The Unhappy Government

[jdobbin]

Don Martin's column today.

http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/column...4f-3ad10d310cdc

An official high in a Cabinet minister's office has an interesting label for his employer: The Unhappy Government.

Put another way, confided a second Tory, if presidential hopeful Barack Obama stands for hope in U. S. politics, the Conservatives represent mope in government.

After 15 years of wilderness wandering in opposition, as the party changed names and rotated leaders before merging, there's little sense the Conservatives are enjoying their de facto majority government control over an election-dodging Parliament.

Watching Prime Minister Stephen Harper take his seat in the Commons is to see a glum leader who, while cool at the best of times, seems increasingly testy at his fate.

As a policy wonk one month shy of becoming leader of the second-longest minority reign in Canadian history, a longevity record beaten only by the country's first minority in 1921, Mr. Harper should be having the time of his political life.

Yet he puts forward grim faces to front his empty-agenda government, fills a Commons time slot reserved for acknowledgments and tributes with a daily smear against the Liberal party and crafts his travel and speaking schedules to avoid Question Period.

The Commons centre aisle, once crossed easily by MPs wandering into rival party sections to exchange pleasantries, is now the sort of barren gap that accompanied the Berlin Wall.

A pretty biting indictment of what the Harper government is like in Parliament at the moment.

Edited May 14, 2008 by jdobbin

[Fortunata]

Steve looks like he's too uptight to be happy at any time, even before politics. There are some people who are just happy being unhappy. It could be that his frame of mind is rubbing off on his MPs ... I mean he does tell them how to think, act and speak; might as well dictate how they are allowed to feel.