Because it's easier than governing:
The Prime Minister’s Office orchestrated a protest earlier this month at which Conservative party interns mocked Liberal leader Justin Trudeau during an open-air news conference.
It is the latest revelation about the lengths to which Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office — the nerve centre of the federal government — will go to meddle in partisan politics.
Plus ça change... Party hacks have been doing sort of thing since before Confederation. Back then, however, our political leaders would occasionally emit an intelligent thought or clear vision. Now it seems to be all heckling.
But lest we imagine this is purely a federal issue:
Toronto Mayor Rob Ford is employing a man who has made repeated calls to his weekly radio show in the past, CBC News has learned.
The mayor and his brother, Coun. Doug Ford, have hosted a radio show on Newstalk 1010 for more than a year.
The Fords have long insisted that incoming calls aren’t planted and have said they do not screen out unfriendly calls.
Which seems about right for Mayor Ford. Tacky, silly and pointless. There is no shortage of Torontonians who still support the Mayor. Why engage in such a juvenile stunt? Does the Mayor's staff not realize they are being watched constantly?
So far as we can tell the alleged planted call did not cost the taxpayers extra. This did:
The Accelerator Centre will provide entrepreneurship training and seed funding to help up to 30 science, technology, engineering, and math entrepreneurs launch new innovative start-up businesses, thanks to a new investment of $945,000 from the Government of Canada. The investment was announced today by Peter Braid, Member of Parliament for Kitchener-Waterloo, on behalf of the Honourable Gary Goodyear, Minister of State for the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario).
If you've got a great idea for a STEM based business, and you can't convince a venture capital firm to invest a few hundred thousand, then perhaps it's not so great an idea. The sort of entrepreneurs who look for government funding tend to be, though not always, the sort who can't get private financing. Perhaps the private capital venture firms just lack the vision and insight of government bureaucrats.
From heckling Justin Trudeau to planting calls on a talk show to playing venture capitalist, this is the politics of theatre. Doing the right thing, the wise thing, may or may not get you elected. Doing the right thing often attracts little attention and even less in the way of campaign contributions. Politics is too often the art of being seen to do things. Thus the modern pol's obsession with the photo-op.
"Hey look Martha! It's that lying SOB I voted for last year. He's opening a new hospital wing. Maybe he's not such a lying SOB afterall."
That's the thinking. The reality is that most people are so utterly numb to this theatre it likely has little impact. The middle school nonsense of heckling Justin Trudeau is just so much nonsense. It rolls over people. Perhaps the idea was to create the impression that Justin wasn't as beloved as the MSM would like us to believe. But who covers these events? The MSM, who will simply edit the images and audio as they see fit.
For Mayor Ford it was an attempt to give the impression he is more popular than he is. But who actually spends their Sunday afternoons listening to a municipal politician talking about politics? Other politicians and journalists eager to find out if the Mayor embarrassed himself more than usual. Do actual voters listen to these things? I mean actually listen as opposed to having the show play as background in their kitchen or car.
The bureaucrat as venture capitalist thing is more worrisome. Billions of dollars are spent every year by the federal government attempting to "stimulate" business. This has created a network of crony capitalists that both wastes taxpayer's money and undermines the market economy. A country's whose capitalists, investors and entrepreneurs look to government rather than to their customers, is a country with an uncompetitive economy.
None of these objections are hard to grasp or hard to explain. But political theatre isn't about governing wisely, it's about entertainment. A low grade form of entertainment, but a distraction from ever day cares and concerns. It's a tale about how all the problems and worries of the world can be solved by government, and how only the nefarious opposition of the other party stops the problems from being solved.
A crude morality tale told by people with little sense of morality.
Comments