Here's the warm Canadian welcome @JoeBiden received in Ottawa tonight. Global Warming narrative is a lame duck pic.twitter.com/NjQavZamAs

— Manny Montenegrino (@manny_ottawa) December 9, 2016

Stephane Dion threatens to “use economic levers to push Trump on climate change”. So… a pair of vaguely effeminate French Canadian men are going to put the screws to an alpha male billionaire American President?
Maybe something was lost in the English-to-English translation.
Morning update: “Heading into the mtg with PM/Premiers. I will NOT be signing any agreement that imposes a carbon tax on Saskatchewan”

Let me introduce your chief diplomat providing his ministerial opinion on a topic within his purview.

Little did J.D. Salinger know what he would wreak. Excerpts from a delightful essay by Clark Whelton in City Journal:

What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness
The decline and fall of American English, and stuff
I recently watched a television program in which a woman described a baby squirrel that she had found in her yard. “And he was like, you know, ‘Helloooo, what are you looking at?’ and stuff, and I’m like, you know, ‘Can I, like, pick you up?,’ and he goes, like, ‘Brrrp brrrp brrrp,’ and I’m like, you know, ‘Whoa, that is so wow!’ ” She rambled on, speaking in self-quotations, sound effects, and other vocabulary substitutes, punctuating her sentences with facial tics and lateral eye shifts. All the while, however, she never said anything specific about her encounter with the squirrel.
Uh-oh. It was a classic case of Vagueness, the linguistic virus that infected spoken language in the late twentieth century…
In 1988, my elder daughter graduated from Vassar. During a commencement reception, I asked one of her professors if he’d noticed any change in Vassar students’ language skills. “The biggest difference,” he replied, “is that by the time today’s students arrive on campus, they’ve been juvenilized. You can hear it in the way they talk. There seems to be a reduced capacity for abstract thought.” He went on to say that immature speech patterns used to be drummed out of kids in ninth grade. “Today, whatever way kids communicate seems to be fine with their high school teachers.” Where, I wonder, did Vagueness begin? It must have originated before the 1980s….All the way back in 1951, Holden Caulfield spoke proto-Vagueness (“I sort of landed on my side . . . my arm sort of hurt”), complete with double-clutching (“Finally, what I decided I’d do, I decided I’d . . .”) and demonstrative adjectives used as indefinite articles (“I felt sort of hungry so I went in this drugstore . . .”)…

Via Arts & Letters Daily. The estimable Theodore Dalrymple writes frequently for City Journal.

h/t Yowza

“The Liberal campaign was anxious that this exchange not be broadcast…”

Liberal response: Do you tink it’s izzy to hear de question?
Or, maybe he’d just come from a cocktail?

Mr. Dion said the issue was most problematic in large crowds, when numerous sources blend together and make it difficult to understand. “If I am at a cocktail and everybody is speaking at the same time, then I will have difficulty.”

Oh… and did he ever answer the question? You be the judge.
Update:

And thus begins a new chapter in media navel gazing. Aaron Wherry despairs that Canadian “Nobody brings you sweaters like we do!” journalism has hit a “low point”.
Man, it feels like I’ve lost my innocence or something.

And Dion serves notice that he’s out to capture the pity vote.

And we enter what is certain to be Youtube’s best election season ever!

I love being the underdog. I love being underestimated, but don’t say so, because then I will stop being underestimated.”
[…]
“Leadership to avoid challenges, and to put us on a risky road of the challenges of the competitiveness of the economy, of climate change, of the fact that you have poverty in this country — and the current leadership is doing nothing,” he said. “Or leadership to tackle these issues with Canadians and to win together.”

Because boycow reho he has written all over him…

“We have a united Canada, a Canada built on clarity and mutual respect. We did it with the courage, the determination, of a cowboy from Calgary,”
[…]
“To me, it’s important for the world to know how much Albertans care about the environment, how much you are green and you want to do the right thing,” he said.
“I can’t accept that your reputation is damaged, as it is now.”

h/t

Dion details the Liberal Green Shaft;

“I’m confident we will have significant reductions. I’m not telling you specific numbers because you would not trust me,”

Two years in the making!

For the record, we were notified by the Liberal Party the evening before they launched their campaign. They presented it to us in a fashion that implied that we should be happy by all of the extra traffic that we would receive as a result. We immediately notified them that we would take action to protect the name and the integrity that we have associated with it, and that we were not interested in receiving misdirected traffic. We began by politely asking. After receiving calls from the media, we contacted the Liberal party to ask again that they please stop using a name that we have clearly associated with our environmental program, to prevent confusion. Only after they refused to stop, did we decide to send a legal notice. We never did call the media – we simply received a flood of calls, thanked all of the concerned businesses/individuals/institutions etc., and gave honest answers to any media that reached us with questions.

Related: “Kyoto, meet Carbon Tax!”

“Dion also said there is something government can do about rising gas prices such as implementing a carbon tax.”

Actually, what he said was rather more garbled than that, and far more entertaining! I’m sure someone will have the transcript in short order…
Update. Watching it again (I can’t open the CTV video) Dion’s argument went something like this – “Very much a carbon tax, or cap and trade would absolutely do a lot to bring gas reductions in a way that will be good for both the economy, the environment and social justice.”
Video up at No-Libs.

