Tampa:  It is not every day that we get to make someone happy, but especially when it is so easy to do so, I can not resist!

  In Canada the Government is falling.  A nasty bit of business where it appears money was diverted from the federal coffers to that of the ruling party and it all got mixed up with a bunch of other issues around the fight to calf off Quebec as a separate country.  You get the picture.

  ACORN Canada’s executive director, John Young, from his perch in Vancouver in an obvious fit of pique sent me a note that started by saying “….if I had a blog…” and then proceeded to lay into the situation hard and heavy.

  Well, I do have a blog, so I am glad to roll with John on this….

  You have to hand it to Canadians. We take a perfectly nice place and turn it into a political joke of tragic proportions. Try explaining a francophone separatist party in cahoots with an anglophone separatist party united in a moment of political opportunism to bring down a party that, despite its’ epic corruption, fatigue, lack of imagination and arrogance, believes in some kind of united Canada and you will find yourself gasping for air and dizzy for the effort.
 
  And yet, four or so weeks from now, that’s what the cards tell us will unfold. Less than a year after lurching (sweatily, desperately and unimpressively) to a minority government, Paul Martin’s dream has turned to a nightmare and Canadians will be asked to trudge to the polls to cast a vote for the party and leader they hate and fear least of all.
 
  Who said democracy wasn’t a beautiful thing.
 
  The result of the upcoming ride will yield another cataclysmic moment in our political history; perhaps one of greater import than that other most recent radical realignment of the Canadian political map — the 1993 election that saw the Tories wiped out, the separatists emerge as the “loyal” opposition, the Liberals installed for an unchallenged decade and the NDP consigned to repeatedly writing the Liberals’ platform only to never to see it implemented.
 
  Ask a neighbor when the last time was that they voted for rather than against something. Actually, just ask a neighbor when the last time was that they bothered to cast a vote. And then, pop a beer, sit back and watch some hockey. Oh wait. Our national sport is gone too. At least we can blame the Americans for that.
 
  And so. We head wearily, angrily into another election campaign. Wishing for a “positive vision” and wishing that we could believe that the purveyors of that vision might actually animate same with consistent legislation once in government. But that isn’t going to happen.
 
  Instead, we’ll either have another Liberal minority government even more crippled, paralyzed, beholden and crisis-ridden than the last. Or we’ll have a Tory government that may look to the Bush model to ram an unpalatable agenda down our throats while they have the keys to the place. Either way, we’ll be back to the polls again reasonably soon as we do our damndest to catch up with Italy for the boobie prize in parliamentary politics.
 
  A bit of an uneven launch to the 21st century for our northern nation. But hey, as the dancing zombies in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang tell us, “from the ashes of disaster grow the roses of success.”