Real election questions
Tell us, oh great ones, about how you'll save us from C. difficile, listeriosis and Big Oil
Today, let's play 20 questions about the federal election.
OK, I admit they're all going to be my questions and I only had room for 15, but here goes:
1. Shouldn't we be worried a lot more about the C. difficile outbreak that has killed thousands of Canadians in hospitals across Canada over the past few years and a lot less about the latest verbal gaffe by some obscure candidate, whose views don't represent those of the party for which he or she happens to be running?
2. Does Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty really get to decide all by himself that there will be no public inquiry into the hundreds of deaths from C. difficile that have occurred inside his province's hospitals over the past couple of years? Seriously.
3. Does anyone else think like me that the limited investigation Prime Minister Stephen Harper ordered into the recent listeriosis outbreak that killed at least 19 Canadians as a result of eating tainted cold cuts from a Maple Leaf plant in Toronto, won't get to the bottom of what appears to be systemic weaknesses in Canada's meat inspection system going back years?
4. Contrary to conventional media wisdom, isn't it possible Canadians don't like Liberal Leader Stephane Dion's proposed carbon tax not because they don't understand it, but because they do?
5. Can Stephen Harper explain why we can afford to publicly subsidize Big Oil but we can't afford arts funding, much of which isn't spent on rich artists or galas but on paying subsistence wages to artists, stage hands and others who willingly work in Canada's labour-intensive, tourist-generating and economy-boosting cultural industries?
6. While we're on the subject of Big Oil, could Stephen Harper and any other party leader who wants to take a shot at it, please explain why the way the retail price of gasoline is set in Canada doesn't qualify as (a) collusion (b) price-fixing or (c) profiteering?
7. Could Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe please explain why, if Canada is so awful, he keeps running in our elections?
8. Could NDP Leader Jack Layton explain how he got himself into the bizarre predicament of defending a cap-and-trade carbon market as a good idea to lower greenhouse gas emissions, while attacking a carbon tax as a bad one? Doesn't he know both do the same thing -- put a price on carbon emissions and that both will inevitably lead to the same thing -- higher prices for consumers for almost everything they buy?
9. When Layton's finished with his explanation, could Stephen Harper please give his?
10. When pundits, criminologists and prisoners' rights groups accuse Prime Minister Stephen Harper of being out of touch with "mainstream" Canadian values in promising to toughen the Youth Criminal Justice Act, could they please explain who these "Canadians" are and exactly what "values," other than their own, they're talking about?
11. Did everybody in Canada suddenly find a family doctor right after the federal election was called, or is there some other reason why the fact millions of Canadians still, presumably, can't find one has fallen right off the election radar screen?
12. How many people actually care whether a political candidate has ever smoked marijuana, as long as he doesn't consider that to be the high point of his life?
13. Does B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell still think all those media pundits who praised him for his carbon tax earlier this year, actually knew what they were talking about?
14. Is anyone else besides me planing to watch the televised leaders' debate primarily to see what Green Party Leader Elizabeth May does?
15. Why do journalists quote unnamed "Liberal sources" bitching that Stephane Dion has run a poor campaign? Given that that's pretty obvious, who cares what some anonymous Liberal thinks, especially if he doesn't have the guts to identify himself by name? How do we even know such a person exists, let alone what their motives might be if they aren't named? Former Liberal Party president Stephen LeDrew publicly criticized Dion and the Liberal campaign last week. Is he the only Liberal left who actually has a pair?
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