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FYI: Tombits... But what will we do if he sings out of tune?

By: Tom Oleson

Posted: 11/21/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

Stephen Harper has been surprising a lot of people lately. Who knew that when we elected Mr. Stuffyshirt as prime minister we were actually electing a kind of Canadian version of Jimmy (Beau) Walker, the flamboyant former mayor of New York, a career politician and playboy whose singing and dancing and penchant for partying, both politically and personally, eventually brought him down?

Flamboyant hardly seems an apt description for Harper, but then, we are Canadian, and it is almost impossible to imagine him as a playboy. He is, however, as recent events indicate, perhaps turning into something of a song-and-dance man outside politics as well as within.

During his visit to India this week, the prime minister joined a Bollywood dance group for a public performance of an Asian version of what looked, to this uneducated eye, like an extraordinarily complicated two-step, at least as it was performed by the Bollywood artists.

Harper's version was more simple, more traditionally Canadian. It was not the classic Liberal pirouette, turning 360 degrees in the blink of an eye, encompassing and contradicting all things for all Canadians in a second.

It was more like the prairie shuffle, as one might expect from an Alberta-based prime minister, but coming as it does on the heels of Harper's previous public appearance as an artiste, it puts kind of a new, slightly less dour face on Mr. Stuffyshirt.

Having cut funding to the arts in the previous election and apparently oblivious to the irony, the prime minister took to the stage at an arts gala fundraising performance to perform what was, to this uneducated ear, a creditable version of The Beatles' A Little Help from My Friends.

It was brass worthy of Pierre Trudeau. In fact, Harper is turning into the closest thing to Trudeau we've had in decades, which may leave a lot of Canadians wondering: What are we coming to?

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 21, 2009 H2

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