Clockwise from top-left: M.P. Peter MacKay (Conservative-Central Nova); Governor General Michaelle Jean; and M.P. Shark (Aquatic Predator Party-Atlantic Ocean) enjoy the rising political popularity of seal meat

What’s the hottest, safest political position for Ottawa politicians to take these days? “Support our troops”? “We gotta invest in our children”? “Help out Main Street, not Wall Bay Street”? “Job creation is our priority”?

Nope! The trendy position for hot politicians who want to be seen is “I fucking love seals getting their heads smacked with icepicks!”

We all know that Michaelle Jean grossed out the world by swallowing down a slimy serving of seal-heart sashimi, after which Peter MacKay, never one to be left out, tried some raw seal meat of his own. Now everyone in Ottawa wants a piece of the hottest accessory of the season, a splayed-out butchered seal carcass!

Pretty much every politician in Canada’s all aboard the seal hunt bandwagon. Considering the widespread criticism of the seal hunt across the country, let alone the world, you’d think there’d be some level of disagreement about it on the Hill, but in Ottawa saying you’re pro-seal hunt is such an empty, unanimously-held sentiment it’s like saying you’re pro-Hockey. (For the record, Your MapleRag is totally down with clobberin’ some seals, but we can at least see why it might be controversial!)

So, what was on the menu at Parliament Hill at a luncheon today held by Liberal Senator Celine Hervieux-Payette? Double-smoked, bacon-wrapped seal loin in a port reduction. That dish sounded so good until you got to the “seal” part.

You see, by all accounts seal meat is pretty much like eating hot garbage. It’s a dark, dry meat that smells like rancid fish and is so tough, gamey and chewy that you need an expert chef to mask (i.e. smother in bacon) the meat’s “uniqueness” to make it edible. Not to mention, the seal’s full of fat which is apparently so vile it’s inedible, and the things are crawling with parasites (not unlike MPs themselves).

But hold the phone! Not everyone’s on-board with this edition of Fear Factor: Ottawa Edition! Liberal Senator Mac Harb is the lone voice against the seal hunt in Ottawa, which makes him a favourite whipping-boy of Conservatives. Look what was said in an internal memo to Tories from the PM’s office!

“Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff claims to support the seal hunt but is attempting to play both sides of the issue. In these challenging economic times Ignatieff’s Liberals are playing politics with Canadian families who depend on the hunt for their livelihoods.”

Oh what the fuck. Really? There’s one lousy senator in the entire Liberal party who’s anti-sealing, which is somehow Michael Ignatieff’s fault? And it somehow makes him “playing politics” to have ONE GUY – some useless senator, no less! – who has an original opinion? But hey, it’s the Tories, they can say ridiculous shit like “Michael Ignatieff doesn’t keep his senators on a leash, and therefore he kills impoverished Newfoundlanders” and get away with it, it’s not like any Liberal’s gonna grow a backbone and stand up to th-….. whaaaaa?

“Following the same logic,” a senior Ignatieff official told The Globe, “if Stephen Harper truly believed in airport security, he would have fired Helena Guergis?”

HOLY SHIT! A CHALLENGER APPEARS! Some random Liberal’s here to lay some fuckin’ SMACKDOWN!

“If Stephen Harper really believed in restraint, he would have sent Jim Flaherty walking to the Tim Hortons on Slater [Street in Ottawa, near Parliament Hill] rather than flying in a government plane to London. Should I go on?”

OH NO! NO! HE DID NOT JUST GO THERE! Whoever the fuck this Senior Official is, they’d better be dishing out ointment for all of these BURNS! YES, PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, GO ON!

“Oh, while we’re at it,” the Ignatieff official said, “if Stephen Harper was really ‘tough on crime,’ would he not direct his Minister of Justice to contest Mr. Jaffer’s unbelievably light sentence?”

OH SHIT! HE! WENT! THERE!

Whoever this mystery Senior Official is, they have GIGANTIC SWINGING BRASS BALLS! Why is this Mystery Senior Official not Prime Minister yet?!

It’s now our goal to find out, WHO IS THE SENIOR OFFICIAL GONE WILD?

Our guess is, obviously, Cute From Behind Chick.

[Globe: PMO harpoons Liberal division on seal hunt]

[Globe: Seal on the menu for parliamentarians]

Deleted scene from "Helena & Rahim Go To White Castle"

Former Conservative MP and husband of Helena “Happy Fucking Birthday” Guergis is reportedly recovering in the hospital, nursing lacerations to his lower hand after receiving a VICIOUS slap on the wrist from Ontario courts!

Jaffer, you’ll remember, was busted last year for plowing through a village with a 50 KM/h speed limits doing 93 clicks, being pulled over, being drunk, and for possessing some sort of magical white nose-candy. Drunk driving, possession of a narcotic, oh boy, this guy’s DONE! He’s headed for the big house! Send my regards to the guards at Kingston Pen, buddy! He- wait, what?

Oh right, he’s a famous politician! He got a careless driving charge and had to pay 500 bucks. Your courts hard at work!

