Duuuuude, have you ever voted in a federal election..... on WEED?

It’s time for part 2 of our series, Better Know a Fringe Political Party Recognized By Elections Canada! Today, we look at the Marijuana Party of Canada – the fightin’ potheads!

HISTORY

To Wikipedia!

“The party was founded by Marc-Boris St-Maurice, an activist and member of the punk group GrimSkunk. After a 1991 arrest for possession of marijuana, he vowed to legalize cannabis.”

GrimSkunk was alright, but they were no MorbidRaccoon, and not even in the same league as ChurlishBadger. Anyways, how convenient of you, Mr. St-Maurice! “Dude, I got busted for pot… maybe I’ll create a political party, become Prime Minister, abolish my criminal record, and then my mom will totally get off my case about going to probation hearings and shit.” Actually, this is a more elaborate backstory than I was expecting, I thought the Wikipedia article would begin with

“The Marijuana Party of Canada was founded when some dudes got tooootally stoned while watching a Star Wars marathon on SpikeTV, and one dude was like, haha, let’s start a POLITICAL PARTY, and the other was like, dude, are you serious, that would owwwn, and he was like, yeah man, then they took another bong hit and totally called Elections Canada and now like, hah, are you serious man, we’re like, a political party!”

Anyways, to paraphrase the next few paragraphs of paranoid rambling on the Wikipedia article, the party was big for a few years in the mid-2000s (a 4th-place finish and almost 8% of the vote in the riding of Nunavut? What are those crazy Iqaluiters smokin’?) But these days after already getting their big victories (decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana, legalizing medicinal marijuana), they’re basically just an obsolete old shell of their former self. With all of the serious members having already joined the Liberals, NDPs or Greens where they have a shot at actual marijuana reform, the Marijuana Party today is left as a loose collection of a few rambling, stoned weirdos.

It smells like the bus driver's jacket!

POLICIES

Weed rules.

No, seriously. That’s their entire policy. They have no official policy book, no plans, no opinions on areas like social issues, healthcare, finance, education… their one, single policy is that weed rules, and you should smoke weed. Hearing Marijuana Party candidates debate is hilarious, because although they’re free to stray from the norm and inject their own opinions to fill the gaps in their policies (i.e., every candidate has wildly different policies in every area other than “weed rules”, making the party fairly redundant), they still try to involve weed in any possible policy debate.

What are you plans regarding taxation? Smoke weed, it’ll help the economy, and like, everything’ll work out. What are your healthcare plans? If people smoked weed, like, everyone would be cured of everything man, check out this article about all the diseases weed cures, I got it from High Times. What would you do in Afghanistan? Send them weed, man.

MEMBERS

Alright, let’s go to their official forums, see what the most popular topic is…

“9/11 was an inside job. Terrorism and war is profitable to Bush and his friends. Harper is with them, call that Big Brother or New World Order.”

Oh, um, alright! I mean, this is probably just some loony who’s toked the wrong stuff, it can’t be like there’s… 461 replies… almost all of which agree with him, and get more and more tinfoil-hat paranoid…

Blair Longley: your next Prime Minister

Most of the posts in the forum are by Blair T. Longley himself, the actual leader of the party! Here’s one where some poor schoolkid got assigned to write a report about political parties, and being the class clown, he totally decided to write his report about the Marijuana Party. Since the teacher wanted the kid to write about the party’s stance on actual issues, and since the party has no stances other than “smoke weed”, he needed to go onto the message board and ask the leader of the party to address his questions. Sure enough, Blair answers! Talk about access, imagine Iggy personally writing you huge, semi-coherent message board posts for your Grade 10 Civics report on the Liberals!

Anyways, Blair does a pretty horrible job of answering the question directly (to be fair it was a hard question, a school student asking “Name any of your party’s policies” to the leader of a political party isn’t as easy as answering, say, “Water bong or vaporizer?”), and he gives a long, paranoid answer where he links this poor kid to all this Zeitgeist-y, debt-is-slavery, libertarian-ish gobbledygook. Poor kid. I hope he did well on his report, “The Marijuana Party: A Bunch Of Insane Old Stoners Goin’ Nuts.”

DUDE, I THINK IT JUST HIT ME

Maaan, it’s like, my brain’s floating out of my skull, I can feel it man, eheheahahaha, I can’t stop giggling, holy shit

DO YOU KNOW HOW TO MAKE QUESADILLAS

I want to make, like… 5 quesadillas, with like, melted cheese, quac, sour cream, and like, man, I’d put like those KFC popcorn chicken, you know, I’d put those into the quesadilla, it would be so good man

HAVE YOU EVER, LIKE, REALLY LOOKED AT A KEYBOARD

It’s like the keys are dancing up and down, they’re sticking out at my fingers, and when I press them, it’s like, they’re pressing me, you know? My mind is totally blown, dude.

PUT ON SOME FLEETWOOD MAC

I’m just gonna veg out on your couch for a while bro.

Captain Picard just read the PPP's policy handbook

Welcome to our new series, Better Know a Fringe Political Party Recognized By Elections Canada! Today in part 1 of our 15-part series, we look at the People’s Political Power Party of Canada  – the fightin’ PPP’s!

Before we go to their website, let’s take a look at Wikipedia for a fair-and-balanced assessment of just what the hell we’re getting into with this party. Although quite alliterative, their name doesn’t offer much in the way of specificity.

