rabble.ca Canadian federal election blog

Of dogs and debates…

by Brian McKenna

The election campaign is sometimes illuminated with flashes that are both comical and revealing. For weeks a story has circulated at dog runs in the west end of Montreal that Dion showed up with his trusty husky, Kyoto. It seems that Kyoto is more prop than pet. Dion did some campaigning and after a bit, left the dog run. “Mr. Dion, Mr. Dion,” shouted some astonished dog owners. “You took the wrong dog.”

The English television debate is unfolding as I write this, but last night’s French language debate says a lot about the country and the influence of Pierre Trudeau. Here were five party leaders sitting around a table that resembled a miniature hockey rink and taking turns on the ice firing pucks at each other. – debating some of the fundemental issues of the day in their second language. Its bracing to think back 40 years and see how far the country has come, from the days that people got away with complaining of having French on one side of their cereal boxes’ “Well, turn it around,” replied an exasperated Trudeau to one such complainer.

The other point is that the word “sovereignty” did not come up once, despite the fierce presence of a party leader whose raison d’etre is the break up of the country. But facing a pension of $132,000 a year , that sixties Maoist, Gilles Duceppe has lost all his fire on that issue. But he was masterful in taking his hockey stick and clubbing Harper over the head time and time again on the culture cuts, as well as putting 14 year olds in jail. Nobody made the connection to the child soldier, Omar Khadr, being held in America’s torture camp at Gitmo.