Mike Duffy on the taxpayers' dime

Some of us were knocking idly around the echoing expanses of the mothballed ESI product development labs over the weekend, raking out the mountain of junk mail under the slot by the door and checking to see if the little red blinky lights on the smoke alarms were still being irritating enough, when the Research Director alerted us that we were in in midst of what may only be called a serendipitous convergence of seemingly-disparate events.

First, Week Three of the Senator Mike Duffy Trial of the Decade (TM) was cannonballing toward us like a watermelon on a waterslide. And now the Royal Canadian Mint is urging people to enter its keen-o Design a Coin for Canada's 150th Anniversary contest online. The web page of which loads aggravatingly slowly, just so you know before you click on that link. Clicked already? Oops. Sorry! I digress. Where were we? Oh yeah:

"I'm kind of surprised nobody has entered a Mike Duffy on the Taxpayers' Dime design yet," said the Research Director, staring pointedly at us through his safety reading glasses.

We'd already started doodling something to celebrate Nickelback's decade of artistic integrity and photo ops in which their lead singer and the current PM shamelessly try to use each other for publicity purposes. But hey. We know a better idea when we hear it. And the Research Director has lasers. We picked out some different-coloured crayons and got to work.

So here you go, Royal Canadian Mint. It's a honey. You're welcome. And, uh, Canada? All we ask is that when it comes time, you remember which trained economic snake-oil marketer it was who put Senator Duffy on your public dime and told him to have at it, especially in the small matter of billing ya for purely partisan events, in the first place. . .

Due to recent events. . .

The Unbearable Lie-ness of Being Stephen J. Harper

Let me start by digressing: a new low, even for me. My Uncle Donny was a flake, even by coyote standards. Hell, prairie chickens thought he was clueless, which you'd know to be pure insult if you'd ever seen one of their Mensa meetings.

Anyway, Uncle Donny used to obsess about climbing those skeletal old paddle blade windmills you once saw on most prairie farms. The kind that pumped water into cattle watering tanks and such, on any number of home quarters. He figured if he could get up high enough, being able to see further than anything else would be an advantage.

Dogs ain't really climbers. With supercanine effort, he could scrabble about a third of the way up the tower. Then his fear of heights would kick in, his brain would go "tilt", he'd have a vertigo attack and fall off. Usually on his head.

"There goes Don Coyote, tilting off windmills again," the prairie chickens would say.

Here (finally, you might say...) is the point: sometimes, despite Uncle Donny's kinda-concussed example, I too feel the urge to tilt off windmills. It's a coyote thing.  And careful readers of this space know I've tilted at The Right Honorable Prime Minister Stephen Joseph Harper since his first minority government.

We'd like to welcome a recent crapload of national pundits and columnists to this soiree. Because, hey, better late than never. Us semimythical coyotes have been well-placed to see plenty of cases of prairie populism. We expect to see more. They're all characterized by true believers, chugging deep from a heady brew of opportunism, mendacity and batshit-crazy. And us coyotes are of the considered opinion that of the lowdown, lyin' rattlesnakes that have led these movements, the PM is right, ummm, down there.

Now he, and this week's human furniture up at the PMO, wish us to think that a highly controlling PM was about the only person in the PMO who was not party to the strangely large and desperate scheme to pay off Senator-in-Disgrace Mike Duffy to, maybe, shut up and put up.

Since Duffy loudly and serially did not, everything about the PM's story has, ummm, evolved. Except for that one item about him having nothing to do with it. Kinda odd, for a guy obsessed with talking point discipline. And an unholy titanic sales job is going into making us buy this talking point above all others. I expect the calculation is, that the waxed, buffed, yet still-strangely-unattractive face of the Harper Government must cling to plausible deniability, no matter how implausible, for the party to survive.

For a man with Mr. Harper's record of high moral rectitude and avowed strong views on openness, transparency, accountability and responsibility in government, I'm sure such disappointing evidence of all this unethical lying and chicanery among his hand-picked political and administrative types would be so unbearable that he would quit politics in disgust. Except, ummm, oh, wait...!

