Ritalin Boy, Davey Snot and me. Love the grainy feel. Shows fewer wrinkles.

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It haunts us still.

The Quebec question, that is. With Quebec Liberals now edging ahead of separatist Parti Quebecois rivals — by a whopping single digit, according to a June poll by the Leger agency — Premier Jean Charest is now considering pulling the plug and calling an election for Sept. 4.

What if he loses? What does it mean for Quebecois, and the rest of Canada?

For Charest, the rationale for going now is plain. The global economy is in serious decline once again, and all of Canada will inevitably be hurt by that. The lead that PQ leader Pauline Marois once enjoyed has evaporated. The fledgling Coalition Avenir Quebec party hasn’t caught on yet.

And, for some Quebec Liberals, they figure it is better to go now (when things aren’t so bad) than to go later (when things are likely to be worse).

Maybe. Perhaps. But what if that political shorthand is wrong?

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I don’t hate Stephen Harper. (Don’t really hate anyone, in fact: when I hate someone, I’m not content to simply stew about it. I go out and do something about it.)

I was thinking about this yesterday, as I laboured to build a floating dock. (It’ll be fine as long as none of you step on it, BTW.) Harper had been very kind to my family when my Dad died, and we will never forget that.

That doesn’t mean we agree with many of his policies – we of course don’t – but we don’t see the man as evil incarnate, either.

Dan Gardner this morn on the Harper Haters:

“This [Calgary-is-best remark] reveals the prime minister’s divisiveness, people said. His arrogance. His insensitivity. Why, it’s yet more evidence that Stephen Harper is the worst prime minister. Ever. The word “fascist” may even have slipped in there somewhere. It usually does.”

Gardner goes on to say that social media is to blame for a lot of this. Unless I’m reading him wrong, he’s saying social media largely created Harper hate.

If so, he’s wrong on three counts.

One, social media doesn’t actually create anything. It’s a noisy, chaotic mirror. It simply reflects what is already there.

Two, “hate” is too strong a word. Writing for the Sun, or being a liberal on the conservative-dominated blogosweird, I get called more nasty names in a day than you will in a lifetime. But I know most of what I get isn’t hate – it’s just bad tempter, or undiagnosed mental illness. Almost always, the critics calm down; sometimes, we even end up being pen pals.

Three, Harper is a unique case. He’s not ever the norm in any baseline social media analysis. With the recent exception of Angry Tom Mulcair, Harper has practiced the politics of division more than any politician in living memory. You reap what you sow, etc.

Anyway, read Gardner. You won’t hate him for it.

I think.

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Got up to cabin with daughter and her fellow camp counselor, both on one-day furloughs, around 10:30. Roxy, who is dumb as a post, acting weird. Neighbour down the way calls out to keep dog in – “there’s a big fisher about.”

They’re nasty bastards (the fishers, not the neighbours), and I doubt the dog would win a scrap with (what sounds like) a big male fisher.

Assuming I have, er, sufficient firepower (and you should), is there any chance I could dissaude said fisher from eating my dog?

Input welcome, as always. Over and out.

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It’s my true home, it’s where I grew up, it’s where my family spent the most years: Calgary.

But can anyone explain to me why Stephen Harper would, ever state that it is Canada’s “best” city?

I think it’s pretty awesome, too.  It’s amazing, in fact.

But it seems like a pretty substantial rookie flub on the part of the so-called Master Strategist.

Anyone agree?

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I cannot tell you how happy I was to read the following on the front page of this morning’s Globe and Mail:

President Barack Obama wants to shift the focus of the election campaign away from health care and unemployment to a debate about income inequality, betting voters will back his call for tax increases on the rich.

Mr. Obama moved on Monday to revive his push for higher tax rates on the wealthiest Americans, making the proposal a key plank of his re-election strategy. It marked a new offensive in his attempt to cast Republican nominee Mitt Romney as a ruthless corporate raider whose policies would protect the rich. 

Why am I happy? Well, because that is the central thesis of this book, which happens to be going on sale in the U.S. of A. in September.  Sample quote:

What, then, should be the alternative narrative that Fukuyama and others call for?

Jean Chrétien, who crafted winning campaign narratives at the national level for forty years—and won three back-to-back majorities—agrees that the best narrative for progressives is the one that could be seen in virtually every North American and European city in the summer and fall of 2011: the 1 percent versus the 99 percent…

 “The Occupy kids out on Wall Street knew that, too. They were a great example of that. [Occupy] was impressive—some of these kids were saying the same thing Warren Buffett said. Buffett said that he was paying less taxes than his secretary, and he shouldn’t be.” Chrétien pauses a last time. ‘This thing, the 99 percent thing, can become an issue in the next election. It can be very big. And I believe this is what Obama is going to say.”

Apparently so! The old guy nails it again!

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Ms. Southey objects to my column, below. She thinks I’m a “dick,” etc. for having effrontery to criticize her friend.  Yawn.

She also thinks her tweet below, about Luka Magnotta’s victim Jun Lin, is super-duper funny. She says it’s “black humour.” I don’t quite see it that way, myself. In fact, I find the “dismemberment joke” genre particularly inappropriate the very week (a) the young victim’s family is arriving to collect his remains and (b) more remains are being received by schools in Vancouver. The smart Globe columnist, however, thinks it’s all screamingly funny.

Me, not so much. What do you think?

Oh, for the “context” Tabby feels is essential: here’s her column, wherein she calls it all “horrific” and whatnot. Which is it? “Horrific,” or an occasion for “black humour”? Only Ms. Southey knows, I guess.

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So, there’s this fellow who works at Sun News.

We often share the same page in the paper for our columns. He is quite famous, and I decidedly am not. I don’t ever mention him, and he doesn’t ever mention me.

There are a lot of good reasons for that, but suffice to say that our benign and baby-faced Sun News overlord, Kory Teneycke, was somehow able to obtain a truce between this fellow and I.

For years, it had been the War of the Roses between us — on steroids. The fact that Kory was able to achieve a cessation of hostilities suggests to me that if you ever want somebody to solve the Middle East crisis, Teneycke’s the guy.

Suffice to say this fellow — who I do not, and will not, name — disagrees with me fiercely on just about everything. The reverse is also true. There is nothing we agree on, pretty much.

Except one thing: Stephen Wicary. Stephen Wicary was the online editor for The Globe and Mail for a number of years. He’s a weedy, pompous bore, like not a few folks on Parliament Hill.

Part of his job, apparently, was to attack people on Twitter he didn’t like. This included my friend Norman Spector, and pretty much anybody who has ever had anything to do with Sun News.

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