Just doin' my job ma'am, protecting all the fine constituents of my riding

Tony Clement is our favourite Cabinet Minister. He’s unashamedly geek-chic like a Judd Apatow character, he’s thoroughly unwilling to take any of your shit, he’s not a loony-bin Reform righty, he shows up on radio talk shows to make poop and weiner jokes, and he rocks Twitter so hard it made Ashton Kutcher jealous. But until today, we didn’t know that Tony Clement was a LITERAL SUPERHERO.

It makes sense when you think about it – Clark Kent hid his ultra-macho Superman persona by working as a pencil-pushing journalist by day, while Bruce Wayne disguised his dark, brooding Batman identity by living the life of a billionaire playboy. It only makes sense that Aquaman, a hero who speaks the language of the sea and has no fear of diving into the churning, dark waves of the Muskoka River to save a citizen in peril, would hide his seafaring heroics with a role by day as mild-mannered, four-eyed nerd Tory Minister Tony Clement.

Then again, the girl he saved was from Toronto – it wouldn’t surprise me if after coming out of her coma and opening her eyes to see her saviour, she’d let out a disappointed sigh and hop back into the river, waiting to see if Justin Trudeau would save her instead.

In all seriousness, though, water safety is a serious issue. I looked up the stats on drowning in Canada, and it turns out that… well, hold on, these statistics are all out of whack, this can’t be right… fucking Stats Canada, does anyone even run this organization?

Pass GO, collect 200 HST-exempt dollars

Regular readers (HI MOM) will notice we haven’t posted in about seventeen years (all figures approx.) There’s a good reason for this, Your Editor has been busy like a beaver moving into a new place, a fleabag Toronto bachelor apartment that hadn’t gotten an internet connection. I suppose that’s not really busy like a beaver, which would necessitate building my home from twigs and mud I hauled with my teeth, and also eating my own testicles when I was sufficiently frightened. (What a noble national creature we have!) In any case, if I ever disappear again you can honestly just read all of the old articles on this site if you need your fix – some of them are coherent!

In any case, the theme of The Canadian Politics this week has been PARDONS! Let’s see who’s been freed, and who hasn’t!

>> HELENA GUERGIS IS FREE! Unlike the girls her husband slept with, who weren’t free at all, but were rather costly. That’s right, the Lindsay Lohan of Canadian politics has been cleared of criminal wrongdoing by the Mounties for her once-alleged-but-now-apparently-non-existent tampering, influence-peddling and shit-disturbing on behalf of her slimey husband while she was an MP. She’s still kicked out of the Conservative caucus, though, in one of those classic “We know you weren’t officially criminally charged but you’re still tainted by sleaziness” defenses, called the “Michael Jackson” in legal circles. Although Guergis was set free, justice was not served for the fine people of PEI, who are still reeling after Guergis called their province a “fucking hellhole”.

>> CONRAD BLACK IS FREE! After being convicted in 2007 of the minor, petty crime of Fucking Massive Fraud, cartoonish fake-Canadian and Mr. Burns-esque media-baron-monster Conrad Black has been serving his days in the draconian hell-hole of a minimum-security prison where they don’t even give you an olive in your afternoon martini, or give you the option of lavender-chai soap to drop in the shower. After having been persecuted for his beliefs (namely, the belief that stealing money is fucking awesome) by a corrupt American judicial system, Conrad Black is free, and wants to return to Canada! The only problem is that as a convicted felon it’s hard to cross borders, and his job opportunities are limited to burger flipper and/or gangsta rapper. We would link you to the reaction of the National Post to this news story, but it was just a long series of excited gurgling noises, mixed with trance-like chanting of “Our glorious Dear Leader… he returns!… just as was prophesized… the Chosen One returns to lead us to the promised land!”

