Harper-land

If there’s one thing apparent about the Stephen Harper Conservative government, it is that they will throw everyone and everything over board as long as they can stay in government.

The most recent example of that is the loss of the election to the United Nations Security Council. Suddenly, after nearly five years of ignoring the United Nations, Harper finally managed to get there in time to promote Canada as a worthy candidate for the Security Council, the most important body within the U.N. It became, for all appearances, his number one foreign policy objective; however, as you will recall, in a classic measure of how much importance U.N. delegates attached to his speech, he spoke to a nearly empty Assembly Hall.

So it came down to a contest between Germany, Portugal and Canada. Germany easily won the first round of voting and Portugal had a comfortable majority over Canada although not the required number of votes to win the second seat. Rather than be subjected to the embarrassment of losing, the orders came from Ottawa to our U.N. delegation to pull out of the race. Turns out the cute little bottles of maple syrup that the Canadians distributed to the U.N. delegates didn’t make much difference. (They should have tried handing out bottles of booze like they used to at home in elections!)

Of course, now the spin doctors take over claiming that it wasn’t really a loss since the position on the Security Council wasn’t that important after all. Then it became a case of our foreign policy being better than many of the voting members anyway and the U.N. has more than its share of corruption. Hmmmm … Parliament Hill renovations anyone?

Then, in a true measure of the ethical integrity of Stephen Harper and his minions, they tried to blame it all on Michael Ignatieff, saying that his comments about Canada perhaps not deserving a Security Council seat really cast their ship of fortune upon the shoals. Wow! On the one hand it seems ludicrous; on the other hand, it shows the enormous respect which they feel Ignatieff must enjoy on the world stage which clearly Harper does not enjoy. Will the real Prime Minister please stand up?