The GG was following through on a traditional Inuit feast while showing solidarity to sealers who have faced international hatred.

The controversial Governor General has once again won praise and guffaws for her actions in eating seal. Critics have complained her role is mostly symbolic as a representative of the Queen, but is often the case with Michaëlle Jean, she enjoys stirring up political trouble.

Sealers have complained Prime Minister Stephen Harper hasn’t supported them in desire to club seals on ice floes.

However, recent comments by Minister of Defense Peter MacKay endorsing seal should help the beleaguered industry.

MacKay told CBC News, “I think that was wonderful. I think she’s Canada’s new Braveheart for eating the seal heart,” said MacKay, referring to the Mel Gibson film about Scottish hero William Wallace.

“We’re going up there again in the summer, the chief of defence staff and I as we did last year [for a military operation], and I expect there’ll be an opportunity to try some delicious seal. I would encourage all Canadians to try seal. It’s a wonderful product.”

Canadians haven’t rushed out to purchase seal meat on MacKay’s suggestion…Yet.

The British, who haven’t had much to do with Canada in decades, have complained bitterly their representative (technically the Governor General reps the Queen), shouldn’t be engaging in politics by eating seal heart.
Dickie Arbiter, the former press secretary to the Queen, told CBC News from London.

“Her role is largely ceremonial and what she does in the political arena is really on the advice of the prime minister and the ministers. And to start cutting up a seal and eating it is sort of making a political statement and not what one expects a Governor General to do.”

The European Union has banned seal sales from their nation states.
No word on when out spoken anti-sealers Paul McCartney and Pam Anderson will bemoan the seal feast. Both Anderson and McCartney have publicly appeared during seal hunt season in the poverty and celebrity stricken villages where the seal hunts take place to bolster their careers.

Mulroney contends he accepted cash envelopes to lobby now deceased foreign leaders like Borris Yeltstin.  And to convince the UN to purchase light armored vehicles for UN force deployment.

Getting paid in large sums of cash might not have been the best business practices. Mulroney claims he kept the funds in a safe and later gave it to friends and family members.

The former PM claims he did the work, but didn’t issue invoices or declare the income on his taxes until the public got a whiff of the action.

There’s much speculation, with evidence that Mulroney actually accepted the cash to fund (via the taxpayers) a light armored vehicle manufacturing plant  in Bear Heard Nova Scoatia. A place with little employment prospects.

Mulroney claims  he killed Bear Head. Acting in the complete opposite of influence peddling. He accepted cash to say no to spending taxpayer money on a light armor manufacturing plant.

However, a CP report suggest, Mulroney chief of staff,  “Norman Spector contends that Mulroney, in his testimony before a public inquiry, has offered an inaccurate picture of his handling of the project backed by German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber.

“What we’ve learned about Mulroney is that he’s very slippery with words and evasive with his testimony,” Spector said.

“He didn’t cancel the project in any incarnation. He never cancelled it.”

The original version of the Bear Head project, first floated in the mid-1980s, would have seen the German firm Thyssen AG set up a plant in Cape Breton to build light-armoured vehicles for sale to the Canadian military as well as for potential export.

The proposed site of the plant changed after 1992 to east-end Montreal, and the project also shifted away from domestic sales toward a heavier emphasis on export markets.

Former Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney testified taking cash payments is probably not the best business practices to have. While new upcoming political hottie, Liberal MP Dr Ruby Dhalla has learned paying nannies in cash is also not the brightest of business decision.

Mulroney admitted Tuesday, May 12 that he collected over two hundred thousand in cash from a German businessmen. Mulroney never declared this amount on his taxes until long after the dealo. Only until a reporter began digging into his financial dealings.

The Mulroney Scandal drove him from office. Rearing its ugly head on the former head of state only after the German business person began ratting out Mulroney to avoid extradition back to German.

The only interesting twist is whether or not Mulroney (who introduced the country’s much hated Goods and Service Tax) paid GST on services he provided. Any services over $30,000 is liable for GST remittance. Mulroney admits to paying income tax six years after accepting the lobbyist monies.