>> THE HEAD OF STATSCAN IS FREE… TO PURSUE OTHER INTERESTS! Munir Sheikh, head of Statistics Canada, has quit over the brouhaha surrounding the Tories’ plan to eliminate the mandatory census. Once the census is voluntary, we expect StatsCan to make some really valuable reports: “alright, so, we got back 17 of the new voluntary census forms… that’s quite the dip from our last reported population of 33 million, huh Bob?” To report how you feel about the resignation of the head of StatsCan over the census, please fill out table 3.a.ii, but only if you have not completely unfilled out sub-form 4.77(a) on the attached orange form 9-B.AA, excluding residents of Alberta, who are to circle their preference on the attached subsection 5B on the Disclosure Of 7-A-Compliant Persons graph, excluding residents of Moose Jaw and people with red hair (9.33-D), but not ex-including persons who own a pet bird or work at a paper factory, per 73-B.ii[2].

>> LINDSAY LOHAN IS GOING TO JAIL! Mean Girls is an underrated movie.

No, we didn't mean to write Die Pigs on that cruiser! It's merely German, for The Pigs.

Woohoo, it’s the G20! Bring your friends, let’s “cause shit” and “party”! Hey man, a bunch of drab economic wonks are convening to have low-key discussions about the intricacies of interest rates, inflation and ensuring macroeconomic stability – you know what that means, LET’S SET SOME GODDAMN POLICE CARS ON FIRE!

Here are my compiled comments, which I’m not calling a “liveblog”, because liveblogs are for teenagers watching American Idol:

• > We join this riot already in progress. They’re already looting down Queen. Maybe these black-clad anarchists plan on looting the American Apparel and putting the clothes on to blend in as apathetic Queen Street hipsters.

• > On breaking stuff properly. CTV News Network is showing a loop of the same 10 or so clips of footage, one of which features a balaclava-sporting anarchist charging at the glass storefront of a Scotiabank and taking a swing at it with some sort of rock (or other blunt object). After a few weak blows of his weak, vegan arm strength against this obviously-reinforced glass, he tries kicking it a few times in frustration leaving a weak dent, and then finally throws his rock at the window in frustration and runs away. I can’t help but feel sorry for the poor, malnourished weakling. I want to start a charity telethon to sponsor anarchists. Did you know that 7 out of 10 black bloc rioters today, right here in Canada, can’t even break a window using a weapon?

• > A disaster of venti proportions. I was watching CityTV when they showed images of the Starbucks being looted across the street at Queen and John, and I noticed a strong hint of sadness in the reporter’s voice as she actually said “OUR Starbucks.” You could almost see her on the verge of tears, about to soberly declare, “That’s when it got personal for me, when these hippie bastards took the Starbucks across the street where I’d gotten countless venti no-foam extra hot soy milk toffee nut lattes, and then splashed it in my worthless assistant Kevin’s face for fucking up my order again.”

• > On ninjas. Speaking of the black bloc gang, a lot of media commentators don’t realize “black bloc” is a style of protest, not a unified group. If you can assign a group title to this fairly nebulous group of shit-disturbers and hangers-on, it’d be S.O.A.R, Southern Ontario Anarchist Resistance, who have quite the cute-sounding acronym for a bunch of morons who think smashing the windows of a Tim Hortons will have a positive effect on political discourse. Y’know, I remember back when the Quebec City protests rolled in around 9 years ago, and as an impressionable teenager, I thought – hell yeah! Fight the power! Breach the fence, don’t take their police brutality! Now, as a taxpaying, job-holding adult, I’m watching these shit-disturbing, cop-car-burning clowns on TV and hoping they get a lung-full of teargas. Have I sold out, or just gained the wisdom that comes with age? On a lighter note, the anarchists, with their head-to-toe black gear, black head coverings and their way of quickly darting around silently, makes me wonder how this city would cope if we were overrun by ninjas.

• > Less SOAR, more SOAP. CBC has just opined that it’s a shame these images of violence and chaos will spread throughout the worldwide media, making a mockery of Toronto. I just turned to CNN to see how our shameful, sensationalist violence would be reported to America, and instead the current breaking news headline on CNN was “ARE YOU AN OVERSOAPER?” Apparently, conventional dishwashers don’t need that much soap at all!

