Since a painting of Prime Minister Stephen Harper lounging nude on a chaise longue emerged on Friday (including all his emerging parts), reaction has been swift, and a little green at the gills. The painting by Kingston artist Margaret Sutherland, titled “”Emperor Haute Couture” (a reference to Hans Christian Andersen’s story of the Emperor with no clothes), drew a sniffy response from the PMO, mostly for the small dog lounging at Harper’s feet. “We’re not impressed,” tweeted spokesperson Andrew MacDougall. “Everyone knows the PM is a cat person.” Opposition reaction was cutting: “This is one case where I think we really do need a Conservative cover-up,” averred Liberal MP Scott Brison. Meanwhile, tweeter Paula Shuck summed up the response of the electorate: “Oh dear lord: may have to pluck eyes out now.”

Brace yourself, Ms. Shuck. After an exhaustive search, backofthebook.ca has uncovered — so to speak — a surprising number of other nude depictions of the Prime Minister. We offer a curated selection below:

“Harper on the Half Shell”:

“Harper and Eve”

“Harper Having Lunch”

“Harper: Boyhood Days”

“Harper and Yoko”

“Harper Descending a Staircase”

- Frank Moher

OK. So I was wrong.

When Christy Clark became the latest Con stooge to denounce Thomas Mulcair,  for simply pointing out that the Dutch Disease is killing our manufacturing sector, I said it could only mean one thing.

Big Oil and its Con puppets were scraping the bottom of the barrel.

But I forgot I was living in the sinister petro state of Harperland.

Where the bottom of the dirty oil barrel goes all the way to China.

And I forgot about the Con Senate, and particularly Pamela Wailin’ . . .

“This is a cheap political ploy to pit eastern citizens against those in the West. Will Mulcair next attack the lentil business, the wheat and grain producers who have long fed the world — or perhaps the potash industry that allows the poor to bolster their depleted farmland in overpopulated areas?

“It’s time for Mulcair to act like a Canadian.”

And that like the Con turkey Mike Duffy, Wallin is capable of saying ANYTHING.

I mean can you believe that? As if Big Lentil is as dangerous as Big Oil. As if Mulcair wasn’t right. As if telling the truth was a crime.

These diatribes against anyone who even acknowledges potential downsides or side effects of the bitumen boom seem to herald a new, dangerous tendency in Canada’s political culture. Opposing a bitumen-exporting pipeline in Canada these days makes you a foreign-financed subversive. And it seems that questioning the economic effects of the bitumen export strategy makes you equally seditious. I call this “energy McCarthyism,” and it should be rejected forcefully not just by those concerned with Canada’s de-industrialization and staples dependency, but by those worried about the quality of our democracy.

As if those Cons weren’t selling us out to foreign interests. As if Albertans haven’t been screaming at those damn Easterners for 40 years over the National Energy Program. Which did to Alberta what Harper’s oil pimp policies are doing to the rest of Canada.

Which explains why the Cons and the other Big Oil stooges are attacking Mulcair like piranhas. They know a killer issue when they see one. But why is Stephane Dion joining in the feeding frenzy?

Stéphane Dion, the former Liberal leader, says he turned down a proposal from advisors to accuse Prime Minister Stephen Harper of favouring Alberta and the oil sands industry during the 2008 election campaign because he feared it would harm national unity.

He said Mr. Mulcair is effectively “giving up” on much of Western Canada and, if he forms a government in 2015, risks having little or no representation from provinces like Alberta and Saskatchewan in his Cabinet.

Oh boy. When will he ever learn…

What Thomas Mulcair understands so well. He doesn’t have to win any seats in Alberta or Saskatchewan. All he has to do is win most of the seats in Ontario, British Columbia, and Quebec, and he will BURY the Cons in the Tar Sands.

Which is one of the reasons he’s looking like a winner, and thanks to people like Stephane Dion, the Liberals are going nowhere.

Liberal support in Canada is steadily slipping as the New Democrats and Tories continue to battle for the top spot, the results of an exclusive poll for Global News indicate.

While the Grits may say that their troubles lie in finding the right candidate to lead the party, Ipsos Reid’s Darrell Bricker suggests the party may be losing a distinct voice in the political arena.

