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.
The most amazing thing about the new prime minister of Canada is that he can't read. We have had, allowed, strange prime ministers before. It was a tired joke that Jean Chretien was the only person in the country who couldn't speak either of the two official languages. Mackenzie King, never married, as we know used to use sances to speak not only to his dead mother but his dead dog. Pierre Trudeau, who gave the middle finger to voters in Salmon Arm from his railway car, told an opposition MP in the Commons to eff off, then fibbed that he said "fuddle-duddle". Sir John A., who liked the gargle a little too much, at a long out-door speech on a too-hot afternoon, had imbibed a tad too much, turned his back on his audience and chucked up his cookies. "And that," he declared as he turned to his listeners, wiping his mouth off on his sleeve, "is what I think of my opponent's platform!" But never before, we can recall, have we had a billionaire prime minister who apparently can't read. This scribbler, unfortunately, cannot speak French. In a one-room schoolhouse in Hearne, Saskatchewan, they strangely did not teach that. The scribbler doesn't go, unwisely, to Quebec as much as he used to when he was an Ottawa Press Gallery regular. (And the Southam office wit would pronounce: "So, Foth, you off for a weekend in Montreal once again to tap the pulse of the Quebec voter in the garden restaurant at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel?" Very funny. All true.) The only point is that some two years ago, without speaking French, the scribbler knew there was a massive scam in the Quebec advertising sponsorship fandango. The Toronto Globe and Mail has been writing about it for two years. You couldn't go into a restaurant in Ottawa and connect with the usual suspects without being told about the boondoggle. And the new prime minister of Canada, who ran the country's money as finance minister, who killed the deficit and as the senior Quebec minister plotted for nine years to get into 24 Sussex Drive, never knew about it? What planet are we living on? The new prime minister of Canada who can't read, can see no evil or hear no evil, now resembles the police chief in Casablanca who was shocked Ð shocked! Ð to find out there was gambling going on in the night club. The new prime minister is now making the same mistake as George Bush is making. Before the age of television, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the only four-term president in the world's greatest democracy, had the answer to communications with the masses. See 'Soothing' P.# Con't from P.# Every Saturday morning, with his little dog Fala beside him, he had a "fireside chat" on radio with America. The entire U.S. nation stopped for those 15 minutes, and everybody absorbed his soothing, confident words as he brought his nation out of the Depression and then into war after Pearl Harbour. That was leadership. He only had to talk to his flock once a week. They knew there would be next week. Television, of course, has revolutionized politics. But neither Paul Martin nor George Bush have learned how to use it. They are in our face too much. Dubya Bush has recently revealed that he doesn't read the papers and doesn't watch TV; he relies on his top aides to tell him what it is important. What they don't have the guts Ð or the brains Ð to tell him is that he's on TV too much. Used to be that while watching the football game, you waited for the commercials, and then went to the loo. Now, when Dubya appears once again, almost every day, you've heard it all before and can go to the loo. PM Paul, the innocent who didn't know nuffin' has the same problem, allowing unknown housewives in rural Alberta to beat him up on Cross-Country Checkup, vowing to cross the country in sack-cloth and ashes, apologizing, apologizing, denying the things he must have known. As one Opposition MP devastatingly told him: "If you're blameless, you must be clueless." No PM should have to be insulted that way. Rise about it. Think FDR. If you look at the Canadian best-seller list in any paper or magazine, you will see that still hanging in the top-10 (while Lawrence Martin's good second volume on Jean Chretien has disappeared) is Geoffrey Stevens' fine book, The Player, the life of my dear late friend Dalton Camp. He details how Camp, a brainy advertising executive, arranged the campaigns that elected premiers in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Manitoba and Ontario and Ð surprise! Ð got a bundle of contracts from those guys once in power. That's the way the system works, and always has. Anyone who attempts to claim the Quebec boondoggle is something new needs to be walked off to the zoo Ð or perhaps take reading lessons. X x x OLD JOKE NOW RELEVANT What's the difference between Bill Clinton, George Bush and Jane Fonda? Jane's been to Vietnam.2/23/2004