• > Who’s the boss? Police Chief Bill Blair just gave the best press conference ever, where he vowed to kick the asses of every snot-nosed punk who messed with his city, and where he did not take any of your shit, you smarmy little reporters. And you’d better have your facts straight, you pencil-necked reporter geeks, or he’ll give you a SMACKDOWN of factual recourse. (The best kind of smackdown!) Um, excuse me, Police Chief Blair, I’ve got a question for you – that banging sound outside, is that the sound of police marching in rhythm and banging their batons on their shields, or is it your GIANT BRASS BALLS swinging together?

• > We’re rioting because of the Leafs’ poor draft choices, right? For historical background – after all, I run a very factual website – I checked Wikipedia for more information on the history of riots in Canada, prompted by repeated mentions of this being the first time tear gas had ever been used on Canadians. It turns out that 6 of the 11 recorded riots in Canada since 1950 have been hockey-related. Sounds about right.

• > Tweets for twits. In other news, Twitter has been an invaluable source of information today – and misinformation, too! I can’t tell you how many times reporters live on the air today said things like “according to Twitter we’re hearing the fence has been breached”, which, of course, never happened. Could you imagine if Twitter had been around during other historic newscasts? “News of the World, Dateline, 1944 – Ladies and gentlemen, we’re getting reports in from Twitter that the Nazis have actually won the war, that Hitler himself has parachuted into Washington D.C. to assume the American Presidency, this coming from Twitter user BigDaddyGoebbelz88“. Speaking of Twitter, I think stalwart TVO newsman Steve Paikin has devolved into insanity, please see below:

FREE STEVE PAIKIN

The talk of the nation is Sun TV News, an upstart Quebecor TV network which people are saying is loosely modeled on the wildly popular, mildly informative Fox News network stateside. The new channel promises to offer a more “conservative, non-politically-correct, fiercely patriotic” take on Canadian affairs. A few questions remain: will the CRTC grant the channel must-carry status, which would force all cable companies to provide it to customers? After rumoured names of everyone from Rick Mercer to Kevin Newman to Ezra Levant, what pundits and personalities will the channel be able to lure? Should we expect the kind of brash, bullying right-wing propaganda that Fox News has become known for, and is that a good thing for Canadian citizens to be exposed to? Is there even a need for another 24-hour Canadian news channel when we’ve already got two, neither of which anyone watch? To help us out, we’ve invited one of Sun TV News’ new on-air pundits, host of the Sun TV News’ flagship “Wolfe Pack Report”, conservative pundit Mr. Horatio Diefenbaker Wolfe!

__________

ARE YOU READY TO HOWL WITH THE WOLFE PACK?

My name’s Horatio, and I’m a proud Canadian. From Calgary, to Edmonton, all the way to Medicine Hat, I love every part of this Goddamn beautiful nation. Except the French, I’m none too happy with them cheese-suckin’ sons o’ surrender-frogs, but that’s a whole other story that you can read about in my new book: “Queblechh: Arguments for Annexation Straight From The Wolfe-man”, available at all fine booksellers. Fine booksellers except for those dirty lefty commies at Chapters who are probably busy selling gift baskets full o’ Pierre Trudeau memoirs, the Communist Manifesto and CBC miniseries about Toronto’s heroic first gay Chinese abortion doctor.

Anyways, back on topic: Canada is the best country in the history of the world, ever. I like my hockey violent, my beer commercials patriotic, and my Tim Hortons loaded with enough cream and sugar to give a moose a stroke. As host of Sun TV News’ new flagship prime-time news-based-opinion-type broadcast, the Wolfe Pack Report, I’ll be giving you the news straight and unfiltered. That’s right, none of that CBC, Toronto lefty propaganda-pukin’ NDP-votin’ nambly-pambly “politically correct” pile o’ road apples. You’re in the WOLFE’S DEN now, baby!

Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to welcome you on this fine day in 2010. Two-thousand and ten, can you believe it? That’s 2000-some-odd years since baby Jesus Christ was born for your sins. That’s right, on this show I’m not afraid to report on our lord and saviour Jesus Christ, and if ya can’t handle it, grab your remote control and go back to letting Peter Man-lovin’s-bridge indoctrinate you to sleep. Anyways, 2010. That’s 143 years since proud Conservative John A. Macdonald founded this beautiful country, 38 years since Paul Henderson defeated Soviet Communism at the Summit Series, and 6 years since the Lie-beral party gave us the shameful SPONSORSHIP SCANDAL, a black eye from which this nation may never recover. For more information on the Sponsorship Scandal, you’ll want to tune into my new 20-part spin-off documentary-tainment Sun TV News Original Miniseries, “The Cretin and The Frogs: How the Fiberals date-raped your country.”