At some point, I wonder if any of the cast (surely of thousands by now...) that have been forcibly frog-marched off the Plank, or the large stock of pliant, fresh noobs lining up for their turn,  might begin to think that the party would actually fare better without the guy who's doing the shoving.

Yeah, he brought 'em to the promised land. But they're now well past that particular hallelujah.  Are they not at least beginning to wonder if anybody will be left to be the party except him?  I mean, after he knifes 'em all in the back to save his face, his implausible deniability, and remaining shreds of his reputation?

From where I sit, about a third of the way up this old windmill, the guy looks willing to kill the party he leads, to keep keep his illusions of self-respect. Kinda like another lyin' rattlesnake oil purveyor who, a couple of decades back, totally trashed an earlier mark of Tories. Whom Mr. Harper, if memory serves, froze out when he started to smell like tainted goods. Yet again.

Against type, them true believers might want to take notes and learn.  In case.

Just sayin'...

Dean Del Mastro: MP for Peterborough/Orange Sauce

How the mighty have fallen. If, by "mighty", we mean a guy who thought he was a Mastro of the Universe because he once was allowed to work himself into a regular thespian froth during parliamentary question period, reading angrily incoherent talking points scripted and handed to him by those clever partisan children who work in the Prime Minister's office.

Then, last year, Dean Del Mastro was launched heavily, nay, gracelessly into the news for something that looked a lot like hanky-panky with his election financing. (Standard disclaimer: not proven in a court of law, still under investigation, blah blah, blah.) The welcome upshot was, suddenly, lo, not a peep from the Mastro anymore.

As in all cases where a Harpo Tory has been observed with a webbed mitt not unadjacent to some cookie jar or other, everybody but the Mastro was out there skatin' into the corner with elbows, shoulders, knees, (and likely Don Cherry's mouth) flappin', while Dean was roped and gagged, schtum, down to the bench by imperial fiat. Or something much like it.

For practical purposes, this named him as a bad boy in all but name. If only the cut-from-a-very-similar-dark-blue-polyester Pierre Poilievre could, finally, be similarly gagged, it might be a personal coyote dream come true. I digress. Not sorry ay-tall!

Anyway, yesterday the old Mastro apparently decided he'd spent enough time banished to Coventry (look it up), and made his comeback move by trying to smear a Postmedia reporter who's been watching all sortsa election improprieties rather closely.

Then, maybe because old habits die hard when there's muddy backsplatter, he denied he'd ever done it and blamed it on the PM's office. After which, possibly due to a stern talking-to by someone who might be even more twitchy about deniability than himself, he issued a lame-o retraction in which he sorta took responsibility but still sorta denied a personal hand in the sorry episode, instead sorta trying to pin the actual wording back onto the PMO, much like a paper tail on a birthday-party ass donkey.

Yes, it's complicated. But the dumb-coyote short version is that Dean Del Mastro seems to waddle and quack a lot more like some unhappy variety of duck every time he tries to splorp back out of that suckin' black ooze at the bottom of Little Lake. . .

Harper: starting to wear that robocall thing...?

In all of the old and new media characterizations of the prime minister, Stephen Harper - including, but not restricted to, suggestions that he is a hyperpartisan, ethically-agnostic, neo-conservative, humourless, neo-controlfreakazoid, scheming, democratically-challenged, micromanaging, vindictive, teflon-milkshake-chugging, fiber-glass-haired robot, there was never much indication that it was the robot part that might take him out.

It has so far merely been the stuff of This Hour Has 22 Minutes satire.

But if I read aright the minor tsunami of e-ink rushing onto the shores of the rapidly-developing robocall scandal, he might actually be wearin' this one. It seems so obvious now, with even a short weekend's worth of retrospect. All the best reference works - yallerback science fiction paperbacks, graphic novels, comix, movies and futuristic role-playing games - often recommend fighting fire with fire.