According to its party platform, the party is neither socialist or democratic, but is a “Centre party to first bring value as top priority to woman, the mother, mothers to-be, mothers that were.” The party further intends to “remove” poverty, that “Canada will never become a military zone,” and that it “will bring back the seventh day as a family day”. In terms of environmental issues, the party believes that “there is no reason for over population, much less of poverty. When you bring respect for women in the family, you have all these problems resolved, abortion and all.”

What… the… fuck?

Let’s see if we’ve got this right. Step 1) Respect Women. Step 2) ???? Step 3) All of society’s ills are now gone!

Alright, Wikipedia must be pulling our legs. I mean, just look at how they sarcastically put quotation marks in front of the word “remove” in front of poverty, you can just tell that whatever teenager wrote this article was rolling his eyes in mock-derision. Let’s go to their website and get it straight from the mother-lovers’ mouths!

Centre: Roger F. Poisson. Left, left-centre, right-centre, right: Women that he's gonna liberate the SHIT out of.

Leadership

The PPP is led by Roger Poisson, an old-ish chubby dude with a strange view of the world and an even stranger stream-of-consciousness style of typing pages of barely-comprehensible ramblings. According to Roger, his education level is “Grade 9, plus further education in learning from the mistakes of the elite politicians and how to avoid them.” Well then!

Every other person associated with the PPP seems to be female, which leads me to believe that Roger is one of those creepy dudes who acts super-interested in women’s issues just to surround himself with ladies. He’s like the douchey guy you knew in college who went to Women’s Studies seminars and talked about how sensitive he was, vying for the attention of the females surrounding him. Combine that guy with the creepy allure of a cult leader and you’ve got Roger Poisson!

Policies

The party has a handy flip-book of policies! Let’s go to the first page. It’s probably gonna try to draw in the readers with some pretty generic, populist principles, right? Let’s see the first paragraph of policy…

We will bring value and moral respect to the women who have come from mothers, who become young women and who could become the new mothers of the nation. When you degrade women, promoting the dissection of the motherly value of women, by pornography, by promoting drugs and alcohol, by immodest fashions, you degrade women and insult the family and ultimately the nation. Such promotions defame the character of women.

So, you’re gonna fix Canada with some form of pseudo-religious Goddess worship. Also, no porn. Also, the very existence of drugs and alcohol are somehow degrading women. And we’re gonna put our women in some sort of Amish burlap frocks to cover their immodest bodies. That’ll empower ‘em up good!

Wikipedia listed PPP as a feminist party, but honestly, this doesn’t seem like modern feminism to me, it seems like a creepy combination of dominatrix-worship and the Taliban. Let’s ask Maple Rag female correspondent Jenn, what do you think of this party whose sole goal is empowering you as a woman?

Jenn: Porn, drugs, alcohol and immodest dress are awesome. Fuck this guy.

Poverty Policies

I won’t even bother copying out what it says on their “Poverty” page. For one, this guy’s sentence structure and grammar are so bizarre that I can’t even bear to transcribe it. But basically, their poverty policy boils down to this: all poor people and disadvantaged groups in Canada should join together in revolt against the wealthy oppressors and corporations. The elite will be forced to give up their wealth to eliminate poverty in one fell swoop. Really, and they call themselves a centrist party? If the complete abolition of capitalism is centrist, I don’t want to see what left-wing is like.

Healthcare Policies

EVERYONE WILL BE HEALTHY IF WE JUST HOPE FOR IT! I’m not kidding, that’s their healthcare plan. They propose an ambitious 50% reduction in healthcare costs simply because people will be happier and full of hope and dreams under a PPP government.

Justice Policies

Oh my sweet Jesus, they can’t possibly be saying what I think they’re saying:

“We, as the PPP, will empty the prisons of prisoners [...] We will call on our military to impart moral values to criminals who are resistant to change. They can earn a career in the military and earn a sense of self-worth, by using their strength in defending the women and children of the nation, and in helping out in emergency situations.”

Good Lord. What sort of evil genius comes up with an idea like that? Freeing every prisoner in Canada and making them join the fucking Army. This is an official political party recognized by Elections Canada. Hundreds of Canadians vote for this party. And they want to free every prisoner in Canada and make them join the Army.

Economic Policies

They want to eliminate all forms of taxation while also eliminating the national debt – no, running a MAJOR SURPLUS in fact – while giving huge payment to aboriginals and farmers, providing free post-secondary education, transferring ownership of all natural resources over to all citizens and having all Canadians share in corporate profits. I mean, sure, why the fuck not? Anything is possible with PPP magic happy juice!

Military Policies

“Terrorism will disappear because we will take the time to listen to the distress of others and find solutions for living peacefully.”

Sure!

“The PPP, with the hearts of its members, will deliver world peace.”

Okay!

Youth Party

Awesome, there’s even a PPP Youth, let’s check it out!

Awesome! There’s, uh… 20 kids in it! And they share four different surnames! It’s ALMOST as if a few people signed up all of their kids at once to be in this terrible club! There’s proof that only one kid joined by their own free will, Victoria, who writes:

I wish I can live in a nice place with no wars. Nice like no hurting people. Stop the bad people. I would like to be in the club called PPP youth.

This Victoria kid’s just as well-spoken as Roger Poisson! And her letter contains no spelling mistakes, which is leaps and bounds above the official PPP policy booklet’s spelling! Sign up this child immediately and run her in the riding of Churchill, Manitoba in the next election!

Conclusion

Everything written on the PPP’s (admittedly well-designed) website rots my brain from the inside out. I could literally make fun of everything written on this site and have enough content to run this blog for a year, but the PPP is just so soul-crushingly bizarre that I now hate all Canadian fringe parties.

So join us in our next installment, where we’ll look at another Canadian fringe party!