I've been slacking off with the blogging and the Canada and so forth lately. It's a good thing the world has Gary Farber in it, to shine the Light of Truth onto the latest blockbuster political scandal to strike our snowy neighbours to the north: Citizenship and Immigration Minister Judy Sgro has resigned following allegations that she agreed to protect a Brampton pizza-shop owner from deportation in return for lots of free pizza. Also garlic bread.
Sgro, you may recall, also made headlines last year during Strippergate,
when it was alleged that she provided a temporary visa to a Romanian exotic dancer who'd volunteered with Sgro's campaign. Larry Zolf wrote a column on that back in December, in which it is revealed that Sgro favoured importing exotic dancers to make up for a shortage of home-grown Canadian strippers. Won't someone think of the poor strip-club industry?
Of course, there's lots more on this in the Toronto Star, among others. If you slog through their free registration, you can still read all their articles. Unlike certain other papers I could name...
What can we learn from all this?
Let's compare and contrast Canadian political scandals with those of the United States for a moment.
In Canada, we have Pizzagate, Strippergate, and Sponsorgate.
In the United States, on the other hand, we have Lying-and-Fearmongering-Chief-Executive-gate, and of course Torturegate, and We-Totally-Fucked-Up-Iraq-gate, not to mention that old chestnut, The-Country-Is-Being-Run-By-Amoral-Mendacious-Buffoons-gate. Pretty much everything about US politics right now ought to be a scandal, really. There is simply no longer any connection between what the President and his chums say and any sort of objective reality.
It must be nice to live in a nation that can get all worked up over a couple of pizzas, where the populace hasn't been numbed into a sort of shell-shocked complacency by the sheer horror of being alive...
Posted by aloysius at January 16, 2005 03:32 PM | TrackBack |