the Walnut Diary

22 DECEMBER:  OMIGOSH!  DID STEPHEN HARPER READ THIS COLUMN???  HES…MARCHING TO THE LEFT, JUST LIKE IN THE QUOTE!!!

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I’m going nuts trying to find the correct version of the following quotation:

The road to power in Canada is to march to the left while claiming to march to the right, and to adapt to every eventuality while proudly proclaiming that you will never change.

I think John Diefenbaker, Dalton Camp or Peter C. Newman  said it, and it’s at the heart of my argument, so I would very much like to nail it down.

My pitch is that I trust Gilles Duceppe a lot more than Stephen Harper because Duceppe has long demonstrated pragmatic behaviour in the House of Commons, despite his claims to the contrary.  I believe he will go along with the coalition in order to do a good job.

Stephen Harper gained re-election on a promise of pragmatic leadership, but as soon as the opportunity arose, he tore off to the right in a spectacularly un-Canadian manner, thereby upsetting everyone to no good purpose.  Such a man cannot be trusted.

Laurence Peter once said:  Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.

Such is certainly the case in Canada at the moment.  The less informed the speaker, the more certain he or she is about the current situation in Ottawa.  Astonishingly, most accept Harper’s argument that it must be illegal to overthrow an elected, minority government.  Only the educated few realize that this is a normal function of the parliamentary system, however seldom used.