election. It was a passionless election, a passionless campaign except for the NDP’s rise in Quebec, and a passionless announcement that Stephen Harper had finally won the majority government. He had been playing the piano for over the past half dozen years in hopes of that night, but still, it wasn’t as if Meech Lake had started boiling over.

          After all that lack of passion, look at the other results that occurred. The Liberals, the party of Laurier, Mackenzie King, Trudeau, Chretien and Martin were reduced to fewer than three dozen seats of the 308 up for grabs, and Le Bloc Quebecois disappeared except for four members from Jacques Bleu’s Pool Emporium, Richelieu-Dorval, Méchant-Duval, and the Plains of Abraham riding.

          So Le Bloc lost 43 of their 47 seats. All those separatists who lost their seats now have to lie back and collect their pensions from us, the Canadian people. On the other hand, perhaps out of principle they will refuse those pensions…wait! What’s that flying overhead? Les cochons.

          Separatists can take heart though. In a short while there will be a Quebec election which the Parti Quebecois expect to win. Back to the old threats of a referendum (neverendum?) so they can blackmail Ottawa into keeping the money rolling into La Belle Province.

My friend Flug, who has been a Liberal since Louis St. Laurent trod the boards in Ottawa, still does not believe that the Liberals lost so badly. Remember after the first moon landing in 1969 when all those conspiracy theorists kept insisting that the pictures of the moon landing were all shot in the Death Valley desert of California? Flug is like that about Liberals.

The day after the election, he tuned in to every newscast, twice an hour, because he thought that it all had been a hoax. Michael Ingnatieff and the Liberals had won the election, and as soon as that tractor-trailer load of ballots was found out behind a warehouse in Barrie, Ontario or behind Jack Blue’s Pool Emporium in Quebec, all would be as it should be. It took a lot of lemonade to get him to calm down, but about 3:00 am on May 3^rd he finally relented and accepted that ‘Charlie Harper’ was prime minister until at least 2015.

          Something else I noted about the Canadian election coverage, and especially about the coverage of CTV, was enough to make one laugh if it didn’t make one weep. CTV – and don’t be thinking that the letter ‘C’ stands for ‘Canadian’ because it doesn’t – had a newscast the next day that I found quite amusing, even for this most American of all the Canadian networks.

          Leading off the newscast was a 7-minute report on the assassination of Osama bin Laden, who had bitten the dust several days before, and following that the talking head said this: “…and now to the other big story. Conservative Stephen Harper won a majority,…etc.” This news report took less than three minutes THE MORNING AFTER THE CANADIAN ELECTION. They wrapped up the newscast with a 2-minute report about a horse jumping through a picture window in Montana. O Canada!

          Just to digress a minute, and speaking of Osama bin Laden, some people (everybody) have speculated that the Pakistani government knew about his hideout and that their intelligence service, ISI, was in fact harbouring him. Considering where he was found, I would have to say that if the Pakistanis DIDN’T know he was there, I would like to play some poker with them. “Oh no,” I would say. “A pair of sixes beats three aces. Two times six is twelve, you see? Yours only adds up to three.”

          Here is a comparison: suppose Osama had pitched a tent on Senate lawn in Ottawa; would anyone notice he was there? Poor example. We’re talking about the Senate; probably he wouldn’t be noticed for weeks. Half the senators would think that Osama bin Lager was a new kind of beer from Holland.

          At least Saddam Hussein had the class to hide in a cave.

          The point is, all the hoopla about our exciting election (as it turned out) and the demise of Osama bin Laden is now over and we can go back to our humdrum lives. Come to think of it, I shouldn’t assume YOUR life is humdrum just because mine is a bit boring. However, I resume skydiving lessons tomorrow morning, interview the prime minister in the afternoon, fly to Washington on Tuesday to play eighteen holes with President Obama, and then fly an experimental jet to Cape Canaveral where I’m scheduled to take the next shuttle flight to Mars on May 29^th. Luckily I won’t miss the Gathering of the Scots at Perth-Andover, NB.