Jaffer, a staunch anti-drug activist, somehow got the more-serious coke charges dropped. Either he successfully argued that he didn’t have possession (”Ossifer, I schwear, tha’ss not mai coke… *hic*”) or maybe the cops found it on an illegal search, which invalidates the charge. Or maybe he just snorted the whole baggy up right in front of the cops, and slurred “Where’z yer evidenthse nowwww, CSI: Palgrave, Ontario?” Or maybe he’s just a rich well-connected asshole and the rules don’t apply to him.

With Bill C-15 being pushed through, the bullshit mandatory drug-sentences law that the Tories love so much they stacked the Senate just to get it through, it looks like Rahim’s dealer’s gonna get a mandatory minimum year in jail. Rahim, of course, voted to support the bill in its earlier form when he was still in office.

“I’m sure you can recognize a break when you see one” the judge told Mr. Jaffer.

Did the court reporter note that the judge then gave an overdramatic “wink, wink” motion while rubbing his fingers together to signify “money”?

His lawyer, Howard Rubel said: “What Mr. Jaffer did was drive without paying attention to how fast he was going.”

He then failed to mention “Oh yeah, and he was totally shitfaced hammered, he was so drunk the cops could smell the booze on his breath, and, yeah, they also found a shitload of cocaine in the car, which my client occasionally enjoys in his nasal area. But really, the main charge here was speeding. The big silly goofball’s just a bit lead-footed on the gas, that’s all! Probably one of those fuckin’ Toyotas.”

Anyways, the real reason the charges were dropped is because Helena Guergis kicked down the courtroom doors halfway through proceedings, screaming like a banshee, jumped off the attorney’s desk and gave a flying elbow-drop to the bailiff while screaming “HAPPY FUCKING BIRTHDAY”, before beating the crown attorney senseless with the gavel and threatening to bite the judge’s face until they arrived at the verdict of a reduced sentence.

[Story: Globe]

UPDATE: Liberal MP Anita Neville brought up Rahim Jaffer during Question Period today, and SHIT GOT REAL! Anita passive-aggressively baited the Tories into responding in some way to one of their own getting a slap on the wrist, after which the Tories demanded an apology, banged their desks and shook their jowls in blustery rage, and Neville was pretty much like, “What, I’m not apologizing, it’s not my fault Rahim Jaffer’s a corrupt cokehead”, which led to more shoutiness and the Speaker having to say “Order” no less than 19 times to shut ‘em up. That should be a new CPAC drinking game: drink when the Speaker calls for order! (Note: MapleRag is not responsible for your upcoming alcohol poisoning.)

Hey, 'dja hear about this?

I was going to write a SERIOUS BUDGET RESPONSE, like everyone else’s doing, but that just wouldn’t suit our… style. Instead, here’s this.

On Monday, two older men – their hair graying, their eyes full of doe-eyed innocence – stepped back in front of the cameras with their finest suits freshly dry-cleaned, ready to return to work after a long time away from their famous desk. They’d taken a controversial break that had been panned by the media in order to get a fresh start at their job. In fact, they’re both hated by the media, and it seems most people you talk to hate them. But somewhere out there, a slight majority of the country – the quiet,  white, middle-aged, Wal-Mart shopping masses – admire this man.

One of them was Jay Leno returning to the Tonight Show he abandoned. One of them was Stephen Harper returning to the Parliament he prorogued.

Yes, we’re comparing the Prime Minister to Jay Leno. This ain’t exactly The Economist you’re reading, bub.

In each case, these were beleaguered public figures who would be trying to regain public sympathy after their controversial breaks from the spotlight. Jay Leno was condemned publicly for what seemed like his bullying, nonchalant attitude towards Conan O’Brien, the man whose job he was taking, and for a series of uninspired TV spots that did nothing to apologize for, or even mention, the controversy at hand. Harper had been at the Olympics, and was publicly condemned for his bullying, nonchalant attitude towards Parliamentary procedure, and for hiding behind the Canadian flag for 2 weeks at the Olympics while failing to apologize for, or even mention, the prorogation.

All eyes were on their return, waiting to hear the material they’d prepared in their off-time. For Jay, it would be his first week back – his monologues, his interviews, his general demeanor – people needed to know that he was worthy of the Tonight Show, they wanted him to prove he still had it, that during all of this two month-long bullshit he’d been preparing material to blow us away. For Harper, it would be the throne speech and budget – two long-awaited announcements that had been stored away during prorogation, people needed to know that work had been accomplished during the vacation and needed to have their needs met by a government with shaky confidence levels.

In each case, they dropped the ball.

Jay Leno... Stephen Harper... Jayphen Leper? Fitting surname.

