(Trash) talk is cheap

Header image for Interrobang article CREDIT: THE GAZETTE
Quebec Premier Pauline Marois has been dodging landmines that could bring her political career to an end.

In the world of politics, one party's loss is another party's gain. Policy based criticisms are few and far between in a landscape where cheap smear tactics have proven far more effective. In the past couple of weeks, Quebec Premier Pauline Marois has given her Liberal adversaries all of the ammunition they could have hoped for, and closely following suit on the federal level were Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau and the Prime Minister himself, Stephen Harper.

Albertans were rocked by the resignation of Premier Alison Redford in mid-March and there are fears in Quebec that Premier Pauline Marois could be next. The Parti Quebecois is trailing the provincial Liberal Party by a considerable amount in the polls with the April 7 election just around the corner. The Premier is fending off questions of sovereignty, brought awkwardly to light by the arrival of flamboyant businessman Pierre Karl Peladeau, and more recent accusations of illegal fundraising methods in her own election campaign in 2007.

As though he were deliberately following in his controversial father's footsteps, Justin Trudeau let an f-bomb slip in a passionate moment while speaking at a charity boxing event. Combine that with his scribbled “just watch me” on a cocktail napkin that he passed to a fellow flight goer who'd asked him if he could beat incumbent Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and the Trudeau legacy has almost come full circle. The Conservative reaction to the younger Trudeau's moment of profanity was a tired sound byte bemoaning his lack of judgement, but historically, profanity by a politician tends to become a punchline and then an afterthought before the week is out.

The Prime Minister had to conduct an emergency transplant within his party as the executive director of the party, Dimitri Soudas, was abruptly fired. The former director of communications for Harper announced his resignation on March 30, but it was revealed shortly afterward that the Prime Minister had demanded his resignation for interfering in Soudas' fiancée's conservative nomination race for the newly created Oakville-North Burlington riding. A party leader can typically avoid blame when a subordinate steps out of line, but because of Harper's iron-fisted grip on his party it's not hard to question his judgement when his hand-picked staffers misbehave. Soudas' appointment to executive officer was debated within the party until Harper forced it to a show-of-hands vote in the Prime Minister's own living room.

National Post political columnist and speaker Andrew Coyne spoke to The Canadian Club in a lecture entitled Our Broken Democracy in which he laments the fact that elections are never about who should be in power, they're about the campaigns. In the whirling miasma of misinformation and political-speak, campaign teams have little concern for how they'll fulfill their campaign promises when they have yet to win the election. While it's impossible to say whether the Parti Quebecois or the Liberals would better serve the province of Quebec, it's one of the last questions voters are asking anyways.

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