A perfectly understandable murmur of bemusement has followed the announcement of the CPC's constitutionally illiterate and procedurally risible intention to "review" Canadian history--this, from a party led by a man who once placed the NDP in the 1930s.
This news summoned before me the spectre, more droll than dread, of an official "Harper History", as delivered by the "Harper Government". One cannot foretell all of what such a history would include, but I think it reasonable to assume that the overall canonical criterion would be...Stephen Harper, a man who has only to order that a 30-foot statue of himself be erected beside the Speaker's Chair to hit the Caligulan floor of bathetic conceit to which he has been falling since 2006.
I began to wonder what a typical multiple-choice pop quiz on a Grade 12 Harper History or Harper Civics unit might look like. I then fantasised about what I hoped it would look like. The quiz below represents a typically Canadian compromise between the two visions. Enjoy!
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1) For Stephen Harper,
Canada Day is
a) a time to gather
with loved ones and celebrate the nation’s history, cultures, and heritage;
b) an annual statutory
bore that requires him to mumble yet another bland, disingenuous, instantly
forgettable speech cribbed from the notes Mike Dufy used whilst barking above
the sound of rubber chicken being masticated during the last Port Elgin Rotary Club gala;
c) a brief spasm of
silly Trudeaupian nationalism that is harmless enough as long as we remember
that Americans are our moral superiors and continental overlords, while we are just can’t-do,
second-tier, socialist parasites.
2) Stephen Harper
believes Canada was founded
a) at Confederation;
b) by the Act of
Union;
c) on the day of Ronald
Reagan’s first Inauguration;
d) on the day Tom
Flanagan lost his virginity;
e) both c) and d).*
3) Stephen Harper believes himself to be proof
that
a) hard work and
thrift are always repaid with success;
b) knowing the date of
Jupiter’s next transit through Sagittarius is worth the relatively uninspired
haircuts and rouge jobs;
c) insane people are
not necessarily interesting;
d) even an
able-bodied middle-class Caucasian male
from a Pearson-era suburb can overcome the inherent disadvantages of birth and
become prime minister one day.
4) Stephen Harper
believes that his greatest accomplishment is
a) evolving the weaselly King Gambit
by establishing the constitutional precedent whereby a prime minister may
licitly lock the doors of Parliament mere hours after a Thorne Speech solely in
order to hoist his sorry ass out of an arrogantly self-ignited bonfire;
b) standing before a
nation teeming with bright, hard-working, superbly educated potential
candidates and still managing to ensure that the beneficiary of virtually every
single patronage appointment was among the most breathtakingly
incompetent buffoons ever to dishonour the public service of an OECD nation,
thereby reinforcing for the masses the salutary message that a Harper government isn’t
the answer to their problem; it is the problem.
c) staying loyal to
the turncoat whose treachery gentrified his Reform Party rabble by continuing
to sustain MacKay’s promotion, galaxies beyond his competence level, even
though the gearbox-headed coxcomb has carefully overseen some of the most
Biblically catastrophic procurement fiascos of modern times;
d) being so synapse-meltingly
boring that not even widespread electoral fraud committed on his behalf seems
important enough to give a fuck about;
e) becoming so adept
at “re-building” Canada’s military by salvaging the rust-bucket hand-me-downs from other nations that plans are now afoot to excavate L’Anse Aux Meadows in
hopes of finding still-seaworthy Viking longboats that can be up-gunned with 20
mm Oerlikon autocannon and sent out as Canada’s contribution to NATO counter-piracy interdiction deployments;
f) providing a fiscal
maladministration so abject that it has sent Canada’s standard of living
plummeting at a speed unmatched since the fall of the Inca kingdoms, thus
helpfully depriving Canadians of what had been the chief pretext of their
uppity self-esteem;
g) establishing the
Office of Religious Freedom, thereby serving notice to all tyrants that they
had better stop being naughty to their religious minorities, or we’ll send a
sternly worded e-mail informing them that they must stop being naughty to their
religious minorities or else we’ll send another sternly worded e-mail telling
them that we really, really mean it this time.
5) As brilliant as
Stephen Harper is, he isn’t perfect. He believes that his greatest failure has
been
a) accusing an
incumbent prime minister of being a fan of child pornography without first
telling his political mentor and chief strategist why that’s a bad thing;
b) halting his
practice of ending speeches with the words “God bless Canada” and thus
giving the totally unfair impression that the courage of his religious convictions is so feeble as to be voidable merely by force of the
amused sniggering of agnostic Press Gallery hacks and his own salivating avidity for a majority government;
c) forgetting to
remind his ministers that they should Google the name of a protesting crowd
before rushing out onto Parliament Hill to send them the government’s fond greetings, lest it should turn out to be an Iranian terrorist organisation that
slaughters innocents;
d) betraying his otherwise
iron-clad commitment to ineptitude by accidentally appointing a highly capable
officer of Parliament, thereby forcing his government to give the utterly
inaccurate impression that it is a vindictive, paranoid clutch of congenital
liars and innumerates;
e) missing the
deadline for Diamond Jubilee Medal nominations, thus being robbed of the chance to reward the deserving critters among the PMO staff's dogs, cats, hamsters, gerbils, goldfish, and chinchillas;
f) being insufficiently emphatic during his
exit interview discussion with Bruce Carson about the importance of discretion.
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* N.B. The correct answer is e), of course, as both events occurred on January 20, 1981.