To call Jay Leno’s first show back “underwhelming” would be like calling a root canal without anesthetic  “less than desirable.” In his first monologue back, he plodded through material that was so stale and so far past its best-before date, even a broke college student would throw it out of their fridge.  Dick Cheney jokes, Paris Hilton jokes – tired, beaten dead horses, the type of thing you can watch without even cracking a smile, as if your cheeks muscles are atrophied and paralyzed from the same awful, predictable punchlines. But for Leno, it was safe – he was just doing what he’d always done, re-packaging the same jokes he’s told for 15 years, why the fuck should he change a routine that works when he’s the top-rated man in late night? Stephen Harper also chose to play it safe. He came out with a budget that was met with collective underwhelmed groans. He didn’t take any risks, he didn’t come out from his vacation with new, fresh material – he did what he knew, which was a budget heavy on talk of belt-tightening, nothing new for social programs or the environment or students, a few token tax cuts, a few loopholes tightened. The budget was released with a whimper, clouded by a country still wearing patriotic red-and-white Olympic goggles and a brilliant diversion in the form of the O Canada “debate”.

Of course, each man has his critics. Notably, the media loathes each of them, calling them egomaniacs and control-freaks, caricaturing them as second-rate stuffed-suits trying to fill a huge desk. They’ve also got real critics in the form of opposition who wants to take their job. There’s one guy who’s particularly a real thorn in their side – a sharp-tongued intellectual-type who gets derided himself for being too erratic, too peculiar for the mainstream.

Call him David Letterman, or call him Michael Ignatieff.

Each were brutal with their criticisms leading up to this week. Letterman lampooned Leno as a self-serving hack in a series of heartfelt monologues, all of this coming from a man who still bitterly remembers that Leno stole his job. Ignatieff was vicious in his attacks on Harper over proroguing parliament, calling him a self-serving hack with disdain for Parliament, all of this coming from a man who’s bitter that Harper still has the job he wants.

The most vicious of all of them, though, has been the third-wheel. The late-comer to the party who can risk being inflammatory and hostile since, being outside of the main two-man fray, they’ve got nothing to lose. Call him Jimmy Kimmel, or call him Jack Layton. Kimmel, you’ll remember, got so pissed-off that he decided to do an entire show as Jay Leno. The NDP, meanwhile, are letting all the attack dogs out over the budget – right now the NDP.ca website has a graphic saying that there’s $5 billion exclusively for TAX BREAKS for BANKS and BIG OIL (not true, but, meh) with a picture of some horrid old fat cat smoking a big cigar, right beside a graphic for $0 FOR FIGHTING CLIMATE CHANGE coupled with a picture of a kid sucking on an asthma inhaler, the implication being Stephen Harper wants to kill your asthmatic kid by somehow poisoning the air, which has nothing to do with global warming, but damn, that’s some good inflammatory rhetoric right there!

Then Gilles Duceppe is George Lopez. You’re forgiven for completely forgetting about either one’s existence. They only appeal to a minority making up about a fifth of their countries – Quebecois and American hispanics, respectively – but within that seemingly narrow demographic they do big business, which translates into bafflingly surprising results (Lopez Tonight averages 1 million+ viewers and occasionally beats shows like Kimmel and Colbert, while the Bloc somehow has 48 seats.) Anyways, no one gives a shit about what either George Lopez or Gilles Duceppe have to say.

And, uh…. I guess the Green Party is Carson Daly or something? Enough with the opposition comparisons, this is getting silly.

So what was the substance of Harper’s big comeback? It was pretty much as thin and predictable as a Leno monologue. If you look at the talking points listed on the Conservative website, it’s pretty much the equivalent of telling the same old Monica Lewinsky and OJ Simpson jokes. Job creation. Hard-working Canadians. Ignatieff’s a tax-and-spend liberal. Carbon tax. Strengthening our economy. Conservative leadership. The same ancient punchlines, told without any of the storytelling flair. The same tired gimmicks, the same joke routines, the same ba-dum-tschh! of sidekick Flaherty on drums after each joke delivery.

Let’s see how their ratings go.

-Matt

Hey Americans, how do you like our national anthem? You might've heard it in Vancouver, about 14 times.

A new trend is sweeping the nation: contemporary music with increasingly sexist themes is being heard from coast to coast, and little is being done about it. A hit song called “O Canada”, written by Quebecois rapper Calixa Lavallee in 1880, is spreading its message of sexist hatred across the nation. This song’s vulgar message was reportedly omnipresent during the recent Winter Olympics, and is now even in our public schools. I’ll give you a taste of this song’s misogynistic, sexist nonsense, but don’t say I didn’t warn you:

“True patriot love / In all thy sons command”

Filth. Luckily, OUTRAGE IS BREWING!

The Parliament’s going to “consider” doing “research through a Parliamentary committee” to see whether or not, maybe, there’s a possibility, that lyrics changes could be considered, to something more inclusive like “In all of us command”. In other words, nothing’s happening, and nothing’s going to happen. Stop frothing at the mouth about preserving our proud heritage, crazy-eyed National Post columnists ready to pounce. There’s probably no story here, considering that the idea of changing the anthem lyrics to be more inclusive is about 3 decades old by now, and nothing’s changed yet.

But still, let’s all get outraged!

Alright, who can we get to serve up some outrage… how ’bout, maybe a University professor, tee up a talking point, aaaand… here’s one now!

“The national anthem should reflect its population and Canada consists of 51 per cent women.” – Adele Mercier, Queen’s University Prof

[Now play this sound clip]

Hold up a minute, you mean there’s WOMEN in this country? When did THIS happen?

