Iggy: club seals, not the tar sands
Each time Michael Ignatieff opens his mouth, I like him a little bit less.
Like every other federal leader, Iggy is in Alberta this week, flipping pancakes and schmoozing at the Calgary Stampede. Given the energy he has previously expended expressing his undying affection for the Alberta tar sands, I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that his rhetoric is getting louder. But where he blows my mind is with the insane statement that Canadians should actually take pride in the tar sands. I wonder if the First Nations people of Fort Chipewyan are proud of the skyrocketing cancer rate in their community that is likely attributable to the environmental abomination that is the tar sands.
Ignatieff goes on to say:
“The Liberal Party of Canada is not going to come forward with climate change plans that club the industry on the head.”
Might I suggest a new slogan for the Liberals in the next election? (Conservatives will like this one, too.)
“Club seals, not the tar sands.”
Scridb filter
Brilliant!
The thesis that all people are hypocrites has “all politicians are hypocrites” as a corollary.
Another relevant thesis is that the more people you are trying to please, the more sides of your mouth you need to talk out of.
These support the conclusion that circumstance obliges Michael Ignatieff to appear more hypocritical than Elizabeth May.
No one can become president of Imperial Tobacco, pope to millions of Roman Catholics or prime minister of Canada without a great deal of hypocrisy.
The choice in politics is to wield power or to speak truth. Occasionally one can manage both, but not often. Elizabeth speaks truth to power and so avoids a lot of hypocrisy. Iggy is not trying to play her game.
This argument is about why the Canadian electorate should allow partisan politics to succeed at all. When will Canadians learn that the way we presently choose prime ministers encourages more hypocrisy than our taste buds can stand, leaving all of us with a bad taste in most sides of our mouths?
Bob Halstead
Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Earth