On the other side of the benches, MP Ruby Dhalla, the star of the Liberal party with her stunning ethnic good looks, is facing allegations she paid nannies under the table. Sans taxes. Dhalla also promised the nannies fast tracked Canadian citizenship for working long hours.

One nanny told newspaper Toronto Star she had to ‘Shine Miss Ruby’s Many, Many Shoes.’ Apparently Dhalla has two rooms of shoes making her a shoe festishes wet dream come true.

Facing her first political scandal, one that could end her political career, Dhalla became reculsive before coming out swinging. She’s hired a lawyer to deal with the nannies and is asking for a parliamentary ethics committee to review her working relationship with the Philipino nannies.

Now it’s getting worse. First came the coalition fiasco — all of which could have been averted had the NDP explicitly offered the possibility of a coalition during the election campaign. Then the Liberals chose the most conservative of leadership candidates, Michael Ignatieff, mostly through attrition and a lack of viable alternatives.

Ignatieff is doing nothing to counter the NDP’s charge that he is basically in support of Stephen Harper’s government. He insisted on no modifications to Harper’s budget. He caved and gave the budget speedy passage when Harper turned up the heat. He supports the Conservatives on the same kind of mandatory minimum sentencing for drug crimes that state after state in the USA is getting rid of as fast as possible, even though it isn’t a confidence measure.

Governments get defeated, not elected, the cynics say, and Ignatieff is a cynic’s cynic.

Last week, Ignatieff sided with the Harperites against British MP George Galloway, whom the government has barred from entering Canada on account of his support for Hamas and Palestine. Although Ignatieff does not support barring Galloway’s entry to Canada, he was just as definitive in condemning him.

“I have never in a long life of listening to George Galloway heard a single sentence out of his mouth that I believed,” said Ignatieff, which points to a glaring difference between the two men. Ignatieff supported the US invasion of Iraq and Galloway was one of its most vocal and prominent critics. The Liberal leader is obviously trying to win back some voters, mostly but by no means exclusively Jewish, that support Harper’s and immigration minister Jason Kenney’s aggressively pro-Israel stance.

Last week, Kenney cut funding, mostly used for immigrant settlement services, to the Canadian Arab Federation. Its president called Kenney and other politicians “professional whores” for their support of Israel. This verbal excess provided Kenney with ample pretext for cutting the funds and playing the pro-Israel card again.

Some say Michael Ignatieff has done so little to develop a personal identity of his own around issues because he expects Harper’s popularity to fall on its own due to hard times. He doesn’t want to create any targets, like his predecessor’s carbon tax, on which he can be attacked. Governments get defeated, not elected, the cynics say, and Ignatieff is a cynic’s cynic.

Some might say Michael Ignatieff’s strategy recalls Dick Morris’ advice to Bill Clinton to “hug the enemy.” Clinton hugged the enemy so hard that he adopted a great many of the disastrous Republican policies that led to today’s big crash.

Last week Harper gave a startlingly partisan speech to the recently-founded Manning Institute for Democracy, Harper slagged Barack Obama’s stimulus plan for taxing the rich and the “toxic coalition brew of Liberals, socialists and separatists.” He also said the global economic crash was the result of people not being conservative enough.

“We are in a global recession principally — and we have to face this — because a lot of people on Wall Street, because of a lot of people in the private sector more generally — homeowners or consumers — pushed or bought into a very unconservative idea: that they could live beyond their means. Regulators may have failed to prevent it, but in the end it was a failure of the private sector to live according to the values we as conservatives know to be true.”

This week Harper is going after the gun registry, which cost the Liberals so much support in rural areas and the West.

Where will Michael Ignatieff go next? At a time when Canadians need inspiration, his current direction is not promising. Even if trends continued and he won a minority government, the policy differences from the current one could be slight.

Ish Theilheimer has been Publisher of the leading, and oldest, independent Canadian online newsmagazine, StraightGoods.ca, since founding it in September 1999. He is also Managing Editor of PublicValues.ca. He lives wth his wife Kathy in Golden Lake, ON, in the Ottawa Valley.