(You guys know that later on it says “God”, right? Like, in the same song? I mean, I don’t want to get you too worked up.)

Alright, this is a dumb, ancient argument, it’s the sort of thing they probably made junior high debate teams argue about in the 80s because (a) people get really fucking worked up about it for some reason, and (b) both sides always win, since if you’re anti-lyric-change you’re a rational sexist, but if you’re pro-change you’re irrational but inclusive.

I’ll outline all your possible dumb, smug-faced arguments, rating their validity on a scale of Smug Emoticons, represented as:

#1: ARGUMENT: Changing the anthem disrespects our country’s history and traditions. Actually, chump, the anthem’s already changed lyrics as late as the 60s, which is why old people look confused when they’re singing the anthem, because they still remember the old version (with a couple extra verses of “We stand on guard”, or something) they learned as kids. Plus, it’s debatable what the original English lyrics were anyways, and the English lyrics are just an awkward copy of the original French. It’s not exactly a firmly-grounded historical landmark of our people, is what I’m sayin’.

ARGUMENT STRENGTH:

#2: ARGUMENT: A sexist national anthem reflects poorly on our country. Here’s a news flash: other than seventh-graders doing geography assignments on foreign countries, no one gives a shit about anyone else’s national anthems. You probably only know the US anthem from watching too much American sports, you know the tune of the badass Soviet-era Russian anthem, and maybe the British anthem as an imperial throwback. If you’re a real trivia buff, you might know a couple other countries’ anthems, with that information stored in the “interesting nonsense that might come up on Jeopardy” cortex of your brain. As you heard at the Olympics, a lot of countries have some truly awful-sounding anthems too, and pretty much all of them have outdated, embarrassing lyrics. The American anthem’s an unsingable drinking-shanty about the British bombing the shit out of Baltimore (if you’ve been to Baltimore lately, you’d probably think the bombing wasn’t so long ago.) The British anthem’s a tune so stuffy and old-fashioned that the only nouns in the first verse are “God” and “Queen”, two concepts the British are increasingly apathetic about. In short, no, the world doesn’t care about our anthem, since they probably have a worse one.

ARGUMENT STRENGTH:

#3: ARGUMENT: If we start giving in to these fringe political-correctness types, what’s next? Easy, National Post columnist. There’s no slippery slope here. Even if you let the feminists win the anthem-lyrics battle (SPOILERS: they won’t), it won’t lead to some topsy-turvy ultra-PC country of your hyperbolic nightmares. Broads already got the vote. Your “If we let them change O Canada, WHAT’S NEXT” schtick is about as strong a point as American wingnuts saying “If we let gays marry, then we’ll have to allow polygamy and bestiality and incest and statutory rape!” No you wouldn’t, you walking First-Year-Psychology-course-lecture-on-logical-fallacies.

ARGUMENT STRENGTH:

#4: ARGUMENT: Harper’s just doing this as political posturing to appeal to female voters. Yeah, probably. But fuck, could you imagine a more miscalculated strategy? Your “base” is white, middle-aged male traditionalists, and you’re considering talking about changing our country’s national anthem to be more feminist? But you’re right, this is definitely some political shit right here: Harper’s basically trying to call the opposition’s bluff here. “Hey Iggy, you guys are all about that feminist junk, you wanna change the national anthem? No? Well, you’re sexist, because we’re considering doing it. Oh wait, you do now? Way to alienate average Canadians, we weren’t actually gonna do it!”

ARGUMENT STRENGTH:

#5: ARGUMENT: They’re not gonna change the thing, because it’d be a huge pain in the ass. THANK YOU, you’re making sense now! You’re right, it would be a gigantic PR mess to try to change a national anthem that we all have implanted in our minds. They’d have to waste all this money changing documents and putting out press releases, and there’d be a huge opposition who just say “fuck it we’ll keep singing it the old way”. We’re a stubborn nation by default, and we don’t like messin’ around with the norm – whether it be getting bent out of shape about Peter Mansbridge standing at his desk, or Torontonians still calling their concrete baseball-toilet “Skydome” after a good half-decade of it having a different name. Our stubborn laziness trumps all other arguments. Yeah, the anthem’s not as ideally inclusive of women and non-Christians as it could be. But it’s not that people don’t care about the plight of women. We’re just lazy. Your Female Editor, and every other ovary-bearing human I polled about this topic, agreed – the prevailing sentiment being “fuck it, I’m not relearning the song lyrics at this point, and no one else wants to either.”

ARGUMENT STRENGTH:

Well, that settles it.

Our national anthem’s sexist.

But, at the risk of presenting an oxymoron, our collective apathy is near-militant in its enthusiasm.

[Article: Globe]

This is a Serious Politics hat. SHE'S SERIOUS ABOUT POLITICS, LIKE US.

WELCOME BACK, POLITICS! We missed you! Our Olympic break was fun, though, we got to post all sorts of silly things as the OFFICIAL CANADIAN™ POLITICS BLOG OF THE VANCOUVER™ 2010™ OLYMPICS™, writing about sexy curlers and acid flashbacks and Nickelback, but now we have to put our Serious Hat back on to make Serious Posts about the adult matter of Politics, which apparently just returned to Ottawa!

