The part-time emergency room (July 8)

DIARY

The $90,000 Mike Duffy bribe

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            I have finally solved the question of whether Prime Minister Harper knew about the $90,000 Nigel Wright bribe to Mike Duffy BEFORE it was made.

            Using the latest technology, a computer program called “What’d he say?” that I wrote in April, I was able to hear every one of the Prime Minister’s public statements and speeches since 2013. I was looking for the phrase “Good to go”.

            According to news reports, and we journalists never lie, somebody in his office (PMO) used that phrase in an email after Nigel Wright gave Duffy the $90,000. What I found out was this: Before that phrase became public, the Prime Minister often used it, and I mean often. After that he never used it again. This proves he knew all about it.

            You could look it up.

            So now I’m waiting for a national, meaning Toronto, journalism award. The only  ‘downside’ as they say will be this: now my chances of being named a senator are  somewhere between zero and nil. The prime minister lives on revenge.

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            After listening to CBC Radio’s morning show The Current on June 23, I was appalled but not surprised that someone has invented a robot for cooking meals in any of our kitchens.

            I daresay that this device, with arms coming out of the ceiling, is just the thing for those who think Tim Hortons is gourmet dining, but I won’t be buying one when it comes on the market in the year 2018. (I hope you’re not too hungry.)

            Radio host Anna Maria Tremonti asked many questions of the gent whose company was building this wonder. It turned out that so far the only thing they have made with it has been crab bisque – which I heard as crap disk. I may have been closer to the true content of this dish than I knew.

            Listening to this discourse, I thought about all the things in this world that NEED to be done and aren’t getting done. Perhaps soup kitchens for the homeless would be a good place to test this Robot Kitchen. No need for volunteers any more; the people could come in for a meal and it would be ready – if they liked crab bisque.

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            Looking beyond crab bisque and all the other pieces of electronic junk, I often wonder why people start smoking or indeed continue smoking in spite of the vast amount of evidence that it will probably kill them sooner or later.

            It’s not as if nobody has mentioned this. In the 1980s the U.S. Surgeon General Edward Koop launched a very loud report stating that smoking is bad for the health. The tobacco companies disagreed; go figure.

            Now in 2015 surely people have figured it out, but it’s like global warming – if you’re making money off it, you ain’t gonna persuade people it’s bad. This morning I was uptown and standing in a parking lot – I was talking if you can believe that – and I counted the number of drivers who came in and got out of their vehicles, then snuffed out their cigarettes on the ground.

            Out of eleven drivers, six were smoking and three of them were high school students. As Alloisius said to Clyde in Shakespeare’s play Friar Puck of Othello: “Alack, alas and yoicks, poor Freidson. Will they ever, never learn?”

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            Bizarre things department: I tend to take note of occurrences that are very weird, strange and bizarre. One such occurrence takes place every day in all our lives, and I don’t mean my weekly column.

            The occurrence or concept to which I refer is the part-time emergency room.

            The bizarre thing about this is that to some people – government bureaucrats – this makes total sense. Over the years, just in Victoria County, there have been 23,981 comments roughly the same as I’m making now. The government’s response has almost always been the same: we need to be more disciplined and we need to have our heart attacks, strokes, chainsaw injuries, and sinus explosions when the ER is open. That’s the trouble with us Maritimers – we’re spoiled by having hospitals and emergency rooms open whenever we need them.

            I have a long list of bizarre things, but I won’t torture you with all them. I will mention the weirdest of them all – the United States of America.

            In the winter I made one of my rare trips to the state of Maine and got to talking (of course) to a patron of the Turner library in Presque Isle. I mentioned I was from New Brunswick and a woman about my age or a little older said she had never been there.

            I found this a little hard to believe, but she insisted. “Anything I want I can buy right here in Maine,” she said, “and I don’t have to go there to meet Canadians. Half the shoppers at Mardens are Canadians anyway. Nice of them to give us their tax money and then close hospitals over there for lack of money.”

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