Failure of Imagination

Forgive me for missing my self-imposed posting deadline this week. I have just returned from travel with a pile of work and other email to catch up on -- a consequence of opting not to touch my computer over the last 7 days. Not that I haven't been thinking about blogging but, choosing instead, a much-needed disconnect. Apologies to my loyal readers out there. My fingers are itching to share thoughts with you stemming from what I saw last week ... more to follow.

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It's clear this government is in a complete shambles.

Just two days ago, the tap-dancing, double-talking, unaccountable Prime Minister emerged from his fortified lair after weeks of galavanting around the world to tell the media that he would indeed be going to the Copenhagen Climate summit after all.

Perhaps he was hoping that we Canadians didn't notice the timing of his announcement -- just a day after US president Obama announced he would be attending (which was also a flip-flop. He had said he would not attend). Maybe he was hoping that we'd forget that Canada has not articulated a Canadian position on climate change. It's likely he was thinking that, after his long hiatus from the picture tubes, websites and radio waves of the Canadian media, people around our country would be mesmerized by his salt-and-pepper hair and blue eyes and not see past that to his complete and outright ineptitude.

This Government is a government of failure. And on so many fronts: leadership; principle; fairness; intelligence; originality; strategy... (I can go on). Little, if anything, substantive has comes out of Ottawa. As a Canadian in the UN, working just two hours flight from several major Canadian cities and our capital, there is nothing that I can point to to say: "We're doing it a bit differently" or "We've got a different take on it in my country" or even "We're pioneering new ___________ (technology, policy, approaches) to __________ (fossil fuels, rising sea levels, poverty alleviation, illiteracy)." Nothing.

Instead, as we wind our way to the end of 2009, we continue to have gaping holes in income distribution across Canada and in levels of poverty and child poverty from coast to coast. We continue to lose fine, intelligent young men and women in a battle half-way across the world that our leaders know is doomed to fail -- not a comment I say with glibness or disrespect for the efforts of our soldiers, but a comment informed by history. And yet, no opposition seems to be able to raise a strong enough voice to bring attention to the incompetence of the Harper Government.

What other smouldering fires can we add to the list? How about $50 billion of debt (and growing)? How about Arctic sovereignty? How about a strong Canadian dollar; not in itself a bad thing, but when combined with the fact that our economy is almost inextricably linked to selling our commodities and wares to Americans, it's a problem. Either we diversify, or we start to die.

Canada has never faced a more crucial time in its history -- so many national infernos ready to break out with so imprudent and incompetent a party at its helm. And for the foreseeable future, it would appear that its position is secure, with the opposition essentially unorganized and ineffective, and Canadians caught in a paralysis of sticking with a known devil. Who can blame them.

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On a different note, I just saw a rather dark, BBC movie/comedy called "In the Loop". If you want to get a humourous and expletive-filled sense of the cutthroat nature of politics and international diplomacy, I recommend a watch (though not with the kids!). Here's the trailer... Enjoy.