Also, Roll Up The Rim started again, in terms of national breaking news we have to report. So go forth and suck back a cup of warm, cream-diluted, African-inventin’ burnt patriotism and half-heartedly slip the slimy lid up until you see “RÉESSAYEZ S.V.P.” before continuing with one smooth motion into the trashbin toss.

Hey, remember Canadian Against Proroguing Parliament? Of course you do, you’re probably a damn member of the thing. If you’re still too old to be using Facebook (an age barrier which creeps upward by the day – it currently sits around 38), then you’ve at least heard about this group, since it’s been filling column spaces, creating blog buzz and was probably even mentioned on CTV Newsnet, to the delight of all 17 people who watch that channel. (Edit: I actually checked Wikipedia, and apparently the channel’s now called CTV News Network, and has been called that for like half a year – what the Lisa LaFuck?) This Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament Facebook group was a big deal, see, because it was supposed to usher in some new era of grassroots political involvement across the country. Political involvement, social media, today’s youth, grassroots, new media, web 2.0, et-fucking-cetera.

These people met on Facebook, and then met up in the real world without supervision? Did they learn nothing about internet safety from Bert & Gert?

Back in February the Facebook group actually did stage something of a coup, when their 200,000+ members managed to actually translate into something happening in the real world! 15,000-odd people showed up for rallies/parades across the country to protest the proroguing. As we all know by now, Stephen Harper listened, and decided not to prorogue parliament Yeah, not much happened, but from the sounds of the media coverage, this was just the tip of the iceberg as this Facebook group was supposedly brewing a political revolution across the country – like the American Tea Baggers, except without the fat, racist, pill-addled Walmart-greeter wingnuts in Confederate flag-Snuggies.

All this media coverage got to the heads of the organizers of the Facebook group. You see, people start shitty Facebook groups all the time – I just performed a quick search, and there are no less than 1,600 Facebook groups with the sole purpose of calling Justin Bieber gay – but when your group takes off virally, you can get an inflated sense of self-worth. When 225,000 people join your group, you get the idea that this wasn’t just thousands of people mindlessly clicking “Accept” when their uncle sent them an invite – this is 225,000 followers of my movement! I’m a leader of a grassroots revolution of a quarter-million Canadians!

Of course, you’re not. You’re a guy who made a Facebook group. The Facebook fan page “Running downstairs on Christmas morning and realizing you’re Jewish” has over 200,000 fans, too. “Back in my day vampires sucked blood, not cocks” has in the ballpark of 200,000 fans. “The Norwegian Olympic Curling Team’s Pants” boasts over 600,000, while “Realizing you borrowed the pen you’re sticking in your mouth” dwarfs the CAPP group with over 800,000 fans. “Flipping the pillow over to get to the cold side” has a whopping 3.5 million fans. That doesn’t make any of these into mobilized, sweeping political movements. It makes them Facebook groups. What the media hasn’t realized is that having 225,000 people in a Facebook group doesn’t mean that 225,000 active members are working towards any kind of end goal, just like there isn’t a massive 3.5-million-strong political party based on the principles of pillow-flipping sweeping the world. It just means that a bunch of people vaguely felt something, so they clicked “Accept” when they got a group invite, and then probably never checked the group page but hoped that their membership would make some sort of intangible difference in the world.

Long story short – as the Globe&Fail reports, the CAPP Facebook group, which has apparently begun taking itself way too seriously and has somehow raised ten-grand (yes, in real dollars, we’ve left the realm of Facebook make-believe) is trying to turn itself into some sort of legitimate political movement.

HOLD ON, it gets funnier I promise.

They’ve kept their CAPP acronym by changing their name from Canadian Against Proroguing Parliament to the more stilted-sounding Canadians Advocating Political Participation. (A completely unrelated aside: my alma mater did that too! It was called Waterloo Lutheran University, and they were all, hey, our school’s not Lutheran anymore, but we wanna keep the WLU initials, so, uhhh… thinkin’…. how bout… fucking GOT IT. Wilfrid, Laurier, University. Nailed it. True story, I swear!) Anyways they’ve put together a website at canadaparticipates.ca. Honestly, look at the site, and think about how the Globe wrote a whole article about this thing, and about how it started as a Facebook group, and there’s ten-thousand dollars floating around somewhere to pay for this stuff. Ok, that’s a little funny already, but in a sad-funny way, like watching a fat figure skater falling.

The first event ever put together by the new CAPP? Some comical silliness they called the Not So Secret Democracy Mission. Alright, I’m just gonna post their mission statement, it’s too funny on its own. Read this in the voice of a little kid who’s dressed up in a suit and making his voice all low to sound super-duper-serious:

“On January 23, 2010, we showed up in tens of thousands in over 60 communities in Canada.

This time, we’ll show up with even more.

On March 2, 2010, the last day of prorogation, Mr. Harper will be under the impression that we’ve all forgotten about his evildoing. Care to show him that not only do we still remember…that not only are we still ANGRY…but that WE WILL NEVER FORGET!