TAKING A BITE OUT OF THE HEADLINES WITH THE WOLFE-MAN!

I designed this logo myself, cuz I'm the WOLFE-MAN. Where's your logo, MANSBRIDGE?

It’s a great time to be a Canadian, with a great, proud leader in Captain Harper at the helm of the beautiful H.M.C.S. Canada, setting sail for Freedom. But trouble is lurking in the waters, my friends. Have you heard about this Twitter gadget? It’s this website on the internet – the very same internet your children use every day – which lets all sorts of lefties around the world compile their vast liberal conspiracies. This latest thing – have you heard about this, folks? – it’s really no surprise to educated Sun TV News personalities like me, but these Goddamn Euro-trash socialists are trying to use the Twitter to “Tweeter” at our elected leader all of their communist nonsense about increasing taxes. Increasing taxes, you heard me right! They want your MONEY, and that’s how socialism starts, and I’m the only one brave enough to tell you about this! I urge my viewers to boycott the Twitter machine, and if your children start using it, give them a good spanking on behalf of Canadian freedom.

Look, I’ve been reading these rags called newspapers, and it’s making me sicker than Don Cherry at a gay disco full of lousy diving Russians. You want real, hard journalism that doesn’t pull any punches? Then you want Sun TV News original reporting! Look at this fine Sun article. It talks about how the government is out to waste your money. Billions of your dollars, wasted! Why? Silly rules, and also goofy rules! We don’t need your fancy Globe and Fail reporters with your ivory-tower University of Whore-onto degrees, we just talk from the gut about what’s really going on, we use words average Canadians understand, like “silly” and “goofy”, and don’t go into any needless detail about what these rules are or where the report can be found, because details like that are for elitists, and we’re just average blue-collar folks telling you news stories from the heart.

THE WOLFE PACK LOCAL BEAT!

In lighter news, you hear about this earthquake? I guess I’m not the only thing that lasts for 30 seconds and that most women reported not feeling at all, HEYO! Go figure that the earthquake originated on a fault line on the Ontario-Quebec border – even the forces of nature (by which I mean Jesus) are trying to separate them from the rest of this country! If I had my way, the earthquake would’ve ripped the whole province of Quebec off, sending it floating across the ocean over to Europe where they can all have metrosexual, French-speaking poutine-orgies for all I care. All those whiny east coast Toronto and Ottawa types were talking about how scary this big ol’ earthquake was. Are you serious, out here in Real Canada, located in all of the provinces that rhyme with Malberta, we’ll get snowstorms in June that’ll freeze Michael Iffy’s bushy eyebrows off and you don’t see us crying on the Tweeter machine about big scary nature. Heck, the next big natural disaster in this country will probably be caused by some goofy Liberal backbencher wagging his chubby chin and creating so much hot air with his Lie-beral propaganda that the changes in air pressure created from the hot air and cold air mixing will create a tornado in Ottawa. If we’re lucky, it’ll rip through those wimps in Toronto before it loses steam, and you’ll see it all live right here on Sun TV News with our new weather girl, Tittanya O’Leggs.

That’s all for this tasty Timbit of a sample of the Wolfe Pack Report with me, Horatio Wolfe. Join us next week when we’ll discuss what the greatest threat to our nation is: Liberals, the CBC, or the flamboyant un-Canadian sport of soccer.

HaaaWooOOOOOOOooooo!

Are you coming to the G20 protest, I hear it's gonna be a riot!

