The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
"Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat." Ð Winston Churchill Churchill, born at Blenheim Palace in 1874, graduated from Sandhurst and with the Nile expeditionary force fought hand-to-hand against the Dervishes at Omdurman. As a London newspaper correspondent in the Boer War in South Africa, he was captured in an ambush but successfully escapedÑleaping from a trainÑwith a 25-pound price on his head. In 1900 he became a Conservative MP for Oldham. By 1906, he had his differences with his Tory friends and crossed the floor at Westminster to join the Liberals, becoming colonial under-secretary and from 1908 to 1910 president of the Board of Trade. He joined the army in 1915 to fight in France in the First World War. He became First Lord of the Admiralty and in 1917 under Lloyd George became the minister of munitions, concentrating on the production of thousands of tanksÑlargely his own "brain-child." By 1924, he crossed the floor once more, to the Conservative side, where until 1929 he was Chancellor of the Exchequer until, of course, he became prime minister in 1940 and became the greatest man of our last century. All this, naturally, brings up our present loony political situation in this juvenile country where in our pizza parliament everyone is fleeing for somewhere else, indicating that we have too many parties with participants with nothing to believe in. Scott Brisson, the bright but rather flaky Nova Scotia kid, one day is seriously considering running for leadership of the new slightly flaky Conservative party, accepts a Paul Martin bribe and ends up in a secure blanket as part of the Martin "parliamentary secretary" envelope that is as big, if not bigger, than the Chretien gang he denounced. Brisson, the only openly gay Tory in Parliament, is ferociously denounced on TV by Svend Robinson, the only openly gay member of the NDP caucus. Keith Martin, the unmarried member of the Canadian Alliance, announces he will run as an independent in his Victoria seat in the spring election. Fuelling all the speculation that he wants into the Liberal tent. The only Quebec MP in the Conservative "melange" announces he doesn't want to have anything to do with the new mixmaster. And Belinda Stronach, bless her soul, whose father tried to become prime minister by running for a Liberal seatÑand losingÑis now trying to become PM under the new-Tory banner. Dalton Camp, born a Liberal, decided later on to become the most-hated Tory in the land by killing off Dief. Jack Horner, a ferocious Alberta Conservative, turned Liberal and of course lost his seat. Pierre Trudeau, a youthful socialist and labour-union champion who hated Duplessis, turned Grit and became, in three months, a PM. And Sheila Copps, stupidly left out of the Paul Martin cabinet, is now allegedly flirting with the clever Jack Layton invitation to join his rising NDP. And there is Chuck Strahl, the boy from downtown Chilliwack, B.C., who has successfully been a Reform MP, a Canadian Alliance MP, then a member of the breakaway group that sort-of tried to be a Unite-the-Right group and is now, sort-of, a leadership candidate for the new Regressive-Convertible party but has decided not to run because he can't understand the rules, and anyway, doesn't have the money. Does this sound like a future government? Winston, we suggest, would be most amused. X x x AND ANOTHER THING: It turns out that the Peter MacKay "leadership" campaign for the Conservative leader got a contribution of $100,000 from the Magna organization. Sounds like a little smelly to me. X x x AND A SECOND THING: Almost everyone I talk to remarks on how Paul Martin's early honeymoon has got off to such a disappointing launch. Especially his obsequious, grinning photos with Dubya in Mexico. The most chilling description, some years ago, came from Doug Fisher, the dean of the Ottawa Press Gallery. "Ever notice," he wrote, "that when Paul Martin smiles, his eyes don't." X x x QUOTE OF THE MONTH: Paul O'Neill, millionaire businessman who was George Bush's Treasury Secretary being fired after two years, in his new book described the president's conduct in White House cabinet meetings: "A blind man talking to a roomful of deaf people."