[...] THIS IS A MISSION THAT WILL GO DOWN IN CANADIAN HISTORY.”

They helpfully also mention that they “do NOT condone violence”. Oh, thank God! I thought for a second your top-secret campaign to single-handedly change the course of Canadian democracy was going to involve just kneecappin’ suckers with crowbars at Tim Hortons. Turns out, it just involves them making a budget Youtube video, and you watching that Youtube video, and, if you wouldn’t mind, making a video response so the original video gets more popular, pretty please? Seriously. This was their event that they thought would go down in Canadian history.

Alright, fuck, here’s the dumb video in question, shot with some Ryerson film studies major’s Handicam, set to the dulcet tones of “Default Windows Movie Maker Sound Files > Emotional Piano.mp3″, which features people saying stuff for a minute while somehow also saying nothing:

So what was the point of the top-secret-mission if this whole “event” was just the launch of a bland Youtube video with a cast of nameless, multiethnic people saying bumper-sticker slogans across Toronto? Back to the mission description:

On that day, we encourage EVERY SINGLE PERSON WHO SEES IT TO POST A VIDEO RESPONSE. In that fashion we hope that we can “hijack” YouTube and become the most discussed/watched video for that day. You can even post video responses TO video responses!

So when’s that day coming up? It was Tuesday. As in, yesterday. How’d that Youtube hijacking go for them? Did they bring the Internet to a crawl with their medium-shattering anarchist takeover of Youtube?

The Facebook group advertising the event had over 700 people saying they’d attend. When the big day came, they got four video responses.

Four.

To summarize: One of many Facebook groups pop up to protest proroguing parliament. One of them gets more popular than the others. People in the media, specifically dumb people, somehow interpret this as a call-to-arms of a political revolution. The Globe writes about how they’re the next generation of political involvement. The organizers, believing all the hype, become a foundation fighting against political apathy, and on their big launch date, with the backing of media attention, they attempt to hijack Youtube by flooding the system with video responses. They get four.

MapleRag is official launching the campaign to fight the growing trend of apathy towards groups that fight apathy.

[Globe article]

[CAPP website]

[CAPP's Fail-video]

If there's a better way to show your gravitas as a political leader than by acting like a piss-drunk prep-squad cheerleader, I don't know it

And as John Ferguson takes to the mic, honestly, all I have to say: “WELL, YOU ASKED FOR MORE FUCKING FRENCH, YOU GOT IT!” It seems cruel to rip this guy more since everyone on the continent has already ridiculed his offensively bad thrashing of the French language. It started with “Bomb Sawyer” for “Bon Soir” and went downhill from there. I was making an odd mixture of a giggle and a groan anytime a word of mimicked pidgin-french dribbled out of his lips.

We’re talking worse than Reform Party-level french.

Then he did a whole bunch of painfully awkward back-patting patriotism, including a forced “eh”, a word which none of us actually use unless we’re trying to seem drunk and harmless to Americans.

He said that athletes were the “wind beneath his wings“, without a hint of irony or anything that would forgive using such a hackneyed line.

He was trying to explain that Canadians were the most humble, polite people on Earth. Then he went on about how Canada is the best fucking country ever, and bragged about how we won at hockey. (Reminder: this is the official address to the planet after the Olympic closing ceremonies, not Coach’s Corner I’m describing.)

Then Jacques Rogge tried to pretend that he hadn’t just watched all of that butchery of the beautiful French tongue, and called the Vancouver games…. the best ever? Not quite. But “excellent, and very friendly games.” Jesus. Them’s fightin’ words.

And then, amid groans of “awww”, the games were closed. That’s it. The Olympics were done. Nothing to watch on your couch in your pyjamas. No more biathlon terminology to learn. No more Brian Williams telling you the current time in the Eastern time zone. No more goddamn “I Believe”. It’s over.

…

And now, LET THE INSANITY BEGIN!

PART 6: Heart of Gold

Hey hey, my my. Sidney Crosby can never die.

NEIL FUCKING YOUNG came out. NEIL. YOUNG. Anyways, he managed to keep the crowd’s attention using only the power of a harmonica, a guitar and a couple of monitors better than any million-dollar choreographed dancing-maple-leaf routine.

Then the torch went out, and he disappeared into the mysterious floor to hang out with Catriona Le May Doan and a mime.
If you’d have turned off your TV at that moment, you would’ve been treated to the perfect closing ceremonies.

But you didn’t, did you?

Part 7: CanCon regulations kick in.

Words can’t describe how awkward the next segment was. Basically, three famous Canadian actors of the 80s came out and did schtick from the Molson “I Am Canadian” ad. No seriously, the exact same stuff, excepting beating slightly-different dead-horses with the Canada jokes! The sort of stuff that would make you cringe if you heard these jokes told at a high school commencement, let alone the Olympics.

William Shatner talked about having sex in canoes. No, seriously. William Shatner, from Star Trek, talked about fucking, in a canoe. At the Olympic Winter Games Closing Ceremonies. Is this the best, or worst thing ever? It’s probably one or the other.

