Après moi, le déluge.

Attributed to French King Louis XV, the statement is generally taken to mean that, once Louis and his acolytes are gone and swept away, then the stink is really gonna hit the fan.  The biblical reference to a flood is a nice touch, but I don’t think Louis had the flood as a cleansing event, but rather as a drowning event, but I suppose that’s up for debate and dependant upon perspective.

Today is the day I do something I ought not to do, not because it would be wrong or improper, but because it will be ridiculed and dismissed as completely out of touch.  But then again, imagine me being completely out of touch, yet correct in the end?  The first part happens more than often, the second I can only hope for, although it’s another one of those cases where I desperately don’t want to be right.

I never voted for Pierre Trudeau but recognized his merits despite everyone at the time being in hate with him.  I did vote for Brian Mulroney, twice in fact, and maintained that he was a good prime minister when he was the Political Bandito #1 at the end of his two terms.  Historians now view both men, despite their weaknesses, perceived or real, to be among the best of our prime ministers.  It took me thirty years to be right on one of them, and forty to be right on the other, but lets’s face it, the present lasts for a second, while the past stretches back forever.  As they say, hindsight has 20/20 vision, but in my case it took decades for that vision to become more acceptable.

I don’t feel I have another thirty or forty years to play with, although there might be an outside chance at the former, so I don’t have the luxury of hanging around and being vindicated by the passage of time and history.  So I’ll make my remarks right now, and predictably take dump trucks worth of scorn from all the people in the world smarter than me, which is apparently everyone.  I may even lose readers because of this, but there it is.  The guy in Nigeria has seemingly left me, so all is lost anyways.

Continue reading “Après moi, le déluge.” →

For me to have no response at all would be telling, and it would be telling the wrong thing, and as much as I would prefer to just look away from a serious train wreck, I can’t just let it stand.

So I’ll be brief —if such is possible — and just say it.

The prime minister must, unequivocally, resign.

So, way to go, Steve for saying something that thousands upon thousands had already been saying.  Good of you to finally get on the bus.  

I know full well there are plenty of people about who don’t give a rat’s ass about what I may think on just about anything.  I’ll even extend that to most people, maybe even all people.

But I do.  I give a rat’s ass about what I think.  It’s important to me, and the way I view my personal integrity.

This is no longer about fancy socks and haircuts.  It’s no longer about his feminism, woke-ism, virtue signalling and all the rest of it.

This is about leadership, stewardship, and good governance, both in terms of policy and people.  And a failure in each of those critical aspects.

Continue reading “IT’S TIME FOR TRUDEAU TO WALK THAT PLANK” →

A little over a week ago, two American candidates from bitterly opposed political parties took to the stage and faced one another in vice-presidential debate.  Republican J.D. Vance and Democrat Tim Walz were going to square off, both having made previous statements of “I can’t wait to debate that guy!”

As the American television audience (and Canadian) of some 43 million tuned in, everyone was a little nervous, in that these things in recent years have devolved into a theatre of the absurd, almost exclusively due to the participation of one Donald J. Trump, America’s 21st-century iteration of a snake oil salesman.  To put it mildly, expectations were low for things like propriety, respect, and a constructive, polite discussion of issues and opposing approaches to dealing with them.

And then it happened.

Continue reading “CIVILITY IN PUBLIC DEBATE AND POLITICAL DISCOURSE: CAN WE FIND THAT HERE IN CANADA?” →