Talking To Americans

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, still searching for the missing Florida votes and the relevance that eluded his grasp five years ago, has demonstrated that like the House of Bourbon, he has learned nothing and forgotten nothing:

Canadians, Gore said, should vigilantly keep watch over prime minister-designate Stephen Harper because he has a pro-oil agenda and wants to pull out of the Kyoto accord -- an international agreement to combat climate change.

"The election in Canada was partly about the tar sands projects in Alberta," Gore said Wednesday while attending the Sundance Film Festival in Utah.

"And the financial interests behind the tar sands project poured a lot of money and support behind an ultra-conservative leader in order to win the election . . . and to protect their interests."

The oil industry is to our era what the Jews, Jesuits and Freemasons have been in centuries past: the insidious conspiracy to blame for all the world's ills, the power behind the throne that controls us all.

What's more, if you can't blame the oil industry, you can always blame some other natural resource or industrial lobby to suit your audience's needs. If Al Gore had been talking to the local progressives in Nauru, he'd have blamed the phosphate industry's lust to mine bird shit.

You'll recall, of course, that the tar sands project was the hot topic of the election. Sandwiched in the Tory platform between the Accountability Act and the GST cut. Paul Martin's promise to invoke the notwithstanding clause to stop the project before abolishing it. The attack ads about soldiers with oilwells. In our cities.

Fortunately for Al Gore, his audience, being American, would naturally have been completely uninformed about matters happening in Canada (we know because Rick Mercer tells us so) and would have been equally as ignorant about this:

The federal Elections Act limits how much money individuals, corporations and unions can donate to political parties. Individuals are allowed to give as much as $5,000 a year, while companies and unions are capped at $1,000 a year.

In their election platform, the Conservatives promised to further limit individual donations to a maximum of $1,000 and ban all donations from corporations, unions and organizations.

Parties and candidates are required to make public any contributions exceeding $200.

But why let facts get in the way? If he couldn't bring down George Bush, maybe he can bring down George Bush Lite.

Source: Calgary Herald