“The problem they’ve got is that they’re having a hard time finding their place in a debate about economic issues,” Bricker told Global News.

Yup. Mulcair is ruthless, the kind of leader these times demand. 

He has found a mighty issue, the truth is on his side. That’s why the Cons are running scared.

For 40 years Alberta used regional alienation like a blunt weapon.

Now it’s our turn . . .

Gawd. What a horrible way to begin my day.

All I could think of was Stephen “Woody” Woodworth polishing his big teeth, and preparing for his big day.

Even my egg started to look like him, and I hardly dared boil it, in case it should hatch. For who knows when life begins eh?

But that’s OK. Because when I checked on Woody this evening, he had egg all over his face.

Conservative MP Stephen Woodworth’s motion proposing that a parliamentary committee study the legal definition of when life begins got zero support from MPs who debated it Thursday.

And to make matters even worse better, he was being whipped with a wet egg noodle by the gorilla from the military industrial complex Gordon O’Connor!!!!!

O’Connor said abortion is a serious decision for women to make and he wants all women to continue to live in a society where they can make that decision “without the threat of legal consequences.”

Although it must be said that old Gordo was clearly reading a speech written for him by the sinister thugs in the PMO. Because in all my years of watching Stephen Harper I’ve never seen him look so pale. Or sound so ridiculous.

The prime minister said party leaders do not have control over the motions introduced by MPs and that it’s “unfortunate” an all-party committee decided the motion is eligible for a vote.

He’s obviously still devastated by what happened to his beloved Wild Hog Party in Alberta. He offered his rabid base a bone, Woody bit him with his big teeth. So now he running scared, and wants to be known as a woman’s best friend.

Right.

Oh well. The struggle continues.

But the important thing is that today we WON. A lot of angry women, and their male allies, made sure the politicians heard their message. Women’s bodies are women’s bodies. And the days of shame and coat hangers are OVER.

So hooray for US!!!!!!!

As for old Woody, I can only imagine how he is feeling eh? Gordon, Gordon, et tu Brutus? Vic, Jason, hug me. WAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!

Lordy. I’d play “I am the Egg Man” if I thought it would cheer the old geezer up.

But since he believes that life begins at conception. Or somewhere between the cock-a-doodle doo and the egg.

I’m sure he’d prefer this one . . .

As a follow up to my earlier chart showing Steve’s Margin of Victory in ridings with the closest vote margins, I’ve adjusted it to include only the seven being contested in court for voter fraud and added two columns of polling data from an EKOS research paper based on a recent phone survey of 4797 voters. It compares 106 ridings where there were no reports of suspicious activity to the seven ridings where there was a lot — election phone calls made to voters to identify who they intended to vote for followed up by a call falsely telling them their polling station had moved.

Only one of them — Vancouver Island North — had an actual polling station change.

So according to the Ekos poll, if you lived in Winnipeg South Centre, for example, where the Cons took the riding by only 1.8% of the vote, you had a 71% chance of getting a phone call asking you who you were going to vote for. And if you subsequently got a follow-up call regarding polling stations, you had a 30% chance of being told your polling station had changed even though it hadn’t.

If however you lived in one of the 106 other ridings used as a control group, you had a 44% chance of being asked your voting intention and only a 14.7% chance of later being given false polling station info.

From the Council of Canadians, who commissioned the EKOS poll and are supporting the court actions, come these other key findings:

• 16.9% of eligible voters received calls related to polling stations. Of those, 22.3% were told of polling station location changes (amounting to 3.77% of eligible voters).
• Of those who were told of polling station changes, the voter intentions were as follows: Liberals 32.6%, Greens 28%, NDP 25.6%, and Conservatives 10%.
• 42.5% of eligible voters who received calls related to polling stations had a call claiming to be from Elections Canada.

And I can already feel a chilly if friendly wind blowing from the infinitely more rigorous Alice Funke at Pundits’ Guide, who would never mix up apples and hand grenades like this in the same chart (ie., adding a polling sample onto Elections Canada Official Voting Results).

But if the EKOS poll is accurate, then up to 15% of the vote in those seven closest vote margin ridings — some 50,000 people — received phone calls deliberately intended to suppress the non-Steve vote.

