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?

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.

Back in the pre-Youtube days – a phrase that sounds so quaint and old-fashioned you’d might as well be starting a sentence with “so I got my Van Halen 8-track stuck in my Geo Metro” – funny videos were hard to come by on the web. You’d have to use Yahoo, or Lycos, or Altavista or whatever to find some guy’s animated-gif-strewn, NSYNC-midi-blaring Geocities homepage where you could devote 20 minutes of intense strain on your 56k connection to download a 30-second RealPlayer video of whatever crap we found funny back then. (Oh yeah, and it’d buffer all the fucking time, don’t you kids remember buffering?) Back in those archaic days, after endless nights of commando-crawling through the trenches of the internet, I remember finding a video so amazing that to this day, it holds a special place in my heart. There was no Youtube, no Twitter, no Facebook, not a single luxury, so anything amazing that you found on the internet was a source of personal pride.

I suppose there’s no better way to discuss this video than to just tell you exactly what it is. It’s Arnold Schwarzenegger starring in a series of Japanese commercials for a questionable-looking vitamin drink. That’s right, we see the Governor of California dressed as a nerd playing Mahjong  before turning into a bedazzled, cackling superhero, shouting in Austrian-tinged Japanese like an escape lunatic, shilling for what I can only assume is crack cocaine in a can. I found this video all on my own in the 90s, probably saving it off an Angelfire site to watch in Windows Media Player, and it brought me so much joy.

Of course, to find the video these days all I had to do was type it into goddamn Youtube, and a hundred versions popped up with zero load time.

What I’m trying to say by all of this non-sequitur nonsense is that it’s not unprecedented for video to appear of a prominent politician running off to Asia to shill for a chemical company.

Tony Clement, your Minister of Industry, has shown up in a tacky promotional video throwing around his influence as a government official to whore himself out for a chemical company in his riding – it’s okay, they’re a green chemical company, so they can’t be evil! – in an infomercial aired in China. The opposition is not amused. We kind of are.

Here’s the video!

Ahaha this is the shittiest video. It’s narrated by Wilford Brimley with a mouthful of peanut butter and consists mostly of shots ripped from Canadian Heritage Minutes, and actually has the audacity to use the song from “Chariots of Fire” in its first non-ironic context since it was used in the actual movie “Chariots of Fire”. And “What a Wonderful World”, what the fuck are you serious, couldn’t this podunk grease-barrel company get some generic production music that doesn’t blatantly break music copyright laws without permission?

If Tony Clement can learn anything from Arnold Schwarzenegger in terms of selling toxins to Asians, it would be to turn into a sparkly space-magician and drown his rivals in noodles while cackling ominously. That might actually bring the level of decorum for the next Question Period up a notch, considering Tony’s already been compared to the ShamWow Guy in the hallowed halls of our nation’s parliament. NDPer Pat Martin compared Tony Clement, Minister of Industry, to – well, let me just quote:

“All that is missing is the headset and he could be the ShamWow guy. Vince, the Slap Chop guy, has some new competition.”

Well, the SlapChop guy and the ShamWow guy, that’s actually the same guy. He also beat the shit out of a transsexual hooker. Vince, I mean. Not Tony Clement. Or at least, not that we know of in Tony’s case.

Tony Clement, you’re now in the MapleRag Infomercial Hall of Fame. Now, just try to peddle your influence to get your colleagues in Parliament to star in some infomercials of their own. Baird would be great to be that angry, sweaty “before” guy that starts every exercise infomercial, the one in black-and-white who’s struggling terribly to perform basic human functions as the voiceover booms “are you tired of back-breaking sit-ups?”

[Story: CBC, if you trust those commies.]

GM Brian Burke announcing the departure of Tony Clement to the US Congress at a joint press conference

In a move designed to “shake up” the stagnant world of the Canadian parliament, Toronto Maple Leafs General Manager Brian Burke announced a blockbuster trade deal today to send Parliament stars Tony Clement and Martha Hall Findlay to the United States Congress in exchange for prospects Congresswoman Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (D-ND), Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH), and a second-round draft pick.

