Some Conservatives are licking their chops, hoping Paul Martin’s successor turns out to be a failed former premier of Ontario.
Eddie Goldenberg, considered by many to be Jean Chretien’s brain, has been telling a select group of blue chip media people that Bob Rae has the touch.
“Fast Eddie” knows that the money will flow like wine if he can create the illusion that Bob Rae is the legitimate heir to the Chretien throne. “It’s Bob Rae boys. You can print it!”
The sheep did their job for Eddie like they always did. In their all too familiar spread eagled repose, the body language bleated, “Fleece Me.”
A fleecing is what Ontario voters received for the four years that Bob Rae was allowed to have his way with them. The numbers were so ugly that even Fast Eddie will have a hard time not scratching on this eight ball.
The bad old days had unemployment, taxes and debt all rising like a Louisiana lake when the levee is breached. The only thing going down a dirty dozen years ago in Ontario was hope. Today’s Conservatives are hoping Fast Eddie can hustle Liberal rubes into resurrecting Rae.
Ontarians prefer their government in various shades of beige. Who can forget Bland Bill Davis? Elected in the ‘70s, he could have governed Ontario for life. The man was a Buick—two ounces of flash and two tons of reliability. Those who admired Davis’s radar, knew Stephen Harper hit paydirt in those ridings that rim Toronto when his warm up act for those sermons on ethics became Bill Davis. When those Ontarians aged 55 and older saw the Pope of Bland bless the cold fish from the West, they felt warmer than a Presbyterian at a Sunday brunch where the four harshest words spoken are, “Please pass the peas.”
Bob Rae didn’t do bland. Every day was crisis day. He always had “creative solutions.” Who can forget the days of Ontario public servants being “persuaded” to take Fridays off without pay. As the formerly prosperous waters were being drained from the Ontario tub, it was Bob Rae who had to wear the bathtub ring.
As Canada’s richest province was about to hit the wall of bankruptcy, Rae’s imminent defeat was never in doubt. Who the next premier would be was a bit of a guessing game. Round up the usual suspects on the left. The Toronto Star, the CBC and the arts communities were apoplectic about the possibility that the Mike Harris’s Tories might conquer Queens Park.
Fast Eddie’s friends were confident right up until the day of the vote that sanity as defined by them would prevail and Ontarians would replace Rae’s NDP with a Liberal government. But history shows that when Ontarians were determined to slay the NDP, the weapon of choice was not bland. When your house has been turned into a cockroach convention, you aren’t looking for a naturopath, you are looking for an exterminator.
Hello, is this Mike Harris?
By now you know the rest of the story.
If Fast Eddie turns out to be right, it will be the greatest thing to ever happen to Canada’s far right. Give a Prime Minister Rae four years and the real right will rise.
At the moment you have Dr. Harper using scalpels to operate on the body that’s been bruised by a baker’s dozen years of Grit.
Throw the keys to a Rae government and the next time the Conservatives come back, the scalpels will become chainsaws.
Could Bob Rae turn out to be a gift to the right? Ask Chainsaw Mike.
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