Catherine O’Hara – y’know, the mom from Home Alone? – told a bunch of Canada jokes that fell flat, but her old-lady cleavage made up for any flatness that might have occured. Her routine started with a cute curling sequence, got kind of awkwardly passive-aggressive, threw around some jokes that reached their pinnacle of popularity in the mid-40s (guests are like fish, they stink after a few days, HAW HAW GET IT, gotta send that one to Leno), and then she disappeared after telling what may be the Olympics’ first pee-pee joke.

And then MICHAEL J. FOX, who’s awesome, got stuck with some more beer-commercial patriotic schtick, the poor bastard.

Part 8: Oh my fuck what the fucking fuck, FUCK, what the FUCK

I haven't seen a beaver that big since my date with Rita MacNeil

I CAN’T EVEN DESCRIBE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT. It would take WAY too long and WAY too many ridiculous adjectives.

MICHAEL BUBLE ON A HAT SINGING “MAPLE LEAF FOREVER”, INFLATABLE BEAVERS, SEXY MAPLE LEAF GIRLS, GIANT TABLE HOCKEY PLAYERS, SEXY MOUNTIES, FLYING MOOSE. It was like you took all the drugs in the world and watched a documentary about Canadian stereotypes.

CTV helpfully explained that Canada was “taking the piss”, you see, that this segment was meant to lightheartedly examine Canadian stereotypes. I have a feeling all of the other telecasts watching around the world didn’t get that memo, and now actually think Canada is a land of, well, over-Canadianness. I’ve never seen an Olympics do such a massive inside joke intended only for the home country. Could you imagine if the Beijing Closing Ceremonies were just a bunch of shout-outs to Chinese soap opera stars and regional inside-jokes that no one else on Earth got?

Also, a note from the Maclean’s liveblog about the song choice of “Maple Leaf Forever”: “It’s a great, great song — but isn’t it banned? “Wolfe the dauntless hero came?” Bloc MPs, to your microphones!”

The only thing that could’ve topped it on the CanCon scale would be if the Trailer Park Boys came out and just started telling every country there to fuck off.

Y’know the over-the-top musical number at the end of Producers, “Springtime for Hitler”? It was that, but with Canada instead of Nazis.

Part 9: SERIOUSLY?!

I then proceeded to predict pretty much all the big Canadian musical acts that would come up next. I was just kidding, of course – “oh, haha, what’s next, Simple Plan…. oh fffffu-AREYOUSERIOUS”, and just like that they popped up in a row like the Junos on acid. Meanwhile, athletes danced around on the floor, and quietly left through the exit which happened to be placed right below the stage, giving everyone an embarrassing view of athletes filtering out early.

NICKELBACK AND AVRIL LAVIGNE. ARE YOU SERIOUS.

LOOK AT THIS PHOTOGRAPH. EVERY TIME I DO IT MAKES ME LAUGH.

I actually joked before the ceremonies that this would be who would show up, but I learned a powerful lesson: never underestimate the mind-fuck factor of the Vancouver organizing committee. As a sidenote, both of these acts have huge followings in non-English-speaking countries for some reason, so all the Eastern European  teenagers who make up the bulk of Olympic athletes were eating it up.

FUN FACT: this is where NBC actually cut away from their coverage to show the unwatchable reality show The Marriage Ref, which will be canceled in about 4 weeks. Seriously, right as Nickelback came on-stage they decided to cut the Closing Ceremonies in half – the Closing Ceremonies of the Olympics they paid HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS to cover – and they put an absolutely awful-looking reality show premiere right in the middle of it. Thank God every day that as a good Canadian, you get fantastic Olympic coverage on a plethora of channels and not comical NBC bullshit. Then again, they cut away from Nickelback, so maybe they had the right idea.

Anyways, then you had Alanis with her boobs almost coming out of her dress, there was Simple Plan struggling in an uphill fight for relevance, then… Hedley? Jesus, Hedley, really? No Tragically Hip? No motherfucking RUSH?

Honestly, I’d make fun of all of this shitty music in great detail, but I’m mentally exhausted. After every act, I just burst out laughing. SERIOUSLY, HEDLEY’S HERE? I just had no words left.

Canada had truly trolled the world by this point.

And, uh… there was some French faux-metal crap, Marie Mai or something, and K-Os, who’s awesome, but then there was some acid-washed b-boying, and fireworks, when suddenly…

It’s over.

Wait, what?

It’s OVER? It’s just DONE? One second, you had a breakdancer headspinning, and then, thennn… “Thanks for coming?” I mean, an anticlimactic ending is one thing, but at least it’s an ending of some sort. This didn’t even have an ending, it just… fizzled out! The fizzling is really the perfect ending for the perfect practical joke. This entire 3-hour affair was one long shaggy-dog story.

Was the goal to play increasingly bad music to test the limits of the athlete’s patience until they finally just decided to leave? I mean, making a captive audience watch Hedley is dropping a pretty big hint, like the host saying “boooy, sure is getting late” to the guest lying on his couch.

Welcome to Canada, world.

You got trolled.