Have you heard? There’s a small summit coming up around June 26-27 called the G20, in which the 20 coolest world finance leaders (suck it, #21!) get to convene in the small town of Toronto to complain about other countries, get in a dick-size contest about the strength of their financial systems, and enjoy free snacks. Generally the resources needed for this task – a room capable of fitting 20 people for a day-long conversation – could be met by an average Newfoundland living room, but this being Toronto, the cost of the affair is expected to round up to a nice, even – pinkyfinger in mouth, everyone – one BILLION dollars. Meanwhile, the G8, consisting of the world’s 8 coolest world leaders, will be run almost simultaneously in scenic, mosquito-bitten Muskoka a few hours north of Toronto. There’s a very important reason that these summits couldn’t be merged into one larger event in the same city which would have saved tens of millions of dollars, and that reason is *sentence trails off in a series of mumbles and coughs* Anyways, we’re stuck with dueling boondoggles now – so what’s the story here?

Well, there’s been a flurry of news stories about the G20+G8 (for our purposes, we’ll recall our gradeschool math and call them G28), most of which were ignored by those outside of the 416 area code. We decided we’d provide you with a roundup of all the G28 news you need from the past few weeks, along with the story’s ridiculousness factor and who the big winners are for each story.

#1: This Goddamn fake lake.

You’ve all heard about this big, stupid, fake lake, right? Well, if you haven’t, the Liberals reeeally want to make sure that you have. Coles Notes summary: they wanted a lake in Toronto for the benefit of G8 reporters to give them the outdoorsy feel they’d be missing out on by not actually being in Huntsville with the important people. The only lake in Toronto is Lake Ontario, the cleanliness of which would make British Petroleum blush. So they built an artificial  lake and decorated it with fake trees and fake Muskoka chairs to give the feeling of being in Muskoka. Shockingly, building a fake lake in downtown Toronto was really expensive and unnecessary and dumb. It’s now universally referred to as “the fake lake”, which adds the annoyingness of catchy rhymingness – God help us if people start saying “Fakelake-gate” – but protesters have submitted to the Geographical Names Board that the lake’s actual name be “Harper’s Folly”.

Ridiculousness: 8/10. They built a lake in downtown Toronto with a bunch of shitty props from Bass Pro Shop to make you “feel like you’re right there in Huntsville”. Come the hell on. That’s like how a tacky, suburban Olive Garden makes you “feel like you’re actually in a rustic Italian family’s kitchen.” A few styrofoam boulders and some floating algae nestled in loud, chaotic downtown Toronto won’t trick the international press pool into believing they’re lounging on their dock, sipping a Moosehead in scenic cottage country. If the international community were wondering what Muskoka looked like, they could Google that shit. I doubt these well-travelled international journalists will be breathlessly reporting back to the home office, “Holy shit, I’m in Canada and you know what they’ve got? A lake! Seriously, a Goddamn lake, with water, right here in Canada! There goes our preconceived notions of Canada being a barren, sand-choked desert.”

Winners: Liberals talking points, for having this giant pool of refreshing symbolism crash right into their laps. Also fake lake-building companies, which are probably seeing a huge boom in interest.

#2: The fact that it’s two summits.

… Instead of just one big G28 summit, which would be $400-million cheaper. Instead, we’re flying Obama to Toronto, and then he presumably has to drive north for 4 hours in cottage-country traffic on Highway 400 in his rented Chevy minivan to Deerhurst Resort, towing his motorboat and getting a left-arm window sunburn while threatening to turn this car around if Sasha and Malia don’t stop singing Justin Bieber in the back seat. Meanwhile, a simultaneous summit will be going on in Toronto, a city where people actually live and work and tend to get uptight about road closures and giant security fences and protesters hurling cinder blocks at them. Hey, at least the G20 protesters and World Cup rioters will be able to merge into a single, cohesive rage-party. Sample dialogue: – “Hey man, you wanna help me flip this car?” – “Hell yeah, I’m so pissed off about these capitalist fascist banker pigs!” – “Wait, what the hell are you talking about, I was flipping cars cuz Holland just scored a bullshit goal on Italy!” – “Whatever, let’s just split the difference and hurl some bricks at an ING.” Anyways, holding a last-minute billion-dollar boondoggle conference, with all the other shit going on in this city, when we’ve already dropped cash on the infrastructure for hosting another summit a few hours north, is… well, I’ve lost my thesaurus, so let’s call it dicktarded.

