So my dad and "Tom" (Thomas Mulcair) met up at Briarwood Park in Beaconsfield the other day.
Yeah, really. Two grandfathers laughing it up with a couple of toddlers. They didn't know each other beforehand, but my dad can still spot a pol with a national profile, and the wily salesman that he is, he was none too shy about starting up a conversation.
I had no idea the leader of the Opposition was my dad's neighbour, nor that he had long-since been, for roughly 30 years, since about the time we ourselves moved there from Sherbrooke.
Will wonders never cease? I wanted to know: What street does he live on? Beaconsfield Blvd? The ritzy Hyde Park perhaps? No, no, probably the more laid-back hippie-wetdream champagne-socialist Kirkwood Avenue?
"Lynwood, I think," was my dad's reply.
"Lynwood?"
"Lynwood."
I defy anyone to find a more pedestrian, unpretentious, straight-up homey suburban road in this entire country than Lynwood Drive in Beaconsfield, Quebec. Go ahead and Google-map it if you don't believe me.
So interestingly, I was out visiting my folks just the day after learning of this, bringing my own two kids and upping the grandkid quotient in hopes of divining a follow-up visit from the potential next Prime Minister of What We Hope Will Still Be Somewhat Recognizable as Canada After The Harpercons Have Had Their Way.
I reckon this was about the same time this despicable smear job was being prepared for print, replete with skillfully photoshopped pic of a "four-car" garage (nobody could own a house with that much garage space unless they were psychotically trying to guzzle enough tarsands-derived gasoline to ...insert maniacal slobbering laugh... bloody-well guarantee climate change hell for all the misbegotten creatures of the Earth, of course).
Yeah, Dr. Evil has nothing on our Tom.
For what it's worth, I am not a big fan of Mr. Mulcair, although he is a darn sight better than probably 90% of the people you might find yourself hemming and hawing over on Election Day.
Anyway, on my way down to visit my folks last Sunday, I decided to venture down Lynwood Drive, perhaps the only road in that southwest sector of Beaconsfield where I never once took up delivery of the Gazette in the late 1980s.
I just wanted to see which was the nicest house on that street, the kind of house a man of his stature might deem worthy of himself to have as his domicile. I have to say, I went right past 109, purportedly Mulcair's address, without even considering it, it was so ordinary.
What does this tell us? That Mulcair owns perhaps the middlest of middle-class cottages, while the homes (former and present) of such Canadian political luminaries as Pierre-Elliot Trudeau (Town of Mount Royal) and Brian Mulroney and Jean Charest (Westmount, both) are among the poshest of posh to be found on the island Jacques Cartier named Ville-Marie over 350 years ago?
Big whoop.
And with Warren Kinsella piling on pathetically, (complain about something real, Warren, okay?) all I can say is that my respect for Mulcair has just shot up ten-fold.
And as for that "four-car" garage? Take heart Tom, because if that's the best they can do, they got nothin'.
1 comment:
I was shocked that this was the same McGregor (I think) who had collaborated with Steve Maher to bring us the report on what was until then Election Canada's secret investigations on the robocalls.
I had to wonder if this was his way of making up to the powers that be for what must have been viewed as an attack on the Conservative party, as the latter is now on the defensive for those misleading calls that misdirected self identified non Conservatives voters.
No wonder few people want to buy papers that publish these types of trash. Have you wondered why the Toronto Star, unlike most of these other papers, seem to be doing so well?
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