Anyone who can read and/or memorize a joke can tell it. What separates truly funny comedians from ordinary run-of-the-mill joke tellers is the way that the joke is told. As is often said, in comedy timing is everything.
The same can be said of politics. Whether or not a political party is successful or not depends not so much upon the issues or their policies but the timing of those policies. A good example of this was seen during the last Ontario provincial election campaign when Conservative leader John Tory made the funding of faith based schools the major plank in the party’s platform. There was no great hue and cry from the electorate to provide such funding. Like others, Ontarians had their problems but having to pay for sending their kids to non-public and non publicly funded schools clearly didn’t appear to be one of them. As well, the Liberal government had just backed down from its intention to bring Sharia law into the province. While Seatless John’s proposal extended to the funding of all faith based schools, many voters identified it with the funding of Muslim schools which didn’t sit too well after the close call with the implementation of Sharia law. While there was a lot of merit and fairness in the Tory school funding plan, the last election was simply not the time to try and implement it.
Now, federal Liberal leader Stéphane Dion is pretty well basing his entire campaign on his Green Shift plan which is supposed to help Canada save the planet. No matter how many times Dion says that his plan is revenue neutral, it is nothing more than a cash grab that will seek to make the West pay in order to benefit central Canada. An election is coming just around the corner although as Angelo Persichilli wrote in his Toronto Star column, Dion is having trouble finding the corner. Whether there will be a fall election or not, the Liberal leader is spending his entire summer travelling the country trying to sell his Green Shaft Shift policy and telling the populace that while their home heating bills will be higher, they will eventually get the money back.
The Liberals have had since 1997 when the Kyoto Protocol was signed until the end of their reign in January 2006 to achieve Canada’s Kyoto targets and they did nothing. The fact that Stéphane Dion held the environment portfolio during part of this time didn’t change things. The Liberals of course whined and whined when the government changed, blaming all of Canada’s environmental degradation on Stephen Harper.
Last week an article appeared in the Times of London indicating that the obsession with the environment may be coming to an end. Entitled “Suddenly being green is not cool anymore” the piece gave examples of how UK politicians don’t talk about the environment as much as they used to. When Tory leader David Cameron’s bicycle was stolen, it was reported as a crime story. Cameron received no recognition for cycling around London rather than riding in a motor vehicle and thereby helping the environment. Nobody cared. The article also mentioned how after Boris Johnson became mayor of London he quickly cancelled a £25 congestion fee for gas guzzling vehicles.
The Times also pointed out that among the general public, the environment is not as an important issue than it was in the past. This finding is consistent with polls taken in Canada that showed that the economy quickly eclipsed the environment as the issue that a significant number of Canadians find to be the most important.
As manufacturing jobs are vanishing and the price of oil at the pumps continues to head upwards, Stéphane Dion is putting all of his and the Liberal Party of Canada’s eggs into the environmental basket. Anyone who has seen Dion speak knows that he has no chance of making it as a successful stand-up comedy. And now it appears that the more he concentrates on an issue of diminishing importance to a significant number of Canadians, his chances of ever becoming Prime Minister of Canada is decreasing. In politics as in comedy, timing is everything.