Margin of victory riding data from Elections Canada Official Voting Results Table 12.

Last two columns in chart taken from data in EKOS Study

By Frank Moher

I’ll leave it to others to dissect why the PC’s ended up trouncing Wildrose in Alberta, despite all the polls and predictions. What interests me is what this portends for Stephen Harper and company.

Whether by happenstance or design, Wildrose leader Danielle Smith is a near-clone of Harper (except for her much-remarked upon charisma, which the Prime Minister is in no danger of catching). She is a field-operative for big-business, especially the oil companies, and for the Calgary School of economics, and its crash-diet approach to government. And she is a pragmatist who has separated out her party’s fiscal and social conservatism and placed the latter off to the side, where she hopes, bozo eruptions notwithstanding, it will be forgotten. It’s the latter which is a relatively new phenomenon in Canadian conservatism — this newfound recognition that separation of state and church might be a good idea after all, albeit it for strategic, not principled, reasons — and which makes her resemblance to her older sibling in Ottawa all the more striking.

And Albertans, of all people, have rejected her. Yes, I know she won her riding and led Wildrose to a total of 17 seats, up 13 from what they had before. But when an electorate turns on a party the way this one did in the last week of the campaign (and perhaps even in the last hours — it wasn’t until a Forum poll emerged on Sunday night, showing Wildrose down four points and the PCs up three, that we began to get an inkling of what might happen), then that electorate is sending a clear message: we have given you sober second consideration, and found you wanting. Sorry.

The big question is, of course, why they did so. Much emphasis will be placed on the bozo eruptions (which we chronicled here and here, while drawing attention to a longstanding one here), and on strategic voting (otherwise know as “anyone but the Wildrose Party.”) But if the results indicate, withal, a general exhaustion with Canada’s far right, it could spell a wider problem for non-progressive conservatives right across the country. Canadians have had a chance to take their measure, and increasingly, we don’t like what we see. Certainly where I live, in British Columbia, the Harper government grows more unpopular by the day, both for its aggressive pursuit of the Enbridge Pipeline and its ties to the even more unpopular provincial Liberal party. Torontonians look shamefacedly away from the ongoing bozo eruption in their Mayor’s office (and longingly towards, yes, Calgary, with its shiny, cosmopolitan Mayor). Quebeckers, of course, took Mr. Harper’s measure long ago. That’s what makes him so vulnerable to disaffection elsewhere — unlike most previous Prime Ministers, he doesn’t have Quebec to fall back on.

And so, as Warren Kinsella put it last night, “A hole has been kicked in a wall at 24 Sussex.” Or if it wasn’t, it should have been. The NDP are tied with the Conservatives in national support, even without Jack; indeed, much of their strength has to do with Thomas Mulcair’s strong showing out of the gate. Of course, all honeymoons eventually end. But as Stephen Harper looks to Alberta today and wonders, along with his fellow travellers, just what went wrong, he might also wonder how best to reconstruct his party to look quite a bit less like Wildrose than it does now. Because if Albertans are no longer buying what the far right is selling, what are the chances anyone else will?

You know what Canada lacks? The American Dream. We don’t even have some lesser Canadian version of the American Dream (like how we have whatever our version of American Idol is called, or whatever our version of America’s Got Talent is called). And it’s our lack of the American Dream that has caused all this controversy to rise up around Harps spending $45,000 of taxpayer’s money on going to a baseball game.

I’m sure most of you are confused, because you all lack the American Dream too. But I don’t, so let me explain.

In somewhere like America — a place that does have the American Dream — their citizens would observe that their Prime Minister, or in this case their President, spent $45,000 of their taxpayers’ money, or in this case $45,934.16 of their taxpayers’ money, on going to a baseball game, or in their case a basketball game, and they wouldn’t be upset, they’d be super excited!

Still confused? I’ll explain some more.

You see, if you possess the American Dream, when you hear about someone doing something outrageous with their money, or more so, the money they made by screwing those who have less money than them, or money they took from hardworking taxpayers, you get super excited for the day that you’ll be able to do that!

Still confused? You guys really need to pay more attention to what I’m saying, or stop interrupting me while I’m trying to explain it to you.

