A rchive Date
[ 09-12-2002 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/jenkinson.html
Stop lecturing, Jean and retire already!
By MICHAEL JENKINSON -- Edmonton Sun
December 9, 2002
He lives in a taxpayer funded mansion, has a taxpayer funded, chauffeur driven car, and manipulates the process to buy himself a brand new taxpayer funded Challenger jet so he can get around the country and the world in style. And Prime Minister Jean Chretien says I'm supposed to drive less and turn the heat down?
No offence, sir, but if you weren't such a complete and utter embarrassment to this country, I might actually be offended by this ridiculous drivel.
Instead, I'm outraged. The PM flies into Edmonton last week for a speech to a group of well-heeled Liberals who drove their expensive luxury cars and giant, gas-guzzling SUVs to a posh hotel, and has the nerve to lecture us used-car driving, paycheque-to-paycheque living working stiffs on the sacrifices we're going to have to make once the Liberals start implementing the Kyoto accord.
No problem jetting all over the world
Here's a guy who is going to retire on a pension that will be more than 90% of ordinary Canadians will ever make in salary in their lives, who has a giant staff available to him at his beck and call and apparently has absolutely no problem jetting all over the world to glad-hand foreign politicians, but heaven forbid he ever set foot in Alberta for anything other than collecting cheques from Liberal faithful, and he's going to tell us to turn the heat down and drive less?
Hey, Jean: when you actually have to work for a living, pay for your own mortgage, buy your own vehicles and, you know, have to make the choice between fixing the car or the hot-water tank, rather than continue to suck on the taxpayer teat for the sole purpose of inflating your own ego, then maybe, just maybe, you'll earn the right to tell other Canadians how to live.
Our current federal leadership is enough to start making one nostalgic for the governing style of those crazy Roman emperors who only demanded they be worshipped like gods.
And you can only imagine how good I feel these days about the fact the Liberals have no real Kyoto plan, particularly after the auditor general helpfully pointed out last week that the gun registry - also, as it turns out in hindsight, implemented without a real plan - is going to cost Canadians more than $1 billion by 2005, a cost overrun of some 43,000%, which is astonishing even by the accounting standards of the Liberals.
So frankly, I don't believe a single word uttered by the government that the implementation is going to be fair or balanced or equitable or anything. It will be confused, directionless, expensive, bureaucratic, maddening and utterly futile - just like the gun registry.
The Liberals are scheduled to ratify Kyoto tomorrow in the House of Commons. Not surprisingly, our two local Edmonton Grits, Anne McLellan and David Kilgour, have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they'd make really good Borg - no more than cogs in the machine of the Liberal collective.
They say they're concerned
Oh sure, they both move their mouths and say things like they've got concerns about the plan and stuff, but today, they'll stand up in the House of Commons like the other 160-odd Liberal sheep and vote in favour of an international treaty that most of them certainly haven't read, for which they have no plan to implement, and for which they have no idea of the cost.
Except the PM, of course. If we just turn down the heat and drive less, everything will be fine. And if we really crank the heat down and park our cars all winter, I'm sure that will cut down on enough greenhouse gas emissions to balance out what his limousines and Challenger jets spew into the atmosphere in his never-ending campaign to carve a legacy out of his sad 10 years as prime minister.
Do I sound bitter? Damn right I'm bitter. Chretien is a tired, meandering old man whose authority to govern this country has vanished, yet the weak-kneed Liberals don't even have the intestinal fortitude to finish pushing him over the side and send him off to his gold-plated retirement earlier than planned.
Not that I think Paul Martin is going to be a whole lot better, but he can't be any worse than our present prime minister, can he?
Can he?
Michael Jenkinson can be reached by e-mail at mj@the-newsroom.com His homepage is at http://www.the-newsroom.com
Letters to the editor should be sent to letters@edm.sunpub.com
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