Did you know? Jason Kenney has quit his cabinet post to run the Gay Pride parade. Vic Toews confessed to being a pederast. Stephen Harper has been corresponding with Syrian President Bashar Assad about crowd control for years.These are not, as you might have thought, lies, but examples of my freedom of expression that I have shared with you to see how, in some hypothetical future, you might vote.
Peter Van Loan is with me on this one. Rob Ford, too, the Toronto mayor having his own connection to the Conservatives’ lying as a part of its campaign to unseat the Liberal MP for Outremont, Irwin Cotler.
The seasoned fabricator behind the polling scam that led to a reprimand earlier this week by the Speaker of the House, Andrew Scheer, is Nick Kouvalis, the CEO of Campaign Research, the website of whose Ottawa-based company tells potential clients that “Ideas matter, but only if people know about them.”
Even more so, it would seem, when people don’t.
Kouvalis is the same zealous bully who ran Ford’s campaign mayoral campaign back in 2010, so pleased with his deceits that he bragged about having created an online identity on Twitter for a totally fake phone-in guest to John Tory’s Newstalk 1010 Radio show called “Karen Philby,” a tactic he credited with having deterred the prospective mayoral candidate from running. Whoever played the part lied about what she would say to get on air and then threatened that were Tory to run, it would show he was “a person of no integrity.”
You have to admire the nerve of these liars — and possibly, too, their humour.
For a while there, I wondered if someone in the Ford-Kouvalis and now Harper camp was endowed with an amusing ironic sense — was even a reader, perhaps. Someone who, say, clandestinely regretted that Toronto’s libraries and the TTC were being hit with an ineluctable 10 per cent budget cut while the police services, as usual, were able to sequester a budget rise with impunity.
Karen Philby, you see, is tantalizingly close in name to that other more famous Philby, Kim — the MI6-KGB double agent who, recruited in Cambridge University days, infiltrated deep into British intelligence during World War II and later defected to the Soviet Union. Now there was a true master of false identities, so confusing that even decades afterwards his lies are proving hard to unravel.
Who am I kidding?
Philby was probably the name of the Subway fella delivering sandwich lunches back at Kouvalis’s Windsor offices, before the dubious pollster hit the big time by making a specialty of small lies with our present abundance of overly comfortable politicians who will resort to just about anything in their majority glee. This Tory axis, partying over summer barbecues in Rob Ford’s backyard, is such a collection of bullies that moral indignation just won’t do. How could it, when Jason Kenney, never resisting the chance to rally the mob, will always supersede it?
And then I return to thinking of that subversive Karen-Kim Philby trickster, and fantasize about the day when wit is the quality that returns to the beleaguered Canadian left. Because, as Pat Martin and Justin Trudeau know, there is in the schoolyard or in Parliament no more powerful weapon than to make fun of the bully who thinks he is accountable to no one.
Imagine if, not so long ago, Michael Ignatieff had responded to Conservative Party attack ads claiming “He didn’t come back for you,” by turning to Harper and saying, “What, you couldn’t get work anywhere else?” How small Harper would have seemed, then, our country replete with CEOs and athletes and professionals and artists and generals who gain reputations and wealth and experience abroad before, to the parochial Conservative country’s benefit, they come back home.
Oh, for someone to turn this demagogic bunch awash in dirty tricks, but apparently immune to scandals, into the thing that would swiftly undermine them — a joke.
Origin
Source: Star
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