Those of us who are American Dreamers are always looking at the bright side of things. So, when we hear that our Prime Minister, or in their case  [Editor’s Note: We get it Natty . . . they have a President and their money is worth more than ours] our thoughts instantly go to the time when we ourselves will be Prime Minister and get to use taxpayers’ money to go see baseball games.

See, that’s the way the American Dream works. We American Dreamers don’t think about the now – in which we are getting screwed by our Prime Minister, and he’s using our tax dollars to go see literally the most boring sport you could go see – we’re thinking about the then.

And the then is obviously so much better than the now; I mean have you seen the now? It sucks. Our Prime Minister keeps spending our money on stupid things. But the then – the then is going to be amazing. Once I’m Prime Minister I’m going to every baseball game I can go to. I’m even going to use your taxpayer dollars to go watch golf games. Why? Not because I like golf, that’s for sure.

Think this seems a little far-fetched – that there’s no way people would work this way? Well, take Obama’s proposed “Buffett Tax” down in the US. You know why no one likes that tax idea? It’s because, sure, they’re super poor right now and keep getting screwed by the super rich, but it’s only a matter of time before they become super rich investment bankers, at which point they won’t want to be taxed.

So, just take a breath, everyone. Stop worrying about the now, when your Prime Minister is spending your tax dollars to take his family and personal photographer on vacation, and start thinking about the then, when you’ll be Prime Minister and get to take your personal photographer to a $45,000 baseball game.

- Nathaniel Moher is a television writer living in Vancouver. This column first appeared in The Flying Shingle.

Our top Ministers of our Canadian Government are so very disgraceful. They continue to lie to us, after being caught by multiple non-partisan authorities. It’s often claimed that people expect politicians to lie, but there’s been an understanding in Ottawa that it was taboo for Ministers to lie to Parliament rather than simply dodge uncomfortable questions. That’s why Harper’s government fell last year on Contempt, and should again if there were enough Honourable members from the Conservative Party.

MacKay isn’t “muddled,” he’s lying. There are twerps eating up the lie, and defending the indefensible because they’ve invested in the Conservatives and are willing to go down with the ship (to a certain point), rather than stand up for Canadian values of honesty and integrity.

A more accurate accounting can be found publicly, than from our Prime Minister. That’s a disgrace, especially around a critical national issue like defence.

Double-tap that lie.

Since Harper, MacKay, Ambrose, and a few other less significant, lying, Dishonourable Members of Parliament won’t resign given their disgraceful track record of hiding plans to spend at least $10,000,000,000 more than they promised two years ago, Canadians will have to punish the entire Conservative Party instead. Blockheads don’t roll, but if they did, it might save the Harper government for another Conservative to lead it.

Hat tip to Dave

Newcomers to Canadian political watching should note that it’s considered a violation of the rules of Parliament not only to lie, but to claim that another member is a “liar.” The proper channel for such a claim is to raise the issue with the Speaker who chairs Parliament and can decide if there’s a situation where a member has lied to the House of Commons while working. It’s been expected for more than a century that the chances of an MP lying are so remote, that there’s no need to permit other members to rebuke a liar directly. That assumption is being rewritten thanks to Stephen Harper.

It’s not so unusual that a professional can face discipline for telling a lie to their coworkers, even their adversarial coworkers in competition with them for the better jobs at the workplace. Telling lies to keep your co-working competition from legitimately obtaining superior work roles is unethical, and against the rules in our democracy. If there is no punishment levied against liars for breaking this rule, what will keep Canada a free country with the best MPs in Cabinet? Show me a country that gives power to its best open liars, its military everything it desires, and I’ll show you a country that faces the threat of a military coup, or even totalitarianism.

An anonymous missive has appeared on

“Ok, RossK, I’ll bite. As a news worker at Postmedia, I think this is an interesting and important question you’ve raised about this odd shift in the commercial media.

It was McGregor and Maher at the Citizen and the National Post who picked up the rifle first, as you note, with the robocall scandal. And now there’s O’Neill. And there are more to come. The Postmedia chain has turned against the PM. Period.

There is no way to understate the importance of that shift. It hasn’t worked its way through the whole empire; you don’t immediately change the attitude or approach of the hundreds of idiots you’ve appointed to management jobs over the years. Or all the columnists, or reporters.

