They made all the kids troop off the bus and show their passports. Anyone know if this is standard operating procedure, in the bright new Homeland Security era?

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I am on a crowded bus with dozens of Grade Eight students, heading to Washington, D.C. Dozens.

Pray for me.

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What would Jesus do?

This week, the question is quite relevant. If He was here, to see all that we have become — with the chasm dividing rich and poor growing ever-wider, with governments bailing out bankers but never the masses, with average folks having to borrow just to keep food on the table — what would He do?

The question occurred to me on Sunday, at the Catholic church I attend, and on the very same weekend the Occupiers finally came to Canadian cities.

The gospel was a well-known one — the one about the attempt of the Pharisees to trap Jesus Christ with a question about taxes (Matthew 22:15). “Give back to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” Christ said to them. “And to God what is God’s.”

Doesn’t sound much like a tax-fighter, does He?

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As far as I am aware, this is the first direct communication – a tweet or otherwise – from the PC leader since he lost the election.

I don’t know about you, but I find this kind of amazing. This is the first thing he has to say to voters?

Like I said once before: as a TSN anchor, he’d be great.

As a leader of a political party? Not so much.

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When disaster strikes, when mistakes happen, what’s the best corporate response?

Well, to respond, for starters. Not to pretend nobody’s noticed.

Last week, as you are certainly aware, was The Great Berry Crash of 2011, and plenty of folks noticed. Across Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas, millions of us peered at our inert BlackBerry screens for day after interminable day, cursing.

Cursing one of the all-time Canadian business success stories, BlackBerry’s Research in Motion (RIM). Cursing the company’s near-total silence about a system-wide collapse that inconvenienced — or hurt — countless businesses and individuals around the globe.

No e-mails. No instant messaging. No web browsing. For days, our BlackBerrys were great big digital clocks, and nothing more. An apology (of sorts) came from one of RIM’s bosses only after four days of corporate silence. It was beyond maddening — it was pathetic.

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Sorry, I ain’t buying it. Rumours of our death have been greatly prognosticated, etc.

The very folks saying the Lib brand is dead said the same thing about the Conservative brand in 1993. They were wrong then, they’re wrong now.

I’ll have more to say about this on CBC radio tomorrow morning (don’t ask me which program, however – it was me and Jim Armour with Brent Bambury, but God knows what show/time it’ll be on). But, in the meantime, I’ll simply note that everyone said Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals were goners, too.

Guess we weren’t.

UPDATE: Man, you guys are fast.  A regular has told me the show I was on was Day Six, and a clip of one of my exchanges with Jim is found here. If I sound pissed off about the Conservatives’ ongoing flirtations with racism and homophobia, it’s because I was.

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…and I’m still walking around, grinning, as I ponder the collective fate of Phony Tony and Benedict Baldy.

Equally, I breathlessly await their run on the NDP ticket, somewhere, sometime soon.

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…and I was totally in love with her in my youth, too.

Too bad I called iMessage “iMessenger,” by the way.  Factual errors on a global scale. Sheesh.

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Chantal Hebert is way, way smarter than me.  But this column has me befuddled.  To wit:

“Notwithstanding the party’s victories in Ontario and Prince Edward Island, the decline of the Liberal brand in Canada has continued unabated this fall.”

Well, no.

Grits were written off as dead in Ontario – and we did a 20-point turnaround to win a minor majority.  Grits were supposedly in big trouble in PEI, and came back with a big majority.  Quebec Grits were supposedly beyond hope just a few months ago, and now it is their main opponent that is dead or dying.  Newfoundland Libs, with a new leader, were supposedly going to be replaced as Official Opposition by the NDP – but they weren’t. B.C. Liberals had joined the ranks of the walking dead, too, until Christy Clark made them competitive again, and the NDP aren’t looking nearly as smug anymore.  And so on.

I’m not one to be complacent – we won the Ontario election because we weren’t, and because we took our opponents very, very seriously.  But these periodic obituaries being penned by the commentariat are really starting to piss me off.  They’re just wrong.

Anyway, I shouldn’t let the crepe-hangers irritate me, I guess.  As Chretien once said to me, when some of his opponents were (again) spreading rumours that he was dying:  “The best way to disprove these rumours about me dying,” he shrugged, “is to keep on living.”

And so he did.

And so will we.

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