DIARY
We are the long-suffering taxpayers
by Robert LaFrance
A question: while
this long, long, LONG federal election campaign is going on, who is running
Canada?
One gets the
impression that no one is actually behind the counter of the store when the
shoplifters are about, and the video cameras have been turned off. It’s like
the U.S. where they have these 2-year presidential campaigns that begin right
after the mid-term elections.
Who are we
kidding anyway? Although Harper officially called the election around the first
of August, the campaign had been going on for months. We knew the election date
was to be October 19 and that doesn’t change. We know the governing party has
vast amounts of money, much of it taxpayers’ money, to spend on mindless TV
and other ads.
Elections Canada
was going to spend $375 million on the 5-week campaign, but now with the
11-week one it will be as much as $500 million. The next time you drive on a
pot-holed road because the federal money wasn’t available to help twin it,
think of those 125 million extra dollars, or if you need help with daycare, or
you hear about another cut to CBC, our only non-American network, remember it
went to a good cause – Male Cow Manure.
The federal
government can’t have it both ways; either they’re working hard to govern
Canada or they’re travelling all over the place to get re-elected. Eleven
weeks? We’ve been looking at these turkeys for years and should know by now
which turkey we want in power after October 19. Let’s get on with it so
government can govern…What am I saying? They don’t want to govern, they just
want to get re-elected.
I listened to a few minutes of the
August 6 debate and had to drink a 45-gallon drum of Pepto-Bismal just to keep
down my supper of kippers and bananas. The last time I saw people behave so
much like children, it WAS children. I was visiting a kindergarten classroom and was impressed by the racket,
but even those little gaffers seemed to be more polite than the party leaders of
Canada. I tried to teach my own children not to interrupt, but I guess the
parents of those politicians didn’t spend much time on that aspect of
child-rearing.
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“I don’t
understand how I lost that toss,” moaned Laramie, the bartender. “I had a
2-headed coin.”
“You lost because
you called tails,” said Flug, who does not suffer fools cheerfully. Besides,
Flug won the toss, won and drove home Laramie’s 1975 Pinto, a car he had always
wanted. Perhaps the next time he is looking for a fool to non-suffer, Flug
could look in a mirror, unless it were a 2-way mirror. I am no fan of the Pinto
‘car’.
In other news
from the Scotch Colony, some people Flug might want to meet have just built a
new bungalow at the foot of Lawson Hill. They are immigrants from the U.S.,
people who have gotten weary of being more afraid of the police than they are
of the bad guys. Their surname is Arbor, but, because of the way we spell some
words, they changed it to ‘Arbour’ as a gesture of solidarity with Canada and
us, its people. Of course the first person to visit them was Moose Jackson, who
had two shotguns and two rifles in his pickup truck. Scared the Arbor/Arbour
family half to death and showed them that some Canadians are firearm nuts too.
PIN stands for
‘pretty important number’ – did you know that? I thought for years that it
stood for ‘personal identification number’ but a woman on the telephone told me
it was just a number that indicated I was right up there in importance. She
said she was calling from Ottawa, in fact from Stephen Harper’s office, and
said that if I gave her the PIN I use on my credit and debit cards I would be
getting a plaque in the mail. About time I got some recognition.
Computers, the
Internet and particularly Facebook have made vast changes in the lives of many
people, although I should add that others drift by without being affected at
all. Bethany Popadopulous, my neighbour down the road, was explaining some of
the shortcuts that Facebook users employ, like ‘lol’ which means ‘laugh out
loud’ and ‘omg’ which means ‘oh my gosh’ or ‘oh my god’ if you want to approach
the Blasphemy Border. The letters ‘bff’
mean ‘best friends forever’. “That’s not used much these days,” Bethany told
me, “because people move around so much and lie a lot, so these days we say ‘ffm’ which means ‘friends for the
moment’. More realistic.
-end-
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