But it’s started.

And it’s huge. It should NOT be underestimated.

The question for us in their newsrooms is: What in the hell can the PM have done to piss off Postmedia (run nominally by the Tory-loving former managers of Canwest, but in reality owned and funded by GoldenTree, a New York hedge fund)?

Well, here’s one theory:

1. GoldenTree invested in the chain in 2010 because newspapers are high cash generators. (Usually, anyway.) Because Canada has foreign-ownership media laws, the new company and its share holdings had to be very carefully structured.

2. But maybe that wasn’t such a big deal, because Harper was making a lot of big, loud promises about opening up ownership to foreign interests. That would mean GoldenTree could unload the chain, or parts of it, in future with relative ease. Hedge funds like to get in and out quickly, and there aren’t a lot of Canadian buyers for a property that big. Quebecor was really the only competitor that GoldenTree faced in 2010 as Canwest lay dying, and Quebecor lost out because it couldn’t put together a big enough offer.

3. Foreign ownership isn’t anywhere on the apparent radar for Harper anymore. At all. Period. Unless he’s in completely secret talks that no one has heard a word about.

4. Postmedia isn’t making money, certainly not at the rate GoldenTree needs it to. As a hedge fund, it would have wanted to move in, tap the cash flow and sell it on. There are lots of more promising cash machines for GoldenTree to move on to.

5. Postmedia executives, including CEO Paul Godfrey, toured newsrooms in BC just weeks ago to announce that while the two papers in Vancouver were still clinging by their fingernails to the black side of the ledger, red ink looms with absolute certainty in the very near future. An online-only Monday-Friday edition of the Province is widely rumoured to be in the works, with staff busy working on a new design for the weekend edition. (Yes, some of this is company trash talk aimed at turning newsroom workers against pressroom workers in talks for a contract that expired about 18 months ago. But that’s not the whole story. True, newsroom workers have taken huge hits; press workers haven’t, yet. And true, pressroom costs are high, and they were high in Victoria, where the chain used them as an excuse for selling the paper there to Glacier. But it is also true that the papers aren’t making the money they should, costs aside. That’s because the company doesn’t understand its product or its readership and can’t think of any other way to fix the problem than to continually cut costs, which in fact only makes the product worse.)

6. Quebecor, which owns the Tory-worshipping SunTV, is now the PM’s best friend and only defender.

7. So should GoldenTree force a sale of Postmedia, with foreign ownership rules still in place, well, the best and maybe only positioned buyer might be  . . . ta da! . . . Quebecor.

8. Which would result in a takeover of the majority of Canada’s news outlets by a completely right-wing company.

9. Say it all together now: Hmmmmmmmm. Can this have been the plan all along?

As I say, just a theory among some of us.

But it would be fair to say that the shift in Postmedia’s Tory coverage is significant enough to have most of our newsroom radar on full alert.

And I would add one other thing, since none of us know where this ride will take us. For everyone feeling so rightly cynical about the media, you will note that there is the odd MSM reporter left who can, when turned loose, still produce. You will note that there were others at the Globe and CBC etc who joined in after the Post kicked off the robocall-fest. I would argue that the heavy lifting was still done by the blogosphere, including you and many of those in your own circle. But I think there is still a rescue-able body of journalists left should the MSM, or any portion of it, come under new ownership that actually understands it own product, readership and social contract — something that Postmedia fails entirely to do.”

By Alison@Creekside

Steve, one year ago: “I’m not opening this debate (on abortion). I don’t want it opened. I have not wanted it opened. I haven’t opened it as Prime Minister. I’m not going to open it. The public doesn’t want to open it. This is not the priority of the Canadian public or this government and it will not be.”

Yet here’s Con MP Stephen Woodworth, happily debating abortion with Choice Joyce at HuffPo.

Why?

Because the House Procedures committee, which coincidentally boasts four openly anti-choice MP guys — Scott Reid, Harold Albrecht, Laurie Hawn, and Tom Lukiwski (and do see yesterday’s  post for their particular shenanigans over robocon) — the PROC Committee has granted Woodie the right to debate his don’t-mention-abortion-I-did-once-but-I-think-I-got-away-with-it abortion Motion 312 in the House on April 26.

