At long last having pulled out a majority. . .

. . .Stephen Harper revealed his grand vision for the country to Canadians

Vote...

Parked as we are atop a few clawed mittsful of cute, furry food chains, us coyotes got no illusions that life is guaranteed to be fair. Or to make sense.

Still, with the ballot countdown now in the hours, I gotta raise a fuzzy eyebrow at Stephen Harper's last shot of gall and wormwood-twisty logic: commanding lefties to vote for him, or, ummmm, dangerous lefties will screw up the stable government that only he can give us.

From his gang's performance to date, I think it must be the kind of stable that needs regular shoveling out.

Con strategists, as in previous kicks at that increasingly dented can full of majority, were counting on their voter base being the only one motivated enough to show. Everybody else was supposed to feel so disheartened and discouraged by the gutter politics of late that they just blew off the balloting. If you didn't vote tomorrow, then they'd win.

That clever script's obviously had an emergency rewrite. And semimythical coyotes -- uncharacteristically -- have little to say about that, except this:

If Liberals vote Conservative to stave off the NDP... then the Toryists win.

Greasy pols, greasy polls and greasy poles

An election now lunges toward either the final gong or buzzer, I forget which, with a speed approaching terminal gravitational acceleration. Certain half-smart tory backroom operators who helped manipulate the damn thing in the first place have hit the ground. Not running gracefully, as they thought they would, but with aerodynamic qualities akin to lead pancakes.

It is telling that Stephen Harper has stomped on (m)any faces in his scramble for a majority. It is also telling, in a negative way, that he hasn't really told anybody what he would do with a majority if he got it.

But it is even more telling that some opinion polls place those unhinged socialists he keeps harpering on about, within hard spitballing range of "his" majority.

Citizenship fatigue, finally, maybe? Five years ago, in the face of a decayed liberal machine, Harper promised Reform-a-Tory honesty and transparency if elected. Since, he and his stable of hyper-partisan frat boys have ridden a breathtaking string of dishonesty, opacity and mean-spiritedness to where we are now.

Their fallback strategy when nailed - and there have been nailings aplenty - has been to wriggle, split hairs and misdirect. Say they're only doing what the Liberals did already. Maybe throw someone who's not named Harper under the bus.

That pristine Tory bus is gettin' pretty gory.

Then, if your name is Harper, you feign an eerily robotic approximation of calm reason to state, "Now, now, you know that's simply not true."

Provable lies, but they play real well with the rural base in Alberta. Also, apparently, with the Globe and Mail, which just endorsed the crud-covered incumbent as the best choice for PM. Because he's you know, a good financial manager. Yucko! As if!

Where was I? Oh yeah: so the reductio ad absurdem Con subtext is that they are now exactly what the Libs were, right? The devil's spawn of which their endless barrage of attack ads do constantly remind?

Seems like the copious backsplatter from all that ugly ordnance may finally be soiling the tailored blue Harry Rosen suits of the firing crews. One can hope.

This election ain't a done deal. What we seem to be learning as the campaign closes is that liberals are still wandering the political wasteland, and that conservatives have emulated them, badly. Could explain the surge of a former fourth-place long shot who seems pretty upbeat and positive.

How it'll play at the real polls, as opposed to the fleeting snapshots of opinion polls, is anybody's guess.

If it's a Tory majority, I still have my doggy helmet, flack jacket and poisoned ink supply from Ontario's Mike Harris years. Anything else, that yodelling, yipping laugh you hear in the distant night after the ballot count will be moi.

Meantime, I'll stock in the English breakfast tea and a crumpy or six for a big, very early-morning wedding. I approve of weddings. They're a welcome diversion. And more important than politics.

The (completely) unreliable narrative

It used to be that unreliable narratives were a device of true artists. Such as, say, Joseph Conrad, considered still to be a master of the novel.

Us semimythical coyotes have gained a certain smaller, more folklore-ish rep as unreliable narrators in prairie cultures with storytelling traditions. I admit we may tend to fudge ummm, small details in the interests of extending a good shaggy dog narrative. In this ramshackle blog's salad days, we had quite a snappy repartee on the roles of unreliable narrators. Begun, if memory serves, by our departed Muse.

But dissembling doggies got nuthin' on the current crop of political operators. As a cog in the unreliable narrator biz, I feel increasingly insulted by their rapid-fire repeater talking points as they attempt to, quote, "seize the narrative". These guys don't give a beaver's butt (or posterior of another rodent of your choice. Porcupine's patoot? I digress...) about the all-important kernel of truth any more. Every good fiction needs it. Yet sucking deeply from the pressurized cylinders of rarified weirdness inside their bubble/hothouse/echo-chamber/whatever, the minority ruling party has convinced itself that voters won't notice it's tossed truth aside completely.

