It is gratuitous anniversary day at the Tuque Souq, as this our 200th post of all time coincides with the one-year anniversary of the Great Canadian Putsch of 2008, that startling palace coup de quoi that had great multitudes of our citizenry storming the Parliament Hill rumour mill for a week and scouring Wikipedia for revelatory factoids on a guy called Byng.For those readers born since, the Great Canadian Putsch started when Prime Minister Stephen Harper tried to enact a Machiavellian scheme to tie public funding of political parties to success at the ballot box, a plan that would have bankrupted the Liberals and Bloc on the heels of a costly election season. The PM's ungallant hubris and hypocrisy caused the wax in his wings to melt, as the 3 opposition parties united to unseat him with a confidence motion, a check-mate move that caused Harper to destroy the playing board by introducing a long-lost million-dollar word: Prorogation.
Convincing the Governor General was all it took for Harper to KO the rabble rousers and suspend the government before it could vote him down. Then, supremely satisfied that he had crushed all before him and sounded the final bell of his closest rival, Harper gave himself a seven-week vacation.In the interim, the united coalition of the Bloc, the NPD and the Grits fell into disrepair, a condition in which it remains to this day.
So what did we learn from all of this, besides the realization that even Canadian politics can be sexy if you cinch up all its parliamentary flab and down a fifth of rye before date night?
Probably nothing. Maybe it's for the best. Politics is too serious a matter to be left to politicians, whose entertainment value returns much higher yields than their integrity.
From the Tuque Souq archives:
Stephen Harper stung by Qaddafi snub
Stephen Harper's Algerian Wine Collection
Israel Lobby to Harper: Do you still love us?
Tories to Jews: Have we got some Nachas for you!
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