Irony is one of my favourite things - as is politics. But that's kind of redundant. Because in this country, irony and politics are practically the same thing.
Take our beloved prime minister, for example. He's so ironic, you could use a metal detector to keep track of him.
Israel went through a tough election with an ambiguous outcome, naturally followed by politicians' contentious bickering finally settled through the formation of a coalition government.
Our Stephen Harper sent out a tweet last week giving props to his Israeli counterpart for negotiating the democracy-saving solution.
(I "follow" Harper and he "follows" me, but when I tried "liking" him on Facebook, even my computer found it an untenable proposition and rejected my advances.)
His official statement, gathered directly from his website, includes the paragraph, "On behalf of the Government of Canada, I would like to congratulate Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the formation of a new governing coalition."
Just reading that statement should cure your iron-poor blood.
It's a testament to the strength of his constitution that he was able to survive uttering the words "congratulations" and "coalition" in the same sentence.
I take you back to the fall of 2008. Prime Minister Harper called for a federal general election, dropping the writ on Sept. 7, a year before the date fixed by his own "fixed election date" legislation (already there is the taste of elemental iron reacting with saliva). Harper needed 155 Conservatives to win their ridings in the Oct. 14 election to convert his minority government into a full majority.
His party won more ridings than any other party, but the final tally gave him only 143 seats - an even dozen short of the majority target - and with just over 37 per cent of the popular vote, he was a long way short of gaining the support of a majority of Canadians (although it's the seats, not the people, who count in our electoral system).
And then he set about governing with the kind of arrogance we generally only accept from majority leaders.
And that annoyed all the other also-rans, each with significant chunks of the seating arrangement - but like Harper, none had more than half.
In fact, Harper got so annoying so quickly, that within weeks of the election, a couple of the other also-rans - Stephane Dion's Liberals had gleaned 77 seats from 26 per cent of the popular vote and Jack Layton's New Democrats were sitting on 37 seats built on 18 per cent of the popular vote - started talking with yet another also-ran, Gille Duceppe, whose 51 Bloc Quebecois seats represented 10 per cent of the popular vote.
Between them, they came up with a plan for an alternate government: a coalition built on 165 seats (beating the 155-seat majority threshold by 10) and representing 54 per cent of all the votes cast in the federal election.
Amazingly enough, Harper did not send them a congratulatory tweet applauding them for negotiating a coalition as an effective and democratic solution to the crisis that was threatening to swallow our parliament.
Instead, he declared the exercise an attempted coup d'état, berated the ringleaders for undermining democracy, declared a constitutional crisis, somehow managed to bully a weak and ineffectual governor general to buckle, and dissolved Parliament - effectively making him dictator of Canada.
I wonder if they can taste the irony all the way over in Israel?
Bob Groenenveld is the editor of the Langley Advance.