Tasting power has made 'em kinda hallucinaTory. Sad really. I'm supposed to be the critter with the loose grip on reality.

I think the blatant, repeated fibbage bears on the current much-discussed-and-lamented election malaise, particularly in the under-35 cohort. Can't blame 'em. Being born in the path of a relentless tsunami of consumer advertising has made 'em awesome bullshit detectors. Faced with an eternal flush of overspun, overwhelming effluent, of which politics has become a pathological subset, most put the shields up and pointedly slope off to higher, drier ground.

Awhile back, some amoral backroom operator decided they no longer needed to pay lipservice even to the tiny grain of truth that good fictions rely upon. Because just making crap up "works". Well, yeah. For a while. Crudely. But blowing off an entire rising generation is a spectacularly shortsighted tactic for democracy and the nation as a whole.

Neocon backrooms harbour teams of strategists, spin doctors and writers whom I imagine are considered in their small, specialized circles to be "artists" at what they do. By the logic they themselves surely would write into Stephen Harper or John Baird's or Tony Clement's briefing books if they'd thought of it, that makes 'em, ummm... con artists. Ba-da-bomp. Rimshot.

If you're a wanna-be government whose much-vaunted base seems to be a bunch of pissed off old poops, and you're running out of time to nail down a majority before they die, and you're on a self-assigned mission to change the ethos of an entire country against its will, it makes a Pyrrhic kind of sense to lie your way into power. And at what cost to the rest of us?

* * * Update * * *

Oh, and? When you finally do see fit to artistically insert a kernel of truth in your narrative? Make sure it matches the matter at hand.
Pro-tip: Do not screw with one of Canada's most trusted - and feisty - Parliamentary officers...

Stirring the election pot. And licking it.

Grandad coyote was an austere guy. The sort of dog one would associate with a large framed portrait frowning severely down on a big, lustrous boardroom table surrounded by overstuffed chairs gliding on discrete casters. A portrait of the sort one might, indeed, associate with the founder of a well-established semimythical enterprise.

I know it may surprise some of you who have noted my, ummm, occasional case of pottymouth, but Grandad very much discouraged expletives of the anglo-saxon monosyllabic sort. Well, what the hell else do you call it when your breath sometimes betrays a swig or two from the occasional toilet? I digress.

I understand this credo had something to do with a long-ago day when the world was very young, when he and his callow young littermates holed up in a culvert, smoked way too many green hayseed cigarettes rolled in pages from yellowback novels, and uttered every filthy word any of 'em could think up. Family history offers no clues as to why they considered this plan sound in the first place. I blame youth. Nowadays, I imagine they'd all drink Red Bull until they ran in confused circles and peed down their own legs while hacking WiFi signals, or something.

Anyway, by the end of the day, they all felt so nauseated they swore off (heh...) swearing for life. Come to that, I don't think any of 'em smoked, either. Score one for proto aversion therapy. Oops... another digression.

Anyway. When severely riled, Grandad would admit to "having my dander up". Someone of whose conduct he generally disapproved, he might allow, was "a so-and-so". Truly egregious types, he called "stinkers". For one totally beyond the pale, he reserved the terrifying term "Dirty Potlicker".

You did not want to be someone whom Grandad called a Dirty Potlicker.

I am uncertain to this day of the true etymological origins of this prairie epithet, but the tone with which he uttered it told me all I need to know. Oh, I've seen attempts to define it (1) (2), but I'm pretty sure, on the evidence, that Grandad meant something a whole bunch worse.

Could explain why, at times much like now, when he scanned the election news in the original Calgary Eye Opener, he could be heard muttering "Dirty Potlickers!!!" under his doggy breath. Over and over and over.

Let the mud wrestling begin...

It doesn't take a cranky semimythical doggie's sahnsitive schnozz to smell the soft reek of an unwanted election hardening. The finance minister positively beamed as he spooled up his precast talking points with yesterday's interviewers, that his prudent budget was, no, nay, never intended to provoke an election. Because you know, his government would never indulge in that kind of game playing.

Ptui. And yes, motivated canines can spit as well as cats, anytime.

The PM must feel relief at ditching the mime show of interest in the nation's policy good. I'm sure it's been a strain. Now he can get back to his hyperpartisan self, start smearing other parties as the irresponsible motivators - those jerks - and get on with his real agenda. One more tiresome crack at that elusive majority.

He is far from the first PM to maneuver thus. It's as if he has combed and taken to heart every instance of political gamesmanship for the past 40 or 50 years. But only from comic books. Finer nuances have been lacking from the beginning. And every time the PM or his wunderkind perceive that they got away with another one, they dumb their playbook down another notch, to even cruder ploys.