Ridiculousness: 7/10.

Winners: Full-time anarchist protesters who would prefer sucking on tear-gas in downtown Toronto than braving the mosquitoes of northern Ontario. Also, high school economics teachers who need an easy lesson example about fixed costs and economies of scale.

#3: G8 spending got kinda high, and it’s all kinda going to Tony Clement’s riding

Do you own any old pile of shit in Muskoka? Good news! It just got a half-million dollar renovation from the federal government. Costs in Huntsville have skyrocketed, most of which won’t go towards things which will actually be needed for the G8 – like media centres being built that won’t be used, or huge renovations spending on the North Bay Airport when it turns out they’ll be flying into Toronto. This obviously pisses people off. And then there’s the accusations that this had something to do with the G8 being in the riding of  noted Twitter-goblin Tony “Slap Chop” Clement, and how convenient it was that his riding was swimming in millions of dollars of luxuries unrelated to the G8. Tony promptly told people that the cost figures the Liberals were throwing around were mostly made-up, and then told the Liberals to shove it, but the damage was done.

Ridiculousness: 5/10. Pork barrel spending isn’t really that shocking anymore. In fact, building some media centres and airport terminals to spruce up your riding for the G8 summit is borderline sane compared to the art of corruption we’re used to from American politicians, where a congressman can sneak an amendment into a healthcare bill to buy a fleet of gold-plated helicopters for his constituents in Assfart, Arkansas without even flinching. In fact, it’s a good thing we’re doing all of this spending – could you imagine how embarrassed we’d feel if Barack Obama knew that the pool at the Huntsville community club a half-hour away from the summit had cracked tilework?

Winners: The fine people of Muskoka who will enjoy this Conservative stimulus spending on needed infrastructure for years to-… haha, nah, just kidding, no one wins except some contractors.

#4: They’re not talking about abortion.

Liberals, NDPers and other God-hating baby-killing commies want Harper to gently bring up the subject of a more comprehensive funding package for global maternal health at the G8 summit, specifically shma-shmor-tion. Harper won’t have any of that, no siree.

Ridiculousness: 3/10. Not so much ridiculous as… expected?

Winners: Christian fetuses.

#5: The Jays had to move a series to Philadelphia.

I can tell you just zoned out, because you’re a politics wonk and you haven’t read the name of a politician in the last 2 sentences and you care not for this “sports” balderdash of overgrown louts and barrel-chested hooligans trying to direct balls in a variety of directions in order to score points and prove their city’s squad is superior. Well, fuck you, this is my site, and I care about the Jays, and so do a half-dozen other people in the world, so THIS IS A SERIOUS DEAL, ALRIGHT? Since the Rogers Centre couldn’t be more centrally located within Toronto’s security perimeter, they – meaning some shadowy cabal who operate baseball, collectively known as “the man” – decided Toronto would play this “home” series in Philadelphia, robbing Toronto of a chance of seeing returning stud-muffin Roy “Doctor Perfect” Halladay. Actually I’ll just share this comic I made with you, since I made it, and – once again – it’s my siiiite, so I’ll put baseball jokes on it.

Didn’t care for that baseball humour, nope? Alright then! Ridiculousness of 5/10 and Winner:Roy Halladay (10th win of the season).

#6: Waaah, I’m so inconvenienced by it all

Hey everyone look at me, I’m a typical whiny downtown Torontonian and I complain constantly about my life being inconvenienced for a half-week, oh no they’re uprooting trees and the bank’s closed and Mirvish’s theatre productions are all canceled and now I can’t see Mamma Mia or take my dumb fat kids to Montessori because of the traffic jams and I’m sure I’ll see a scary protester from the balcony of my condo and oh my God they put up a security fence I’m going to blog about how Toronto has become Nazi Germany and I’m so darn inconvenienced by this half-week-long thing and SHUTUP SHUTUP SHUTUP

Ridiculousness: 0/10. You live in a big city. Sometimes big events happen in big cities and you have to alter your plans and then a week later they’re done and you can move on. Go blog about funny things your dumb cat did or something all of you yuppy jerkoffs, I’m tired of hearing about how 5 days of traffic jams will ruin your comfortable middle-class life.

