Our colleague, John Robson, surveys the current political environment in K1A-land and finds it wanting in his weekly column for the Ottawa Citizen today. You can almost hear the Ka’ching of the taxpayer credit card…
Then why, cries my last remaining reader, do you spend a whole column telling us you don’t care about things we don’t either, in agonizing detail?
Two reasons. First, you need to know this is what the guardians of the public purse (governmental and opposition) consider important. It is where they put their time and energy and while they’re sending dozens of these every week they aren’t doing, or thinking about, anything else. And it is costing you plenty, as the Tories try to buy support from every conceivable constituency and the opposition parties hammer them for not doing so on nearly a lavish or shameless enough scale.
Second, I just started reading a book of Wilfrid Laurier’s parliamentary and public speeches before he was prime minister. Oh, there’s an issue of interest to Canadians, comes a sarcastic shout from the back. Yes but, I shout back. Things used to be genuinely different, and could be again if we grasp what went wrong.