I’m pretty sure Canada just trolled the world.

Sit back and think about what just happened. Our nation was given the task of putting together a 3-hour extravaganza to satisfy the varied tastes of a diverse planet.

We produced a series of bizarre inside jokes, shoulder-patting shout-outs, unintentional comedy and Avril Lavigne.

I’m convinced this was some sort of entirely-intentional form of prankery. It was Andy Kaufman via Kids In The Hall. We took the millenia-old Olympian tradition, the largest media and sporting event on earth, and turned it into what Royal Canadian Air Farce might have come up with for a “Canadian stereotypes” sketch in their unfunny years. All coated in a Velveeta-cheesy sheen of beer-commercial patriotic schtick, with a revolving door of “special guests” like a 70s variety show, and a series of moments that left a bewildered planet asking: seriously, what the fuck is up with Canada?

PART ONE: The Greatest Thing Ever.

Honestly, this was the most perfect thing ever done by anyone. Everyone I’ve talked to loved it. It made up for the Opening Ceremonies on its own, and was the perfect start to the show.

Couldn't they have gotten Red Green to fix the damn ice-penis thing with some duct tape?

If you missed it, they had the three ice-penises of the cauldron up, with the elusive broken fourth one still down. After some sparks and flying machinery, a mime (hey, they said they wanted more Quebecois content) pops out, plugs it in, Catriona Le May Doan comes out of a hole, and they light the thing. It was delightfully self-effacing humour. Only Canada could get away with starting their Closing Ceremonies by making fun of their Opening Ceremonies. Whoever thought it up should get a raise.

PART TWO: Early signs of trouble.

Some band I’ve never heard of called “Inward Eye” show up, seeming like a budget version of a U2 cover band, singing a song with lyrics that seemed to entirely consist of the words “Whoooaaooaoaoa, Vancouver.” Meanwhile, a bunch of high school student did a choreographed running-around sequence, with snowboards. It actually looked pretty cool, but after the lock-step Communist precision of Beijing, anything involving humans moving simultaneously will look like a sloppy, haphazard orgy.

Then they trooped in the Native chiefs, with their silly, fanciful Indian names like “Bill Williams”, along with Harper (SEE, I JUST REFERENCED A CANADIAN POLITICIAN, you can’t claim I don’t write enough about politics on this “politics blog”) and Gordon Campbell, who was fucking embarrassing the whole time. I mean, I get it, we won at hockey today, it’s exciting, you’re probably still drunk, but you’re a PREMIER, and you’re on WORLDWIDE TELEVISION. Don’t stand up and wave a gigantic flag you somehow smuggled into the VIP box inches away from the faces of foreign dignitaries, you look like an ass.

Then a bunch of Kidz Bop drop-outs mimed and force-smiled their way through an agonizing sugary-sweet upbeat version of O Canada, which at least wasn’t as bad as the arrangement at the Opening Ceremonies, but wasn’t as good as, say, the actual arrangement, the way the song always fucking goes.

PART THREE: There’s athletes at the Olympics?

Then they marched out all of the athletes in a confused huddle, with Canada looking sharp in vintage caribou-adorned knit sweatervests, and Germany looking like neon LSD vomit.

Joannie was our flag-bearer, because… y’know.

John Morris was there too. <3 <3 <3

After we watched all the athletes slowly shuffle their way to their seats after having pointed their camera-phone at every possible physical direction, we got a pretty painful musical number. Nikki “Overstayed your welcome, kid” Yanofsky, some chick who I’m told [by my mom] was a winner of the canceled show Canadian Idol, and a dude who I’ve never heard of badly pretending to play guitar. (I was informed by the NBC telecast that he was Native, so… what, I’m not suggesting that, he was there just because he… I mean, I’m sure he’s a great… just that, with the…) They droned through the sort of Up-With-People pop drivel that appeals to no one of any age, and THEN THE PARTY STARTED.

PART Я: IN SOVIET RUSSIA, OLYMPICS CLOSE YOU!

Must... crush... capitalism...

Just to make Canada’s sloppiness look bad, we got treated to Glorious Mother Russia coming out to annihilate all of our brains with a precise, choreographed, sensory-overloading preview of Sochi 2014. A choir came out to sing what seemed like the 25-minute extended-cut remix of the Russian national anthem, which is a spine-tingling tune if there ever was one. Then, as Mounties raised the Russian flag over Canadian soil (and Cold War-era baby boomers had a stroke at the sight of their old nightmares realized), we were treated to an onslaught of Russia-overload that reminded me of the now-dated Simpsons episode where Russia switches back to the USSR, leading to parade-bears becoming tanks and Lenin crushing his glass tomb.

There were bowling cosmonauts, ballerinas, orchestras, supermodels, some sort of freaky modernist Madame Butterfly rendition, and the combined powers of Olympics failures Evgeni Plushenko and Alex Ovechkin (combined nose weight: 3.7 kg.) It made me want to drink some vodka.

Oh, and there’s SO MUCH MORE TO COME!

[CONTINUED IN PART 2! TOO MUCH FOR ONE POST TO CONTAIN!]