You've been warned

Barking up the Big E-Bike Ban

Yesterday, the National Capital Commission moved to ban E-bikes -- at least honkin' big ones -- from recreational paths. Public consultations, fines for perps, and everythin'.

Don't get me wrong. I love e-rides. One of the biggest hoots I've had in the past year was hijacking somebody's robo-mower for an exhilarating l'il motocross through Greely. Hilarity with a minimal carbon footprint! I digress.

Normally, us coyotes see the NCC's double-mittsful of planners as, ummm, Double-Bureaucratic Twits. Like many bureaucrats and planners, removed from the real world. Except by about times two. Maybe squared. More likely cubed.

But on the Big E-Bike Ban, I'm gonna go all Randall Denley on ya, and agree with the twits, maybe actually be one myself. I reluctantly concede that they might get it right by accident. Sometimes.

The cycles in the NCC's crosshairs are the ones that look and act pretty much like full-fledged motor scooters.

Dealers of these things say they're being targetted unfairly. And kinda ignore the fact that like their gas-snorting kin, they're plenty heavy and drive at city traffic speeds. Sure, e-scooters sport pedals, but they're evolutionary vestigial tails -- near-fictional afterthoughts to skootch owners past motor scooter license laws on a technicality. Honest owners will admit their spiffy e-rides are way too heavy for such sweaty nonsense.

I mostly blame bicycle brain. Cyclists that think they're not on real vehicles, and so are not subject to real road rules.

Bicycle brainiacs do all sortsa crap. Elbowing walkers on sidewalks, blowing off stop signs and red lights with that cute li'l semicircular sidestreet deke that abets the private fiction that they haven't done anything illegal or dangerous. On recreational paths, bicycle brain causes 'em to barely nod to the, ummm, strong suggestion to ring their bells when they're overtaking unaware pedestrians in speedy silence. Even if there are only a thousand or so in the city right now, calling what amount to full-on scooters that weigh a couple hundred pounds and go 50 or 60 kph, "bicycles" and letting 'em loose on recreational paths is just askin' for disjointed tails. Or worse. And I know from disjointed tails.

So just this once I tip my semi-mythical hat to the bureaucratic twits. Bask in your coyote kudos! We know it can't last...

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.