A not-so-secret meeting is held in a Montreal hotel room. Stephen Harper wants to find out why he did, and is doing, so poorly in Quebec—a meagre five MPs, and down to the teens in the polls. He consults Brian Mulroney, who is looking rather like a statesman these days—so has our political culture been cheapened and coarsened.
Perhaps I might offer some advice myself, which I sincerely hope Harper doesn’t take. Stop letting your spitefulness and petulance continually get the better of you.
What was Harper’s reaction when he was crushed in la belle province last year? He immediately got abnormally interested in things Royal. He removed paintings by a well-respected Quebecois painter from the Foreign Affairs building in Ottawa, replacing them with a portrait of Her Majesty. “Take the red paintings down,” forsooth. And then he tried to sell them off.
He appointed a unilingual Auditor General. And a unilingual member of the Supreme Court.
Insults, both calculated and petty. The well-known Harper personality once again on display. Could this be inherited?
ADDENDUM: More. How could I have forgotten Angelo Persichilli, briefly Harper’s unilingual chief of communications? [H/t for prompt.]