Gasp! A Canadian Political Scandal!
You have to love reasonably-handsome Defence Minister Peter MacKay (not really, that’s mostly a turn of phrase.) He seems to attract embarrassment like a pocket attracts lint.
First, a few years ago, his girlfriend and Conservative Party colleague, Belinda Stronach (blonde, leggy, mega-rich, may or may not have had a dalliance with Bill Clinton, definitely had a dalliance with former NHL enforcer Tie Domi) ditched him and defected to the Liberals for a cabinet position. When reached for comment, MacKay managed to blurt out “my heart’s a little banged up.” So we felt bad for him, until he referred to her as a dog, and then we got over it.
And now he’s used a military helicopter to pick him up from his fishing lodge (thankfully, it does not appear to have a racist epithet in its name). Because, according to the leaked emails, otherwise he would have been stuck with a ninety minute drive and a half hour boat ride. (The horror.)
Initially, MacKay claimed said retrieval was part of a pre-planned search-and-rescue exercise. It was not.
The best part, of course, is the email exchange revealing the military’s complete lack of interest in retrieving said Defence Minister (who was actually winched up — like in that bad Coast Guard movie with Ashton and Kevin Costner — as the fishing lodge was tight on space for a massive Cormorant military helicopter landing):
At one point during the discussion, a different officer, Col. Bruce Ploughman of 1 Canadian Air Division Headquarters in Winnipeg, raised concerns about the optics of picking the minister up from a fishing trip with a military helicopter.
“When the guy who’s fishing at the fishing hole next to the minister sees the big yellow helicopter arrive and decides to use his cellphone to video the minister getting on board and post it on YouTube,” Ploughman wrote, “who will be answering the mail that one?”
Ploughman expressed reluctance to have the military accept the mission.
Okay, the best part is actually what happened after the helicopter ride, when Harper transferred to a jet “to fly to a lobster festival in his Nova Scotia riding where he was proclaimed a ‘lobster-banding champion.’”
Will he resign? Hard to say. Canadians are notoriously tolerant of their public officials. Former Prime Minister Mackenzie King hired a psychic to commune with his dead dog, Pat, from whom he received advice on governing the nation. More recently, Pierre Trudeau told striking truck drivers to “mangez de la merde” and his wife flashed her bush at a Rolling Stones concert. Oh, and Jean Chretien lightly throttled a protester at a public event.