Canada's Politicians: Broke, Autocratic, and Inhuman

There's a reason most politicians don't try to strike a balance between acting official and acting human, and it's not because they don't all have Stephen Harper's sweet musical chops.

Despite the perception of politicians as fatcats dining out on the taxpayer’s dime, an Ottawa Citizen editorial assures us that this is not the case in the nation’s capital, where coffee isn’t served at government meetings and senior workers buy their own Timbits to dole out to their staff. “But austerity can be taken too far,” says the Citizen. “Canadian officials who can't properly host visiting dignitaries make Canada look second-rate.” Fair. But in this economic climate it’s unlikely taxpayers are going to trust politicians with fatter expense accounts, so hopefully any visitors to Ottawa will have been to Dublin or Athens recently and our déclassé soirees won’t seem so bad.

The Toronto Star’s Jim Coyle cites Stephen Harper’s proroguing of Parliament, Dalton McGuinty’s enacting of a G20 police-empowering law, and Rob Ford’s indifference to critics as evidence that leaders at all levels of Canadian politics are displaying an “inclination to autocracy and arbitrariness” these days. He suggests this is “why citizens generally, and the young in particular, have been turned off politics.” Coyle doesn’t exactly have his fingers on the pulse of the younger generation, because few political issues in recent memory have motivated young Canadians (in Toronto at least) more than Rob Ford and the G20.

While Coyle laments that these are not the most auspicious times in Canadian politics, Sun Media’s David Akin writes on his blog today that it’s perfectly desirable that our leaders act inauspicious occasionally. “I'm infatuated with any politician — no matter the stripe — who remembers to act like a human being every now and again,” he writes. But he’s also not surprised that they don’t do it more often, when there are people out there like this unnamed senior Liberal who whined to the Globe and Mail today that Harper didn’t sing one song in French when he rocked out at the Tory Christmas party. “It shows that he is clueless about Quebec culture,” said the anonymous Grit. What nonsense. Watch the video; the only thing it shows Harper is clueless about is finding the middle harmony in "Sweet Caroline."