So you're STILL voting Liberal...

Hey, who can blame you? After all, Stephen Harper doesn't smile. Also, he's going to sell us out to the Americans, put toll booths in hospital waiting rooms, and torch every gay bar in Canada (after filling them with abortion doctors). It's all right there in the Conservative Party of Canada platform: you've read it. Haven't you?

It could be argued, actually, that the only person in Canadian politics with any reason to smile these days is Jack Layton. Here's a man who, by dint of third-party status and Paul Martin's colossal ego, has managed to hold our government hostage to his socialist demands. Then again, letting Jacky-boy drive the bus isn't translating into increased support for his New Democrats, so even Layton can't be grinning too widely.
The most recent polls show Grit and Tory support to be pretty close to dead even. That will, of course, change: it has before. In a week or maybe two, Ontarians in particular will have either forgotten all about the sponsorship scandal or at least forgiven their beloved Liberals for committing it. In fact, the forgiveness is already spreading. A letter in today's Toronto Star suggests that given the size of the federal budget, the amount mislaid in AdScam is really rather picayune. I heard something similar from a colleague at work (who, oddly, identified himself as a Conservative voter!)
Look, the amount of money involved in AdScam is far from the point. The point is that the Liberals have clearly been in power far too long. I'd say the same of any other party: thirteen years is clearly well beyond the shelf life of almost any politician...they go rancid, and things like AdScam become, in the unforgettable words of Jean Chretien, "the normal operation".
If the sponsorship was the only blight on an otherwise exceptional record of governance, I'd be inclined to let Bytown bygones be...but instead this scandal is merely the latest and greatest in a catalogue. Flip the pages and you will find sordid illustration to prove my point: Shawinigate; the HRDC boondoggle; the bloated and completely useless gun registry; a justice system in tatters and a health care system to match...the list goes on.
Martin has gone to great lengths to try and convince us that the Liberals involved in AdScam were yesterday's Liberals. Notwithstanding the image of Martin leading the House of Commons in cheering for Chretien, our Prime Minister was second in command during the whole mess. Despite Gomery's whitewashing, Paul Martin is in my eyes anything but clean.
And the Liberals, it seems, have learned just one thing from Gomery: not to get caught next time. To that end, they've crafted a tragicomedy called Bill C-11, which purports to protect whistleblowers and in fact does a much better job protecting the guilty. Check it out here .

Under the new legislation, if you are in the public sector and you have reason to suspect that people around you are up to no good, you can report your suspicion to your boss. If it's your boss who's up to no good--as is often the case--you can report that to an independent complaints commissioner. The commissioner will then take your information, investigate it, and report back, not to an open Parliament, but rather to your own department head, who is basically free to turn the report into a paper airplane if s/he wants to.
Not only that, you're prohibited from going public yourself. Your complaint and its results can be sealed for at least five years: conveniently, the length of a government's term in office. And when I say "sealed", I mean sealed: the Access to Information Act is powerless against this legislation.
In this way will the next AdScam go entirely unreported. You have to admire the gall of the Liberal Party of Canada: their solution to being caught with their hands in the cookie jar is to hide the cookie jar.
But vote for these crooks again, Ontario...because they're smiling crooks, and they love you.