Or in this case, ill-intentioned robots with ill-intentioned robots.

Although us semimythical coyotes hail from an ancient, far more animistic age, we try to stay on top of breaking trends. But we confess our ancient fuzzy-assed selves to be as flummoxed as anybody to find that the dumbest, scummiest, least-loved robot in modern life - demon dialer, robocaller,what you will - appears to have become, inadvertantly, the unlikeliest of unlikely heroes of the piece, rattling the relentless grey course of the uber-robot currently in charge of the country. He's probably telling the truth when he says he didn't know anything about it, but the weight of past evidence certainly suggest he actively fostered a,ummm, certain atmosphere and mindset among his partisan minions.

Irony abounds.

One can only imagine the mindset of the untold legions of spin doctors and strategists who've burrowed into the pickled oak wainscotting up at the PMO and PCO like a King-Hell carpenter ant infestation. They followed the standard playbook, fer cripes' sake, admitting no guilt but making the required ritual sacrifice. In this case, a low-level, hyper-enthusiastic little tory shit somehow fell under the party's increasingly bloody bus for unspecified, but highly-implied reasons. It should've satisfied the party base, and, really who cared about anybody else? They're all liberals and/or child pronographers anyway.

But the howls of the torch-bearing rabble under the ramparts got louder instead. Many who in the past could be relied upon to defend such behaviour have taken offence and started yowling themselves. It all appears to be too endemic, organized and well-bankrolled to be the work of one half-smart, if misguided, kid.

Seems you can pull a lot of fast ones in pursuit of partisan goals these days. Ignoring the traditions and laws of parliament has lately been seen as "welcome decisiveness" among a certain goal-oriented crowd, as if it was a good thing. But suddenly, it's seeming that if you appear to have really screwed with the bases of democracy enough times... well, then. Pattern recognition kicks in. Things Change.

We coyotes seen lotsa changes in our time. We're keepin' our yellow eyes on this one with more than our usual interest...

$250K to transform 3 ? The RCMP needs us!

Y'know, this front page item totally arrested me (heh...) as I pawed thru this morning's Petfinder: the RCMP is set to pay $220,000 to send three deputy minister-level guys to counselling in Arizona, in hopes of transforming their organization, particularly its sliding public image. Factoring in travel, taxes, meals and booze, they'll likely sock out $80K to $85K to ship each warm body out for, ummm, transformational counselling. Which will then, of course, drip through the RCMP org chart like wholesome milk through a bowl of Grape Nuts...

I have no quibble with transformational counselling. What with tasers sizzling amok; questionable training; organizational arrogance and rot; PR stonewalling and BS*; and all-round not-getting-it-ness, the Mounties lately have been driving their spiffy squad cars in the PR ditch more often than not. They need to change.

What gripes me is the fact that we're outsourcing this lucrative gravy train ummm, serious and delicate matter, to US counsellors...

I mean, just yesterday, Aggie was saying that our long-term plans to (somehow) make tunza bux off this blog and never work again, were in serious peril. This story is karma!

I'd like to note that we ESIs are long-time experts in both personal and systemic transformation. For $85K a pop, I'm pretty sure we can offer the RCMP a competitive service. And it shouldn't stop at three guys. Oh, no. In fact, we recommend our comprehensive counselling package for all 25,000-odd sworn and unsworn members of the force.

According to my calculator, this rings up at a touch over $2 billion. Give or take a few bucks. Almost enough, I think, to keep us in the style to which we would love to become accustomed...

We have one condition: our fees are non-refundable. Because, while we, as professional counsellers, would do our utmost to create conditions for transformative change, it's up to the Mounties themselves to (heh, again....) cop to the responsibility. They've got to really want to change...

* Blue Serge...

Tracking the mint's missing gold

I happened by Mister Sloppy's place yesterday - okay, he happens to have air conditioning - and by way of breaking his grumpy Evil-Genius silence, mentioned the Mint's vanishing gold problem, and how the local Petfinder was just yesterday obsessing again about the strange silence of government, mint and red coated gendarme types.

