Now this is funny

(Posted by John.)

Former Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney - who left office with a Bush-envying approval rating in the mid-teens - may actually embarass our newest Conservative PM.

Canadians will appreciate that enough for me to repeat it:

Mulroney may actually embarass Harper.

Mr. Mulroney plans to hold Prime Minister Stephen Harper's feet to the fire, urging him not only to put environmental issues on his government's list of five priorities, but to put them at the top of that list. His message: leadership trumps process when it comes to saving the planet.

Although Mr. Harper's commitment to the Kyoto Accord has, thus far, been vague, Mr. Mulroney intends to sound the alarm on the subject of global warming and the issues -- including the threats to Arctic sovereignty -- from the melting of the polar ice cap.

You've got to love journalistic convention - Harper's "vague" committment to Kyoto has been crystal clear to anyone with half a brain. He is thoroughly committed to abandoning Kyoto, duh.

One of my early political memories is of an ex-Marine friend of my mother who had come up from the US and lived here for about a year or so after Gulf War I. I remember very clearly his words, after drinking deep of the profoundly anti-Mulroney sentiment of the time:

"Sweet Jesus, I thought we Americans hated Bush. But you Canadians - I'm worried you're gonna fucking kill Mulroney!"

This made a profound impression on me, at the tender age of 10. That said, the one thing nobody will ever be able to take away from Mulroney is that he is genuinely one of the best environmental leaders this country has had. This is not actually anything I expect him to crow about. The fact that his predecessors and successors were miserably worse than him doesn't actually win him any points in my book.

What does win him points, in my book, is that he was such a collossal douchebag that we got more than a decade without even a serious threat of Conservatives in power. It's almost worth the GST, for that.