Winners: Call-in radio shows in Toronto where morons vent about stuff, also anyone who was being forced into seeing “Mamma Mia” in a week and luckily had all of the Broadway shows in Toronto canceled.

#7: The company that’s putting up the fence in Toronto is called “Mammoth Erections” and there’s signs and trucks everywhere in Toronto that say “Mammoth Erections“.

Ahaha. Now THERE’S newsworthy journalism.

Amazingness: 10/10.

Winners: The childish and easily-amused. Probably you.

Your next Prime Minister, JACKEL LAYTIEFF!

The talk of Ottawa lately has been the tale of two star-crossed lovers, born to separate warring factions – a classic story of intrigue, conflict and bromance. What if the Armies of Orange, led by their resurgent mustachioed general, could put aside their weapons of battle and find common ground with their foe of generations past, the Empire of the Red L, and form an unholy bond forged by the very fires of Hades… and perhaps… find love?

No. No. It’s not going to happen.

There’ve been a number of columnists seemingly pressed for deadlines lately who’ve engaged in a bit of speculative fan-fiction about a centre-left merger in Canadian politics, perhaps as the only way to take down Harper. Not to mention that last week no less a character than Jean Chretien told the CBC that if a merger were do-able, the Liberals should do it. Iggy himself, for his part, has done his best to avoid comment – but has still made the flirty comment that a Liberal-NDP alliance government would be “legitimate”. With the Liberals just trying to tread water at this point and the NDP, despite their impressive barking, still being a small dog in this fight, a LibDP merger is the only way some people can get their calculators to add up to a majority government. Of course, the precedent for an unholy political alliance is fresh in the public’s memory after newly-minted Prime Minister David Cameron’s wheelings and dealings on Merry Olde Knifecrime Island.

So, who would win out if the Liberals were to form an unlikely (read: impossible) alliance with the NDP?

Well, the first winner would be dumb people! Take this Sun columnist – pretty much all Suns are the same drivel, the city isn’t important – who seems to be just itching to say “Heh, yeah, let those dirty commie bastards merge with those rotten Fiberals, eh-heh-heh, then we can tar them as the Marxists they are while diminishing the influence of those Goddamn poutine-sucking seperatist frogs!” Conservatives love the idea of a Liberal-NDP merger, because they see it as a step backwards for the Big Red Machine. Their unstoppable rival for over a century, now forced into taking on the baggage brought on-board by a motley crew of socialist hippies? Talk about Tory talking points!

The Liberals themselves had something of a similar fortunate windfall back in the 2004 election. With the newly-merged Conservative Party ready to take a serious crack at Martin, the Liberals were given ample munition in trying to turn off centrist voters by reminding them this wasn’t their daddy’s Progressive Conservatives anymore, this was the Refooooorm Party they’d be voting for. That’s a real anecdote, by the way – back in 2004 Liberal phone-jockies would call you up, and if you said you were voting Conservative, their scripted response was “You mean, you’re voting Reform?”

Aside from the bountiful Conservative talking points that a united left would provide, who else would benefit? Well… the Conservatives would benefit again, since all this merger talk makes the Liberals look weak. (Hey, how many times do I get to link-drop the Saskatoon Star Phoenix?)

Alright, what else would result from a Liberal-NDP merger? Uh, you, douchebag in the corner, I believe you had your hand up… sorry, did you just say this is exactly like the Slap Chop commercial? What? No. You don’t understand how metaphors work. You’re not allowed to talk anymore.

Alright, but the NDP are all on-board the idea of actually forming a government, right? No? They’re skeptical of the deal, and so are the Bloc? Oh.

So… what you’re saying is, the Liberals would look weak, the NDP don’t think it’ll happen, and the Conservatives would be the big winners?

But hey, it could still happen, right?

[SECOND SPOILER ALERT: No, it still really, really won't happen.]

When she sits around the palace, she sits AROUND the palace!

