"Yikes"

Campaigns are supposed to be a battle of contrasts and this one certainly has shaped up in such a manner. But they can also offer a heavy dose of hypocrisy.A number of people and organizations were upset yesterday with the National Citizens Coalition and its mangling of Canadian sensibilities when its CEO Peter Coleman took the low road when noting in one of his tweets that Ignatieff's wife, Zsuszanna Zsohar, was not yet a Canadian citizen and musing, "Ignatieff's wife is not even a Cdn citizen? Yikes!!! optics of that are sure not very good." Even some Conservatives are shaking their heads at that one.It's well-known everywhere that the NCC shills for the Conservative Party of Canada, though it's less known that Stephen Harper was once its head. No one has expected anything different from them for years. It didn't start out that way, however. Some 40 years ago its founder, Colin Brown, maintained that it was every citizen's right to express their displeasure with their government or to ask questions of political performance. This made sense. Brown introduced what was then a novel idea: the paid newspaper advertisement, which has since morphed into a method better known for its blind partisanship in all parties rather than an educational tool for citizens in general. By the time Stephen Harper became its head it had become a full-blown propaganda machine for the conservative movement.Liberal Bob Rae was right yesterday when he claimed that the NCC's comments on Zsohar represented a road we really didn't want to journey down and that Coleman's words were "deeply offensive." Zsohar herself is waiting for her citizenship to be finalized as we speak. She didn't jump any queue and, owing to her position, has been eloquent in discussing why she wants to formalize her relationship with this country.So, yes, I too was saddened by Coleman's rather ignorant observation. But it was the organization's own hypocrisy that irked me the most. Go to its website and you'll see its proud moniker displayed at the top: "For more freedom through less government." Fair enough, except that with Stephen Harper, their past CEO, they have the largest spending government in Canadian history. And it's not just because of the recession. The Conservative government put us into a recession prior to the worldwide financial collapse. While accumulating the largest deficit in history, it also added over $200 billion to our national debt. Size of the PMO and ministerial staffs have mushroomed. The cost of governance itself has risen steadily in Harper's five years. And to all this the NCC has said too little to be noticed. It should have been enflamed when Harper opted to change the name of the Government of Canada to "the Harper Government," but it couldn't find the fortitude. One man was using his authority to place his name above the citizens of Canada and the NCC raised barely a whimper. And now we have roughly $50 billion dollars in fighter jet and super prison costs to go along with the similar amount of deficit dollars.But all that's okay, you see, because it's just been discovered that one proud woman from Hungary wants to become a citizen of this country. "Yikes," says Coleman - in the process degrading not only the thousands who are undergoing the same process, but the millions who have entered Canada precisely through a similar means. My mother was a Scottish war bride. If the NCC had existed then and said the same thing about people like her, it would have perished under its own ignorance and citizen anger.This might well be an election for the ages. Citizens have been denied and degraded by a government that refuses pertinent budgetary documents for some of the largest expenses in our history. It has refused to permit the people to reign supreme by either resisting prorogation or by replacing the name "Government of Canada" with Harper's own. It has refused citizens access to its rallies and grown deaf to the crying present need of Canadian families. And it has declined the will of citizens who consistently bemoan the use of  attack ads between election periods. And now, during an election of all things, it permits one of its appendages to single out a sincere and inspiring citizen applicant. If Stephen Harper ends up losing this election, it will be because of his contempt, not only for the people of Canada and their government, but because of those like Zsuszanna Zsohar who still believe this country can be free from such lunacy.