Hence the near-permanent barrage of contemptuous US-Republican-style ads slagging the opposition leader's character and telling Canadians - in terms of the lowest possible denominator - "Tories good. Others evil".

Finally in the last couple of weeks, emboldened by a growing flood of character and corruption issues starting to jet out from behind the PMO's crumbling disciplinary dike, opposition parties have started throwing back smears of their own. Parliamentary politics lately has become like hippos mud wrestling in a smallish plastic playpool. Hardly germane to any watcher, but unavoidably backsplattertastic.

Lost in that storm is anything like discussion of actual platforms or policies. The best we can hope for is the rote equivalent of a Grade 11 Pep Club Coordinator's high school election promises of free beer in the water fountains. Meant to charm superficially for a moment, but unbelievable, unattainable, and after the spray settles, undelivered.

Very well. Let the mud wrestling begin. But ask yourself: what the hell are federal elections actually supposed to be about? And based on that, maybe ask a candidate or two a question. Or two. And possibly keep at 'em until you get real answers.

The worst part for the Stevester...

...about manipulating the country into another unwanted election, no matter how badly he wanted it, no matter how much he thought that maybe he could pull off a majority this time, was having to retool his usual, grim, authoritarian public persona.

He had to overcome deep personal distaste. To pretend to be warm and fuzzy, to con (heh...) the all-important female vote.

As Ottawa's chattering gaggles twittered themselves into a pre-electoral tizzy, Stevie-baby knew that the old quick fixes - like the much-lampooned blue sweater vest - were stale toast.

It'd have to be something bold enough to change minds without forcing him to change any of his deeply held, yet deeply unpopular, political stands. Yet something that spoke to his inner rockstar. So he hired rafts full of image consultants. Wrangled. Bit the bullet. Called in the fiberglas supplier that had done his hair for years. All the while, he feared that the gargantuan cost of retooling the factory dies completely would show him up as a hypocrite - or worse, a laughingstock - when the inevitable Access To Information Act requests uncovered it.

(Steverino's note to self: Kill that lousy act! Deader!)

Then, miraculously, the sales rep slyly suggested another fiberglas hair model already on the assembly line! It fit the bill perfectly...

Original photo: Remy Steinegger, Wikimedia Commons. You know where the hair came from...

About last night....

That'll do. As you were.

Ghost of Past Election

I came across this sign a couple of years ago...

I wonder if the owners of the sign regret tossing it in the garbage?

A Big Yellow Taxi moment

This past weekend, the (almost former) mayor piled more, ummm, vision, into his "vision for Ottawa": (yet) another suburb, to be serviced by a ring road plowed through the city's green belt. It was at one and the same time a Big Yellow Taxi moment and a heartfelt cry for help. Involving emergency laser eye surgery.

Us coyotes can't help noticing that most of the mayor's recent vente speculative fictions involve the thoughtless trashing of the city's public open spaces: running electric rail along the Ottawa River Parkway; a Lansdowne Park deal that bobbled lands in the public trust into private developers' waiting hands, with a nifty side deal to carve big a new exhibition space out of the southern greenbelt; and now the ring road idea.

Now, the green belt has been eyed with avarice and intent by developer types for most of its five-decade run. To them, it is 20,350 hectares of prime open space ideally situated for plunking down any old building they care to name. If only they could get their frustrated mitts on it.

A lot has changed since a rather well-regarded city planner guy named Jacques Gréber suggested the idea in 1950, and it may well be in the public interest to revisit its whithers and wherefores. But I'm unconvinced that Mayor Larry is the guy to shepherd the process. He has already amply demonstrated a really unfortunate bias toward what us coyotes call "inappropriate development", along with a serious disregard for the niceties of due process, and an utter lack of intelligent consideration of consequences.

We coyotes, of course, are biased in an entirely other direction. You might say hizzoner's purported big picture schemes hit us where we live. Because, well, they do.

But the public open spaces that the city under this mayor has already dealt away - or wants to - are treasures. If citizens decide to give 'em up after proper debate, fine. But it should only be for the right reasons, and for a fair payback. Even, one might hazard, and I am aware of the irony of my using this word, as a part of a vision. If possible, one grander, more inspiring and more cohesive than badly focused pipe dreams.

At the very least, you'd better damn good and sure before you throw away something as scarce as green space in a city. Because if there's one thing us coyotes know, it's that once you pave paradise, it's lost. And as Joni sang back in her chirpier, more soprano-y days, ya don't know what ya got 'til it's gone.

How dumb am I supposed to be, again...?