“We’re really looking to rebuild and inject some new talent. I’m not afraid to shake things up. The media probably thought a guy like Clement wasn’t moveable, being Minister of Industry and all. Y’know what? Titles don’t mean jack to me”, the outspoken Burke told a media huddle outside of Parliament. “From what I’ve seen from Sandlin and Jordan, they’ve got the kind of grit, tenacity and hustle that I like in a government representative. Sure, people will question my moves, but let me tell you, this group of MP’s needed a wake-up call.”

Tony Clement, now serving as a freshman congressman representing Ohio’s 4th Congressional District, said the move came as a shock. “I really didn’t think I was going anywhere, I had time left on my contract with Parliament and I was a Cabinet Minister and all, but look, that’s the past. I’m looking forward to working with Congress, they’re a great organization with some great players, and I look forward to playing on the Ohio Delegation line with guys like [John] Boehner and Kucy [Dennis Kucinich].”

“Look, it’s a real loss to lose Tony and Martha, but that’s just the dynamics of the market,” said current Parliament captain Stephen Harper. “I’m looking forward to playing with Sandlin and Jordan, they’re both classy, gritty players with a ton of potential who can work the corners in a legislative session and won’t be afraid to throw the gloves down in Question Period.”

Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, a 5′6″, 39-year-old out of Aberdeen, South Dakota who will now be the Member of Parliament for the Toronto riding of Willowdale, said she was looking forward to playing with Parliament. “I’ve been learning about the franchise, the history, y’know, checking out the Wikipedia page about Canadian government ever since I heard about the trade”, she told reporters. “It seems like there’s a lot of shouting, so, I’m looking forward to that. Also, why the hell’s my new office locked? Anyone know what the hell ‘prorogue’ means?”

“I think both organizations can benefit from this trade. Congress is picking up a couple of seasoned veterans as they gear for a healthcare-playoff push, and Parliament’s getting some great prospects as they work on rebuilding,” Burke added. Asked if he was considering more trade moves, possibly with European parliamentary bodies, Burke said he “didn’t want any of those pantywaist Euro crybabies prancing around.”

I'd better take a camera-phone picture, IT'S NOT LIKE THERE'S ANYONE ELSE AROUND CALLED A "REPORTER" WHOSE JOB IS TO TAKE PROFESSIONAL PICTURES

Here we see Tony Clement, Conservative Member for the riding of Twitter, taking a stupid picture with his stupid camera-phone-blackberry-photo-gadget of Canada’s sweetheart, Barbara Ann Scott, as she looks ready to set parliament on fire in accordance with the wishes of most Canadians.

Tony, you look like a doofus. Instead of smiling and applauding like a dignified human, you’re crouched over your stupid twitter-gadget, mouth slack-jawed like a 13-year-old girl furiously snapping pictures at a Jonas Brothers concert.

Globe&Fail, what’s the scoop?

“Many MPs, including Immigration Minister Jason Kenney and Heritage Minister James Moore, were taking pictures of the event on their BlackBerrys and cellphones.”

DAMNIT KENNEY! WE WARNED YOU ABOUT THIS KIND OF BEHAVIOUR. If you can’t use your cell phone at responsible, polite times, we’re going to have to take it away from you. You can pick it up at the end of class.

UPDATE! We went on Twitter and sure enough, here’s MP James Moores’ snapshot. Boy, good thing you took that blurry Blackberry photo, how else would we be able to capture this moment? I mean, other than the professionally-taken Globe&Mail picture you see above.

Plus, sometimes it’s possible to hate a person just from seeing their face, so, that’ll come in handy later for our “Worst MP” contest!

Left: Rob Anders, Calgary West (Cons.) Right: Harold from The Red Green Show

Left: Leon Benoit, Vegreville—Wainwright (Cons.) Right: Beeker

More after the jump!

Left: Jean-Pierre Blackburn, Jonquière—Alma (Cons.) Right: Emperor Palpatine, Lord of the Sith

Left: Lois Brown, Newmarket-Aurora (Cons.) Right: Renee Zellweger, back when she was in "Bridget Jones" mode, not hot Renee Zellweger

Left: Claude DeBellefeuille, Beauharnois-Salaberry (BQ) Right: Tony Clement, Parry Sound-Muskoka (Cons.)

Left: Mark Holland, Ajax-Pickering (Lib.) Right: Butthead

Oh, we’re just getting started, you bet your sweet ass there’ll be more. It’s our new favourite game!

Send us your suggestions, too. Don’t be shy, anonymous reader. Comment box’s right there, hon.