Showbiz in Ottawa.... the omnibus budget voting...

Until fairly recently, Canadians have taken a certain amount of pride in having a different approach to governing the country than our American cousins govern theirs, but we're getting more like them every day it seems.

This omnibus budget bill, encompassing 400-plus pages and nearly four dozen laws being changed, and requiring some 22 hours of marathon voting seems to be uncomfortably similar to those American tactics of tying together a batch of unrelated pork-barrel projects and then shoving them through under the guise of a budget modification which in itself had nothing to do with its add-ons, or very little at best.

Here's a picture from today's Globe and Mail showing (left to right) our P.M., the ever-radiant 'Hairspray' Harper, flanked by his House Leader Van Loan, and on the right, that isn't a Chicago mobster, despite the squinty look and the flashy suit, it's Peter 'F-35' MacKay, the marvelous mathematician and Defense Minister. The Three Musketeers they aren't, Kiddies. And we can tell from the look on Harper's face that he already knows God's going to get him for this one.
It's just a matter of time.

Here's what Queen's University professor Ned Franks says about all that:-
"I consider these bills and the form they come to Parliament and the length of them an affront to parliamentary procedure and practice." Well said, professor.

This self-serving dictatorship is a democracy only on the day once every few years when us unwashed masses are allowed to vote for those who participate in it supposedly on our behalf. The rest of the time, our main function is to provide the revenue for these spendthrifts to squander as they choose.