Each week, Kyle Muzyka sifts through what our PM has been up to in this column, The Radical Adventures of Stephen Harper, for your personal enjoyment. (You can see his archived reviews of 24/SEVEN here.)
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Radical Adventures of Stephen Harper. As per usual, our fearless leader was up to next to nothing this week. In fact, there was even less content this week, if that’s even possible.
We begin with 24SEVEN and its announcement that our nation will be sending more non-lethal aid to Ukraine. Regrettably, given our track record on Ukranian aid, more plausible is that Ukrainian-Canadian families were secretly hired to make and ship out millions of perogies. On the plus side, each cook would guarantee that they were the best perogies you’d ever eat, as the recipe would almost certainly have been passed down from their grandmother.
Harper also had a round table discussion about free trade with the Republic of Korea, adding another nation to a list of those that are almost free to trade with. It seems as if it’s become rather trendy to have a free trade deal with Canada, now. Think of Canada as the bucket cap of the free trade world. Sure, it’s becoming more prominent, but it still feels somewhat irrelevant to most Canadians.
His annual visit to the north took place this week as well. Harper visited a few communities to “showcase the science, technology and research that are underway in the North.”
Let’s be real here, Mr. Prime Minister. We know that all you really want to do is rip around on a quad.
He’s leaving his competition in the dust.
24/SEVEN
Even news outside of 24SEVEN was sparse. The biggest story this week concerning our PM was Rob Ford/Leo challenging him to the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, and Harper giving a donation instead.
Come on, Mr. Harper. We all had our hopes up on this one, and you couldn’t even give us that brief satisfaction.
Finally, a post from the Globe and Mail earlier in the week has a diagram about what Canadians think about our Prime Minister, along with Obama and Putin.
Here are some of the words most commonly used to describe our leader: secretive, dishonest, arrogant, uncaring.
What’s most interesting (to me, anyway) about the article is that words used to describe Obama are the exact opposite: influential, charismatic, compassionate, honest. It’s interesting to think that, if this study was done in America, the Americans’ description of Obama would be simple to Canadians’ description of Harper, and the most common perception of Harper by America would most likely be “who?”
PHOTO OF THE WEEK
“This is the coldest thing I’ve held since I put my hand firmly on my chest this morning!”
Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press