Your Morning Laugh

The best line of the day has to be this one from Chantal Hebert in the Toronto Star writing about Harper’s blundering PMO:

One can only run a federal government on the

wits of apprentice sorcerers for so long.

As Hebert writes, first it was Sandra Buckler getting caught out claiming DND had kept Harper in the dark when it stopped transferring detainees in Afghanistan.

Next up was press secretary Dimitri Soudas getting mixed up in a dispute between DPW and a certain “politically active” Montreal landlord.

Now it’s chief of staff Ian Brodie and the leak of embarrassing revelations about Obama’s and Clinton’s real positions on NAFTA.

Yes, yes, yes. Top that off with a slathering of Brian Mulroney and a heaping helping of the Chuck Cadman affair and SHarper seems to be getting in deeper every day.

Maybe, though, we ought to be grateful for all these scandals. With an opposition in disarray these embarrassments are probably going a long way to keep Harper out of majority territory.

Still, “apprentice sorcerers.” that is a good one.

 

Renegotiating NAFTA

Both Democratic candidates have pledged to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, if they reach the White House. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton at last night’s candidates’ debate pledged to renegotiate America’s deal with Mexico – and with Canada – to get, as they put it, “fair trade.”

What’s “fair trade” anyway? Well, according to Obama it means making America’s trading partners toe some sort of line on labour and environmental standards. Wait a second, labour standards? What are we supposed to do, scrap our labour standards to scurry into the American abyss? Environmental standards? Well, he’s got a point there, we both need to do better on that score.

It’s the adjective “fair” that worries me. Americans tend to judge fair by the tilt of the table and they usually like to see it tilting their way. Take a look at the softwood lumber shakedown we’ve endured these past several years.

I wonder what “fair” means in the context of America’s debt crisis? That little problem, an entirely made-in-America brew of wanton spending and profligate borrowing, is coming home to roost and the landing may be hard and bumpy. It’s bad enough that world markets, including Canadian, have found themselves duped into holding ginned-up American subprime derivatives. Are we also to become America’s free trade whipping boy?

Navigating the coming years with the United States will require a strong Canadian prime minister and not the kind who instinctively drops his pants and bends over the barrel when Washington snaps its fingers – the kind we have now.