Woodie believes a human life begins at conception and he’s not about to allow us sluts to fuck that up for the state any longer. All he asks is for a committee of 12 MPs – 7 Cons, 4 Dippers, and 1 Lib with a Con chair all appointed by that selfsame PROC committee — to figure it out for us and let us know the answer to the question: Why doesn’t the state have legal custody over the breeding vessels any more? AKA Whatever happened to a trip to England for the rich; coathangers for the poor?

Woodie wants it all done “scientifically”: “If we accept one law that says some human beings are not human, who’s next?”

From there he makes the jump from what is human — which is not in dispute as fetuses are obviously human tissue — to what is a person, which is a legal argument. He’s pretty sure some kind of equitable agreement can be worked out that will allow two or more legal persons to inhabit one body which will be fair to both and so help me he likens it to freeing the slaves: the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1859 that blacks were not persons under U.S. law. Wouldn’t you and I have objected if we had been there?

I am outraged!  Are you guys outraged?!  That’s a stupid question, of course you are, because I’m outraged and, because I form your opinions for you based on my opinions, that means you guys are outraged too!  And that’s good, because I’m going to do something I don’t often do – vent!  (I know this is a drastic turn for a hard-hitting, investigative reporter such as myself, but I can stand by no longer!)

Now, I’m sure most of you were waiting with bated breath for the Harper Government to announce their new budget.  It’s like Christmas, only with less math (“And twelve-minus-eleven partridges in a pear tree”) . . .  and real.  And I was right there with you, sitting in front of my TV, watching whatever the Canadian version of C-Span is, wearing my new budget slippers and eating my new budget tub of ice cream, when “BAM!”, the Harper Government hits me hard and fast (and not in the good way).

Sure, they throw out some things that make sense. Increasing the retirement age – makes sense to me. I’ve always said our elderly are just a bunch of gripers. (“Oh yeah? My bones hurt too!”) Really, what have they done for me?  The Cons also throw some cuts at the CBC budget. And why not? The CBC hasn’t made anything good since “The Beachcombers.”  It looked like we were in for a pretty sensible fiscal year.

But then they did it, then the “BAM!” hit – the Harper Government is getting rid of the penny.  That’s right the old queenie, as we call it in Canada, is about to be dethroned (beheaded?).

At first I was outraged because I didn’t know how anyone was going to buy penny candies anymore – which, as we all know, is a time honoured youngster’s tradition. (“Of course there’s only fifty cents in the bag . . . no . . . no . . . it just feels like there’s a dollar’s worth in there.”)  However I was quickly informed that penny candies actually cost a nickel now (I blame the communists), and kids aren’t allowed to eat candy anymore because we have an obesity problem.  Next thing you’re going to tell me that everything at the dollar store costs a dollar twenty-five, and that there’s a slave-labour problem.  It’s a sad, sad, communist world we live in now.

Butthe real reason I’m outraged is because we’re living in a world that is on the brink of an economic meltdown (or as I like to call it, an economidown – just say it a few times, it takes some getting used to, but I swear it’ll be the next Bennifer), and our government is talking about just throwing money down the drain?  I guess, being that Harps is, in fact, a robot, he’s never had a grandma and therefore never learned the lesson, “A penny saved is a penny earned.”

What does that mean?  I don’t know; my grandma was always spewing crazy sayings like, “It’s the communists’ fault that FDR is dead.”  My grandma was crazy.  My point, however, is that Canada produces 816 million pennies a year; if you times that by .01, you’ve got yourself 8.16 million dollars.  Can we really afford to throw away 8.16 million dollars every year because Harps doesn’t like how his fingers taste like tin foil after he’s handled some pennies. (I can only assume that’s why we’re getting rid of the penny – Harps is kind of power hungry like that.)

Here’s an idea: why don’t we take all those 816 million pennies we produce a year and give them to the CBC?  That way they can start making new episodes of “The Beachcombers,” and people will actually have a reason to watch the CBC again.

I don’t know, I guess that’s just my five cents.

- Nathaniel Moher is a television writer living in Vancouver. This column first appeared in The Flying Shingle.