Canada 2008 election campaign bloopers
p2pnet news view | P2P | Politics:- What’s a national election without screw-ups? Right?
Some say an election is nothing but.
Anyway, Noel Boivin (left) and Christopher Lombardo have it covered.
No! The other left. The left left below is George W.Harper.
Between them Boivin and Lombardo run The Shark Guys and, not at all coincidentally, also wrote the subtly entitled The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death and Other True Tales of Drunken Debauchery.
Below is Part I of their two-part election blooper series. We’ll be running part II tomorrow. Of course.
Thanks, guys. 
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There are some who would say that Canadian politics are dull. And they would be absolutely right. Once you take out all of the entertaining parts involving French secessionists and the joys of bilking Alberta out of its oil money (where it’s best to look the part before you saddle up with a bag of it, see our Prime Minister*, left), Canadian politics and watching paint dry are about equally entertaining, with the latter slightly edging out politics as at least you can be alone with your own thoughts while watching paint dry. This is something you can’t do while trying to figure out what the hell the Canadian Senate does, who its members are and why you can’t vote for them.
[*Note: Prime Minister Stephen Harper is embroiled in a controversy of his own we'll get to soon---an aide stealing speech excerpts from a former Aussie Prime Minister's speech!]
With everyone caught up in the US election, including, well, the two Canadians who write this blog (see our take on a certain US vice-presidential candidate’s belief that humankind marked the end of a working day by sliding down the tail of a brontosaurus by clicking here), it’s not surprising that the Canadian election campaign running at the same time has fallen into the shadows–that is, until now.
These days, Canadian politics isn’t as boring as the waking paralysis of Liberal Leader ‘I could’ve been a contender’ Stephane Dion speaking on any topic. This year, blogs and the major kick in the pants they mean for those in the mainstream media have resulted in numerous election candidates being caught with their pants down (sometimes literally, sometimes not… more on that later).
Here is a look at some of the more entertaining (well at least if you’re not on the campaign bus of the concerned party) political gaffes to come to light during this election season. We have divided them on party lines, so as to show that bad taste, poor judgment, and, okay we’ll say it – insanity – comes in all shades of the political spectrum. Here in Part One, we take a look at the gaffes of Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s old posse, the Liberals:
Lesley “Black Helicopters” Hughes (Manitoba): You know that office nutcase who seems a bit strange but sort of blends in with the furniture until the inevitable happens and he sounds off on the fact that the moon landing was filmed on a Hollywood sound-stage and that Elvis and Tupac are alive and well and have in fact opened up a B&B in rural Pennsylvania (which the Paul McCartney impostor is helping to fund)? Well Lesley Hughes is the Canadian political equivalent of that guy.
Hughes, a former radio talk show host, so therefore thoroughly experienced in communicating with people who are also a few slices short of a loaf, claimed that the Mossad was involved in a 9/11 plot warning Jewish businesses to get the hell out of dodge before the Twin Towers attack. Such claims can be countered by anyone with the ability to think, read, and recognize the number of Jewish names on the list of those who perished that day. Liberal leader Stephane Dion wisely sent Ms. Hughes political fortunes in the general direction of the mercury in Winnipeg’s thermometers.
Simon “Dead Air” Bedard (Quebec): Who says radio hosts appealing to the tinfoil-hat / chronic insomnia crowd shouldn’t run for public office? Well, we do, and to strengthen our case we present to you Simon Bedard, who had to drop out of the election race recently after comments he made at the time of the Oka crisis in 1990 surfaced. At a time when tensions between First Nations (Native Canadians) and the Army were at an all-time high following a standoff over plans to build a golf course on the site of an ancient burial ground, Bedard chimed in with the following: “You go in there with the army, then you clean up all that. Fifty dead, 100 dead, 125 dead, that would put it out. We bury it and life goes on.” Dion again stopped the campaign bus, told Bedard that it was just a half-hour rest-break, and then ran back on the bus and hit the gas the second Bedard was out of sight.
Ricardo “Send ‘Em Packing” Lopez (Quebec): Another Liberal candidate who resigned after it was discovered he was of the “Let’s put them all on a big boat” school of settling cultural disputes. Lopez said: “I think all the Indians should be sent to Labrador [a region in Atlantic Canada], to go live together and have peace and leave us in peace.”
Garth “Now we’ve never met before, right?” Turner (Ontario): The leader of the Liberal Party appointed Garth Turner as his special adviser for riding and constituency outreach – bad move – and in a profile on Canada’s parliamentary channel [kinda like C-Span and with a comparable audience--those who've had their flights delayed, cranks, shut-ins], Turner was featured in a segment showing what it’s like to go canvassing door-to-door for votes. Cameras followed him to the door of a supposedly random voter in his riding, and he was met with a reception that was uncharacteristically warm coming from someone answering a knock on the door and finding Garth Turner on the front stoop. (Turner was booted out of the Conservative Party’s caucus basically because they found him annoying. This is a party headed up by a man who seems like the kind of guy who would fink you out for smoking on school property, so just think of how truly annoying Turner must have been).
One of the parliamentary channel’s 37 or so viewers recognized the “random” constituent as the son of Turner’s own campaign manager. Turner himself apologized on his blog, though not without some slippery words protesting that he did not intentionally involve himself in such a carny-like deception.
Andrew “I said what now?” Telegdi (Ontario): Admittedly, this was a fairly minor gaffe in comparison to the others here, but it was also one of the funnier ones. In an all-candidates debate, Liberal Telegdi misspoke in a speech, and thrilled every Conservative in the audience by announcing that his “Number 1 job is to elect Stephen Harper.” Wags in the crowd were quick to pounce on that and say that the Libs were well on their way to mission accomplished in that regard, and Telegdi for his part, once he realized “in horror” what he said, posted his own YouTube video in which he cleared up the mistake – he meant to say “eject.”
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