The Freeman's Burden:

To defend the principles of human liberty; to educate; to be vigilant against the ever expanding power of the state.

Monday, May 02, 2005

Canada may be on the verge of its own Republican Revolution

I don't know if anyone cares, but I find Canadian politics fascinating, so stick with me and I'll try to convince you of this. The entire Canadian way of life (I don't know what that means either, but again...stick with me) may be teetering on the edge. It all started during the government of the now out to pasture Jean Chretien. The Quebecians were getting restless about being stuck in a government with a bunch of dirty, tea-sucking limies, as they tend to do every few years. The Frenchies were starting to talk independence again and Chretien wanted to head this off before they started blowing up sheep, or acting like the French, or whatever. So being the big government guy that he is, he created a new bureaucracy, gave it a bunch of tax money and told it to go convince every one from Montreal east that being Canadian doesn't suck (A tall order by any measure). Apparently the FEJ's (Friends of Jean) who headed said bureaucracy instead heard, "Take all this tax money, pay off our friends and funnel the rest into the Liberal party." The scheme worked beautifully. The Liberal's media friends ran some adds espousing the virtues of funny little slices of ham and hockey and the Frogs quit hopping, meanwhile the Liberals rolled to election victory and Paul Martin replaced Chretien who was, by this time, older then the Hudson Bay Company. About the time that Martin was warming up his office chair in Ottawa, the whole patronage fiasco exploded. The Liberals ship of state started leaking like a siv. Parliamentary elections occurred in the middle of all this and the Liberals got their collectivist butts handed to them, the NDP (New Democrats, the farther lefties) bolted the ruling coalition and suddenly the Liberals were trying to run the country with a minority government. Meanwhile, the Sponsorship Scandal was in full swing. (Canadians don't have the media savvy to come up with good scandal names apparently. If they had a Fox News Channel, it would have been called something cool like...Sponsorship-gate.) A commission had opened hearings and the revelations just kept getting worse and worse for the Liberals. So much so that a week ago, the polls in this most left-leaning of nations had the conservatives up for the first time since Lewis and Clark. A sidenote, the Canadian Right looks a lot like the American left in so much as they couldn't win class president and are equally as clueless what to do about it. There were two conservative parties in Canada, but they finally figured out that splitting the vote was futile and formed the current CPC. Now the Conservatives have called on the Martin government to call elections immediately to, in the words of CPC leader Stephen Harper, put the Martin government out of its misery as soon as possible. So the long and short of the whole thing is that the world's most inept conservative movement may come to power by default. The NDP is to far left, the Liberals are to corrupt and the other major party, the Bloc Quebecois, well they have kind of a different demographic. This should give Libertarians everywhere a sense of hope, the impossible does, sometimes, happen. And you thought Canadian politics was dull.

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To learn more and to keep up with this story, check out the CBC news website. CBC has the best journalism I have ever seen, despite what Bill O'Reilly says.

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