Mister Sloppy snickered. My usually cast-iron coyote tummy clenched. That laugh is never good.

"Slop," I said, fearing the worst. "In your obsessive quest for world domination, you haven't sucked 15 million bucks' worth of gold into an improbability vortex? Or something?"

"I didn't need to," he cackled.

"Huh?" I can be a dimwitted doggy. Especially when it helps me enjoy nice cold air conditioning a bit longer.

"You know how the Tories - having such terrific heads for business - are all hot on selling off prime government assets at fire sale prices? To allegedly balance the government's books, even though it always loses major money?

"I was rummaging around a government network one night a coupla years back and sniffed out the fact that their brain trust had decided to flog the mint's extra gold inventory in secret. To - get this - one of those "We buy all of your used gold - no amount too large or too small" joints that advertise on late night cable channels. I hacked myself into a few emails as a discussion option, and incorporated myself as a cheap gold buyer the next day. Bought a few ads in throw-away tabloids and on cable to look legit. Hung out. Waited. The government showed up in no time!"

"Aaand?" I breathed.

"I drew up a contract they couldn't make head or tails of. Not that they ever make head or tails of anything," he snorted. "When the dust cleared, I had signatures on an airtight document assigning me fifteen million bucks in gold ingots and assorted refining scrap, purchased for the princely sum of thirty-seven dollars and fifty-two cents. Which, by the way, is actually about what most old gold places would have paid 'em. A buncha the backroom guys from the PMO are now so redfaced, all they wanna do is drop the whole story down a mine in Sudbury."

"Now, if you'll excuse me, I gotta pack." Mister Sloppy looked dreamy. "Maybe Switzerland. The ice cream in Zurich is fabulous this time of year."

"So you're taking a well-deserved break from planning world domination?" I said, hopefully. I've had enough Pepto-Bismol moments lately already, with Mayor Larry back.

Mister Sloppy cast an austere blue eye at me. "Of course not! The Large Hadron Collider is there, too..."

Stunned?

Many of you know that we of the Elgin Street Irregulars are big on lists of, ummm, five. If you don't, read our archives. You'll figure it out.

Some may also recall that I take a dimwitted quadruped's dim view of high voltage electrical discharges applied to living creatures. Especially since the Vancouver death of Robert Dziekanski after he was tasered - five times, it turns out - in October 2007.

With a full-on enquiry into the man's death, Taser International, cops in general and the RCMP in particular all seem to be heavily vested in denying that Tasers, police, Dziekanski and deadness are in any way linked. These may be honestly held opinions.

But I admit that my first uncharitable thought, when I heard about the Alzheimer's-like testimonial trend at the inquiry was, "Yeah, right. Stonewall away, guys...." Because, I reasoned, these talking points may also exist because if any of 'em did hint at regrettable liability, there could be legal and financial hell to pay, in Vancouver and elsewhere.

But faced with RCMP Commissioner Bill Elliot's plea for the public to walk a mile in his police force's spit-polished boots before rushing to judgement, I am now wondering about the real victims here. Could it be that the guys behind those electric stun guns really are victims, and worse off than Dziekanski?

Because after standing nearby while one of them pulled the trigger - did I mention, five times? - all of the Mounties present seem to have suffered catastrophic memory loss about the event. I don't wish to be uncharitable and suggest that they made their original statements under the mistaken assumption that no bystander had video-recorded the entire incident. Which would now place them in a position of having to explain why their statements and that video seem to part ways on several, ummm, crucial points...

No, we coyotes will take the high (voltage) road, and a charitable view of such memory loss. Obviously, the poor sunsabitches' neurons were fried by the weapon's electrical fallout. One weeps! To think of all the incidents in which police will be medically unable to remember why they zapped anybody! We could lose respect for the Mounties. And the legal system would surely descend into chaos...

Behold, the most Canadian photo ever

Canadian Museum of Civilization, Gatineau, Que., July 2007