The year of the Grinch
Alcohol and substance abuse counsellors sometimes say a person has to hit rock bottom before they can start climbing out of the nightmare of their addiction. For political junkies in Canada, this past year had to mark a new low of degradation.
After 2013, the most famous Canadian in the world is now the crack-smoking moron who just happens to be the mayor of Toronto. Sweaty, violent and obscene, Rob Ford cannot open his mouth without a vomiting up a chunky witch’s brew of lies, hatred and self-pity. It’s telling that he still has a decent chance of re-election from his impenetrable support base that cheers on Ford’s every cringe-inducing embarrassment.
The only saving grace is that it’s Toronto. What? Oh right. Montreal also elected a flabby fool with foot-in-mouth disease this fall, one who had his snout deep in the Liberal sponsorship scandal a decade ago. How soon we forget. At the very least, we hope, Denis Coderre will stay off the crack pipe – a small mercy after the year’s revelations of a municipal corruption cancer that infected every last cell of Montreal’s body politic.
After showing promise of progressive change in the initial weeks of her government elected last year, in 2013 Quebec Premier Pauline Marois opened Pandora’s box in a bid to consolidate political power. By introducing the human-rights horror of the so-called Quebec Charter of Values, she threw a trainload of explosive tar-sands oil on the smouldering embers of racial hatred in Quebec, with predictable results. The most vulnerable of visible minorities in our society are now fair game in a toxic explosion of verbal and physical assault, and this with the full moral support of the Quebec government.
Saving the worst for last, Prime Minister Stephen Harper this year shed any pretence that the public good has any role to play in his governance. Having corrupted the Senate, used federal intelligence agencies to spy on Canadians for the benefit of foreign corporations, killed environmental protections, trampled our fundamental democratic rights and repeatedly lying about all of the preceding – even though he knew we knew he was lying – it’s hard to imagine it can get any worse at any level of government in Canada.
There is no shame anymore on the part of this smug gang of gloating Grinches. The most casual of political observers can’t help but wonder at the head-spinning contempt.
The case of James Moore, one of Harper’s senior ministers after nine years in government, is revealing. A week before Christmas, the season of giving and of remembering Jesus Christ’s command to be our brother’s keeper, Moore snidely expresses the true soul of Canada’s Conservatives with a comment about child poverty that will henceforth define his political career: “Why should I feed my neighbour’s children?”
This has to be rock bottom. It is time for Canadians to take a long, hard look in the mirror and seek help to escape the deadly addiction to the politics of selfishness. We can only hope that 2014 will see our first steps on the difficult but necessary road to recovery.
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