Adrift

Walk away me boys, walk away me boys,
and by morning we'll be free
Wipe that golden tear from your mother dear,
and raise what's left of the flag for me

The shock of it all still has many of us in a stupor, like the Blitzkrieg has rolled through and we're all wandering around in the ruins of Europe. One minute I was drinking a bottle of cheap French Merlot with the BBC on; the next I was staggering through the middle of the night, passing drunks talking about how Donald Trump is just misunderstood. Fuck me we're in some vile times, but one global catastrophe per column, I suppose.

The casualty reports of the BREXIT vote are still coming in and it will be years before the full extent of this calamity is known, if it can ever be so understood: Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn faces a revolt from within his own party after yet another - and most appalling - example of his lame and dismal leadership, and the Pound Sterling was being beaten unconscious in back alley while the results were still coming in. Over the course of just a few hours the British economy tanked at a rate not seen since before the Great Depression. Billions, perhaps trillions, have been wiped out.

The damned thing even had a real body count: MP Jo Cox, a champion of diversity who pushed hard to help refugees, was murdered by a reactionary nutjob trying to Make Britain Great Again, and on the big night Nigel Farage still had the audacity to squeeze the words "without having to fire a bullet" through his gopping fish-faced mouth while announcing British independence. The whole European Experiment which has provided for the most peaceful and prosperous decades that continent has ever known, has been put at risk and fascist upstarts in France and the Netherlands are hungrily eyeing the bleeding and vulnerable EU. Christ, I can't wait to see the Charlie Hebdo issue about this.

At least I can take some comfort knowing that one of the casualties of the night was David Cameron, that Pigfucker. After appeasing the lunatic fringe of his party and fending off an encroaching UKIP in the previous election by recklessly tossing off a promise to hold the referendum, his hog is thoroughly skewered and roasted. Well deserved. Next time, David, remember that voters who can be convinced to vote for Nigel "doesn't everyone call them Chinkys?" Farage is probably best left alone and not worth chasing.

This is different than an election defeat, there's a sharper sting to it. With elections there's always the prospect of getting them back the next time around. The next two or three years may be rotten but at least we can think the next cycle is a fresh start. It's much harder after a referendum, which may never occur again and can't be taken back nearly so easily. Even if it could be, in time, so much of the damage is already done. It's unsettling to watch a country vote itself into near complete irrelevance.

Boris Johnson is my bet to be the next Prime Minister. He's one of the best educated dopes on the face of the Earth and his buffoonish persona is as worrying as it is hilarious, but if the ship is going down we might as well have a song and a laugh while we're at it.

And make no mistake mate, the ship does indeed appear to be going down. In Northern Ireland Sinn Fein is back to whispering about a vote to unite with the Republic and that may gain serious traction. Scottish nationalists, only recently defeated in no small part by the argument that only staying in the United Kingdom could guarantee their place in the EU, are already planning the next vote on independence and it's becoming harder to argue that they're better off where they are now...stuck sharing a country with a Middle England full of small minded bigots who really don't seem to like brown people unless they can cook a good curry, and don't understand why they (and of course, nobody else) bothered to win the war just to be ruled by Belgians and Germans anyway.

At least we can look forward to watching whoever leads the Conservative party struggle and twist through the politically dire consequences that await them no matter what they do. It's possible they or Cameron will go down in history as the last Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and it will be almost entirely by accident - a reckless promise tossed off without much consideration to bring the whole temple down on your own head in order to placate a few malcontents on the right. Empowering racists, and dodging facts and evidence to further divide an already divided country. Swinefuckery: it's a new entry in my political lexicon and that is going to be the definition. Jesus, remember when these people owned 1/4 of the Earth's surface? Only mad dogs and Englishmen went out in the noonday sun back then, and the rest of us used to be able to tell one from the other.

The world is getting smaller and more integrated whether these people like it or not, and theirs virtually nothing they can actually do to stop it. Leave campaigners seemed to play on a portion of the British psyche that acts like the kid in high school who won a gold medal in track and field in Grade 11 and that's been their whole life ever since. So glorious was that victory that it has outshone anything else since, it's how they define themselves.

No progress is possible, no modernity enacted if it might challenge that mythos. Remember the good old days? They ask, repeating the mantra of the Jeremy Clarkson school of Political Theory, Why did it all have to change? Who needs a comprehensive and coherent set of trade, travel, and safety regulations dictated by some faceless paper pushing nerd in Brussels? Nevermind peace and prosperity, I bet he can't even finish a 500m dash!

Or is a 546 yard dash for those still operating in backwards nonsense? For the foreseeable future, I suppose it might be.

So Long, Stephen

If today was your last day and tomorrow was too late
Could you say goodbye to yesterday? Would you live each moment like your last?
Leave old pictures in the past, donate every dime you have?
If today was your last day?

Stephen Harper is leaving politics. I've waited a decade to type that sentence, and I bet most of you have waited nearly as long to read it.

I can't say it comes as much of a surprise: Former Prime Ministers (especially defeated ones) carry a rank smell with them wherever they go. They are suddenly a specter, haunting Parties who are eager to move on after an election.