I'm on a roll. While I sucked my paws over the state of federal politics yesterday, the incumbent mayor, in what I imagine he hoped was a display of charming candour, finally admitted out loud what sentient Ottawattamies have pretty much realized since their last municipal election-night hangovers hit: that his first half-term was a disaster cratered with "rookie mistakes".

Oh, that his nibs finally got anything even half right is fairly momentous. But us semimythical coyotes still find him charmless. Being played for a simpleton by someone who lacks the chops to do the job right does that to us... I digress. That phrase is getting to be such a trademark that I'm gonna put that on a baseball cap and market it. I digress again...

It may be that the mayor figured that if he copped to his record of awfulness, he could then, whenever after it comes up, do what spin doctors call "changing channels". This is saying, in effect, "I've already dealt with that, it's ancient news, now let's just move on and talk about what really matters. Which is anything but that.". Watch for it.

It was also the sort of calculated move that suggests the guy is temporarily listening to his store-bought brain instead of the winging it that is his wont. Polling at less than half the support of your leading rival apparently focuses even the most scattered mind. Oh, he fondly imagines himself as a big ideas guy, but he's just scattered.

And what are we to make of what David Reevely calls "Larry 2.0"? The things he imagines to be his latter-day signature victories - like flogging the very public Lansdowne Park to the first very private commercial developers that had the balls to just ask for it, whilst shredding due process - are, well, who he is.

Self-proclaimed 2.0 status aside, worrying signs of that problematic unselfaware hubris remain. The guy who thought he was going to ride into Dodge City and change things all by hisself didn't even know what he didn't know then. He has never grasped important nuances. Driving a city this size on a learner's permit is dangerous egotism. And he's still more than a little hung up on how important being a 'multimillionaire' makes him - in multiple statements. (Read 'em if ya have the stomach.)

It takes more than a bunch of hired mouthpieces who are all about an election-year surface wax & buff to change the fact of a man whose flaws are deeply embedded in his personality. Four more years of Larry has a very high probability of being four more years of the same, no matter what he - or the backroom - think they're floggin'.

Item: 95+ to run for city council

Fair enough. We need some new faces in the electoral race. But if they all show up in the same teensy-weensy car, I'm leavin'...

House of Representatives

Who knew the U.S. election would be fought not only in Ohio and Florida, but on Bay Street in our own Centretown? Perhaps, just weeks ago, colourful Dion and Harper posters hung in rowhouse windows somewhere in Washington, driving a most Canadian wedge between unparliamentary neighbours.

First Feline of Florence

Wise and whiskered
In his element
Oblivious to mantras, miscues and meltdowns
Far from the hustings
Light orange gelato stripes listen
For the sounds of cork
Rubbing against glass
Footsteps on slow-travelled stone
And whispers in the piazza
So blissfully unaware
Of John Baird's hair

Cabinet secrets indeed...

Can the election get any more boring? The eye-glazing ennui sent me scurrying to the observatory library to dig up these little-known but fascinating facts about Canadian politics:

1. Historians believe William Lyon Mackenzie King wrote a final but now lost volume of his famous diaries. Known cryptically among scholars as "Tranche 21," it has never surfaced. But King did mention the volume in at least two letters penned shortly before his death. In one of these missives, King suggests he fabricated stories in the earlier volumes about séances and conversations with his dog to dispel the notion he was tremendously dull.

2. Sir John A. Macdonald's fondness of drink is well documented. But his true weakness was pie. During whistle-stop campaign tours, Macdonald insisted that a fresh-baked pastry -- preferably blueberry or strawberry -- be waiting on the train platform, to be lustily consumed immediately after his public addresses. He even travelled with a personal pastry chef. During the 1891 campaign, the chef fell ill in northern Ontario. Party minions were left scrambling to ensure a suitable pie was ready for the stop in Kenora, Ont., and sent frantic telegraph messages to the kitchen at Rideau Hall in Ottawa for advice. Nervous aides feared the crust would be too soggy or, even worse, too flaky, sending Sir John A. into another of his drunken tirades.

3. In the late 19th century, men in sparsely populated western Canada were allowed as many as three votes: one for themselves, and up to two others for their livestock -- either two head of cattle, or one cow and one sheep. Several years later, women got the vote.

4. The Green Party's campaign signs are completely edible. Coming in three flavours -- mango, pomegranate and rhubarb -- each certified-organic sign contains more protein than the average veggie burger.

5. All of Environment Minister John Baird's toupées are hand-woven from imported chinchilla fur. A special order-in-council was signed last year to allow a dozen of the Andean rodents, which face extinction, to be quietly brought into Canada. They are raised at a secret location in Baird's Ottawa riding.

Images: Sir John A.: Politics, Polls and Pastry, Nofifththing Press, 1976; Cows: www.rampantgames.com/