Shades of Joe Clark

It's an Animal Farm north of the border, politically-speaking, and I won't go there with which breeds and species I think the opposition parties have become. If you're totally clueless as to what I'm talking about, read all about it here.

Suffice to say, Canadian PM Stephen Harper has been reduced to a hunk of prime, mooing Alberta beef awaiting mad cow disease slaughter.

I wasn't at all into politics back in 1979 (pot and lit were more my style), when Joe Clark became PM for only a day or two or however brief his minority-rule stint turned out to be before the Liberals ousted him in a non-confidence vote. Perhaps it was months. It seemed like days.

But the parliamentary rumblings feel similar. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Clark entered into the fray in a very tumultuous economic time in Canadian history ~ post-Pierre Elliott Trudeau and his many "PET" projects, not the least of which was the Petro Canada (Pierre Elliott Trudeau Ripping Off Canada), not to mention the National Energy Program - an endeavor which proved, if nothing else, that "east is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet."

Morph the decades ahead by two, and here we go again. A young, upstart and rather unassuming PM from Alberta who is way more brilliant a policymaker and leader than others might give him credit for. Sound familiar?

Just replace that old monicker, Joe who? with Harper who? - and exchange the old host of feathered foe of the black, Bloc and bluh (insert French accent here) variety, surrounding and pecking away at the conservative carcass until nothing remains but dried dead meat hardly fit for pemiken, with our new and not so new feathered friends, Dion, Layton and Duceppe, (a name that if you bastardize in a half-arsed attempt at guessing whether 'e' is pronounced as a soft or hard vowel 'e' in huck-too-ey Quebecois francais- minus the accent eh goos and upside down c's and fancy birthday hats and all that-, might easily rhyme with deceit).

So the latest and greatest is that in this coalition attempt to usurp and oust Harper, Harper has had to suspend Parliament.

Didn't emergency measures such as that just happen in Pakistan?! Egads - and Harper's not armed like Musharraf was. Holy hacked-up hockey sticks, Captain Canuck, what's going on up dem dar north of the 49th and east of the 100th meridian, eh?

Now having said all this, while I can't rightly determine where my vote might swing these days ~so far left-leaning am I even though I can't seem to muster up any enthusiasm for the NDP ~ I, nonetheless, still have to confess that any coalition involving the Bloc scares the bejesus and sacriste tabernacle out of me.

It's all a crock of merde (pronounced mare-duh), my apologies in advance for bringing something as lovely as female equine into something so unlovely as the Bloc mix, which is the manure that has lined the political streets for the running of the bulls event the opposition parties have been participating in these past few years.

I seriously don't think the opposition sees him in the light that posterity will prove flattered and prospered Canada in the long run. While I don't think Harper warrants a white cowboy hat and white horse, I do think he has Canada's best interests at heart and soul. And I think he won fair and square - the voters decided. And at the end of the day, that needs to stand for something.

So much for bragging this fall that we Canadians knew how to do elections right - drama and epic just weren't our style. Teehee. I suspect we might be in for a longer haul, if not an overhaul.

But whatever way I look at it, it still feels like 1979/80 redux all over again. Am I alone in thinking this?