Happy Victoria Day, drunken Canadians! Victoria Day is a famous holiday invented a million years ago in Olde Englande – possibly the Victorian age, I’ll Wikipedia it later – to celebrate Queen Victoria, a frumpy fat lady (note: fat for the time period, by modern standards she’d wear a size Medium at Wal-Mart) who was Queen of Olde Englande And Her Majestic Vermin-Infested Colonies. She married her first cousin and plopped out 9 inbred kids, continuing a long tradition among British monarchs of fucking their relatives. She was so good at being incestuous and fat that we named a city full of smiling, colonial plump-faced white people in Ye Olde Britishe Columbiae after her. We also named a holiday in May after her, because Canadians salivate over the prospect of getting any possible day off from their miserable soul-crushing jobs.

Victoria Day is celebrated on the Monday that follows May 24, leading to the holiday being colloquially referred to as “May Two-Four”. This is a uniquely Canadian reference to a “Two-Four” case of beer, so named because counting into double digits is hard, eh.

Canadians honour the memory of Queen Victoria, the longest-serving monarch in British history, by waiting in traffic all day on Friday to get away from their suburban gated communities and into “nature”, a term which covers the 99.999%-odd percent of our nation’s land-mass that isn’t within the city limits of a city large enough to sustain an NHL franchise. Canadians often choose to observe Victoria Day by mooching off their buddy for 3 days because he’s got a cottage. Oh, it’s ok, you’re not mooching, you bought the guy some hot-crossed buns from the farmer’s market on the way in, and a case of whatever beer is on sale, Lake-something, sure, grab it.

Then you can celebrate our enduring British traditions and our country’s uniquely close bond to the Queen and to the Crown by getting drunk outdoors and sitting around a campfire as some asshole you knew from high school tries to remember the chords to a Tragically Hip song on the acoustic guitar he just happened to have. You suck back another beer and then decide it would be hilarious to jump into the lake, but it’s fucking freezing, because it’s Canada, and it’s only May. Then you drink some more and tell that story of the fat broad from Hamilton from the shallow end of the gene pool that you met at a bar in university – classic story – and in some whimsical, cosmic way, it’s as if Queen Victoria herself was taking her rightful throne in the storytelling of those young Canadians celebrating the day for which she was named in the country which she half-heartedly let us keep.

Long may she reign.

They see me rollin'. They hatin'.

Remember that Saved By The Bell episode where Zack falls in love with a handicapped chick, and then he does all this awkward grandstanding about how she’s different from everyone else, when really all she wanted was to be accepted – and everyone learns a valuable lesson? Of course you do, but just humour me by watching this clip anyways. Specifically the wheelchair basketball game which appears to be played in some sort of 7-foot wide hallway, where Zack slathers on the painful sitcom awkwardness by pointing out that the real star of the event is his handicapped girlfriend, who’s an actual cripple, not like them, who are just pretending for the day.

So that’s pretty much what all of your favourite MPs were doing today.

An all-star cast of MPs – Justin Trudeau, Peter Mackay, Olivia Chow, Martha Hall Findlay, John Rafferty and Nathan Cullen – were wheelin’ around Ottawa all day in rented wheelchairs. And by pretending to be crippled, handicapped, wheelchair-bound, in a wheelchair, persons using wheelchairs (thanks for the correction, John Rafferty, who apparently just read the diversity training handbook he got during university frosh week) they were… raising awareness about the real sad-sack people who don’t have the luxury of leaving their wheelchairs, just like 90s heartthrob Zack Morris was insensitively trying to explain after the basketball game!

You see, the only way to understand what it’s like to live in a wheelchair is to make a public spectacle out of yourself as you zoom around town in pimped-out wheels followed by photographers, hanging out with Paralympians and playing wheelchair rugby (with Justin blatantly cheating by sticking his leg out in the photo above, just like AC Slater did in the clip!) Y’know, they did normal disabled-person stuff. This is a perfectly normal thing to do, much like that time I wanted to know what it was like to live as a blind man so I decided to blindfold myself and just stumble into shit downtown for a day. Or the time I wanted to learn about irritable bowel syndrome, so I shit my pants – the only way I would ever understand.

Yeah, that’s all that happened today in Canada.

Sorry, “hockey”? Huh? What happened?