The clock has been ticking on Mr. Harper's departure since shortly before 11pm on October 19th but due deference must be paid to the riding and the few thousand voters who actually elected him, and Stephen Harper has been present (if silent) in the Commons for the last six months. Finally, however, the jig is up: He will sit there no more. Nobody wants another Diefenbaker, some wizened old imp wandering the halls of the Centre Block terrifying young MPs like a Mad King stalking the ruins of his old palace. No, it's much better to leave now...especially now that the trial of Mike Duffy is finished and he no longer needs Parliamentary Privilege to protect him from involvement in that court case. It's funny how timing works out, no?

I will always remember him as the man who could drive his opponents into a mad animal frenzy, barking and frothing at the mouth, just by affecting that attempted half-smile of his and calmly saying one of his pre-loaded phrases like "My friends, that's simply not true." Oh, how they hated him; they still do: even now, months after his defeat, you can easily find a pack of rabid Harper haters on Twitter at any time of the day or night.

He is moving on to become a "public intellectual". I'm not sure what that means but I can only imagine the kind of ad he'd run against anyone else who deigned to style themselves like that. It apparently involves setting up a Foreign Policy institute. Hah! From the man who threw a temper tantrum by locking himself in the closet of the Brazilian foreign minister; the man who blew off the UN to deliver a partisan attack speech at a Tim Horton's, and then blamed the opposition for Canada losing a Security Council seat.

Foreign Policy Institute? Jesus, best of luck with that, my friend. I hope somebody's told him it's going to involve more than just driving four-wheelers up north.

Abacus has him as the least popular former Prime Minister of our times: I won't begrudge anyone their feelings for the man. After all, his premiership was marked by more than his fair share of fell deeds, and his bastardly attitude ensured he would have no bridges left to cross at the end. For all of our howling and rending of garments at mere mention of his name, his mark on this country is hard to find.

I promised myself that some part of this column would be more than just the simple shitstorm of a long-blocked colon suddenly released. So I will muster some nice things to say about the 22nd Prime Minister of this country. Stephen Harper is a master politician who played the game well, it can not be denied. I have said many things about him these past ten years, but I'd be damned fool to argue his skill as a political actor: He forged a new political party, held it together through sheer force of will, led it to big electoral successes, and nearly succeeded in killing and supplanting the Liberal Party.

But the price of his power was to lose any semblance of a national vision. Once, in beta-testing, it's possible he had Big Ideas for this country. By the time he arrived at the Langevin Block, however, they were watered down to pablum. Stephen Harper's great plan for Canada seemed to be a slightly more dysfunctional version of the country as it is today but with him at the centre of it forever, and for me that lack of imagination is the truly unforgivable part. He was content to remain a tinkerer, fiddling with little knobs here and there in the relentless pursuit of electoral wedge issues he could exploit to remain tinkerer-in-chief for a few more years.

All governments in power long enough become obsessed with nothing other than remaining in office, but the Harper Conservatives arrived in Ottawa in 2006 with the attitude and contempt of old hacks. The only thing he seemed to delight in, the only vision he truly tried to enact, was the conversion of our political landscape into a nuclear wasteland. Carpet bombing opponents years ahead of elections with nasty negative ads questioning their intelligence, patriotism, and masculinity.

Eliminating the per-vote subsidy to exacerbate the power of wealthy donors in political campaigns, gaming the contribution rules to screw with their opponent's leadership races, gutting the power of Elections Canada to promote the very act of voting...none of his most egregious crimes were about reshaping the country, they were always just about keeping him afloat and In Command for another election cycle.

When even they weren't going to be enough to stop Justin Trudeau, the Conservatives finally took a hard right turn and began shoveling the years of goodwill they'd built up in immigrant and minority communities into the boiler. Running back to their bigoted, small minded base with xenophobic nonsense like a national dress code, 'Barbaric Cultural Practices' hotline, and their contemptuous response to the international refugee crisis.

For all his skills in the Dark Arts, for all of his willpower and personal strength, the speed with which the current Liberal majority has been able to begin rolling back the Harper legacy is a testament to just how shallow and ineffectual it was to begin with.

Indeed, years from now Stephen Harper will be remembered most as a caretaker Prime Minister whose chief accomplishments, aside from a remarkable record of fraud and skulduggery by his administration, will be the elevation of a new generation of unprincipled cutthroat politicos in the Conservative party like Byrne, Soudas, and Novak. It will be the legitimization of asinine fuckwits like Rebel Media. It will be the fracturing of the Conservative party which now runs frantically, arms flailing, from the policies and record they were so quick to defend just a few months ago and into the political doldrums for the foreseeable future.

That is the legacy he has left us with. We've been stuck in an isolation chamber for ten years and have reemerged with nothing to show for it but complete exhaustion and the unshakable feeling that the whole experience has just been a complete waste of our time and energy.

The man was so uninspired it's taken me two weeks to finish writing this column. We lost a decade to his mediocrity and I continue to be drained of my Chi just trying to recount it here, so I will leave you simply. It was time for you to go away a long time ago, Stephen, but I suppose better late than never.