“It’s rare that the population wants an election, but we can feel it when the fruit is ripe. And at that time – it’s not up to me to tell you when; it’s part of the strategy that we keep close to our chest – there will be an election.”” – Stephane Dion

(h/t “aek”)

Hon. Stéphane Dion (Leader of the Opposition, Lib.): Mr. Speaker, for months the government has known about very serious allegations concerning former prime minister Brian Mulroney. It received hundreds of pages on the whole affair.
The Prime Minister even received personal letters from Mr. Schreiber and yet the government did nothing for months. Why?
Right Hon. Stephen Harper (Prime Minister, CPC): Mr. Speaker, last week I announced that as a result of a sworn affidavit that has been filed in court the government would appoint an independent third party to advise the government on how to proceed with such allegations.
Let me make clear what we will be doing. We will be asking that independent third party, whom we will be naming very shortly, to provide us with the terms of reference for a full public inquiry as well as any other course of action that the independent party deems appropriate.
Hon. Stéphane Dion (Leader of the Opposition, Lib.): Mr. Speaker, the information prompting a reaction from the Prime Minister had been in his hands for months: a letter from Mr. Schreiber, marked “To the Addressee Only – For His Eyes Only”.
This from a Prime Minister obsessed with controlling everything down to the last detail, as his caucus knows all too well. The Prime Minister is hiding behind the PCO and junior staff in his own office.
Will he step up to the plate and do the right thing, that is to launch immediately a full public inquiry?
Right Hon. Stephen Harper (Prime Minister, CPC): Mr. Speaker, I just answered this question about a public inquiry. The independent third party will give the government the appropriate terms of reference for such an inquiry, and such an inquiry will be launched.
Let me just speak to this issue of the letters, which the Leader of the Opposition alleges I have. Let us be very clear. I remind the Liberal leader that Karlheinz Schreiber has been the subject of extradition proceedings by the federal government for the past eight years. I can assure the Leader of the Opposition that when somebody writes about his extradition proceedings, that is not handled by the Prime Minister. That goes to appropriate government officials.
Hon. Stéphane Dion (Leader of the Opposition, Lib.): Mr. Speaker, even Mr. Mulroney is calling for a full public inquiry. The Prime Minister must be the only person who does not think it is a good idea.
Why? What is he afraid of? Will he do the right thing? Will he take on his responsibilities and call a full public inquiry now?
Right Hon. Stephen Harper (Prime Minister, CPC): Mr. Speaker, the problem is that the Leader of the Opposition had whipped himself up into that question and has failed to listen to the previous two answers.
That is precisely what the government will be doing. Under the circumstances, the independent party that the government will be employing will be making a recommendation to the government on the appropriate terms of inquiry for a full public inquiry.

(Hansard)

PM Harper today in his press
conference:

“We have tried to listen and tried to adapt our program where it’s
realistic to do so and where it’s responsible to do so to address the
demands of the opposition,” he said.

“But there is a ‘fish or cut bait’ on this. You can’t pass the
throne speech one day and the next day say, ‘Well, we didn’t actually
mean to do it or we didn’t mean to give you a mandate.’ We will take
it as a mandate and we will take it as an ongoing question of
confidence to get those things done.”

h/t

Meanwhile:

Cheers,
lance

“We must be really proud that the parties that believe in Canada are stronger* tonight”. – Stephane Dion

“We wish nothing more, but we will accept nothing less. Masters in our own house we must be, but our house is the whole of Canada.” – Pierre Trudeau
“Of all our dreams today there is none more important – or so hard to realise – than that of peace in the world. May we never lose our faith in it or our resolve to do everything that can be done to convert it one day into reality.” – Lester B. Pearson
“Well, come on people! These guys are still terrible! We can do better than that. Where is the improvement? In fact, over the summer, the government got even worse!” – Stephane Dion

And where are all the gods?
Where’s the street-wise Hercules
To fight the rising odds?

Isn’t there a white knight upon a fiery steed?
Late at night I toss and I turn and I dream of what I need

I need a reho!
I’m holding out for a reho ’till the end of the night
He’s gotta be strong
And he’s gotta be fast
And he’s gotta be fresh from the fight

I need a reho!
I’m holding out for a reho ’till the morning light
He’s gotta be sure
And it’s gotta be soon
And he’s gotta be larger than life
Larger than life

*

UPDATE…

“Faster than a speeding bullet” – now on Video

Via Jason Cherniak: “Please spread the word, because I think it is important for this message to get out.”

Happy to be of assistance…

Broke.
Broke.
Broke.
(Hell, Bob Rae had to borrow money to get through the leadership campaign. What does that tell you?)

It’s the launch of a new SDA category! Or, as Stephane might say “This category will propel sustainably. I have always believe that”.
We’ll start things off with this short transcript from a taped interview ;

OC: “When did your thinking on these issues start to change? When did you become aware of them? At the time that Paul Martin appointed you, or…”
Dion: “No, I must say I have always been a lover for nature…um, love with a nature and, as a Quebec city kid it’s not difficult to be in the wood — twenty minutes and you are, it’s a beautiful lake in the woods, and I love that, and I’m always reading and very concern about protection of nature and involved and so on…”
Later on, same answer, same question, “Where I’ve been convince that the environment and the economy must be together, and it will become the issue of the century, it came over years, and when I became Minister of the Environment, right away, it’s what I said to Mr. Martin and to my deputy minister. It was my plan.”
OC: “After you became the Minister…”
Dion: “No, the very moment I became. The first thing I said to the Prime Minister was ‘oh, if you give me that, this is the orientation I want to give to this department.’ I think it’s the key point to that.”

Olaf, bless his heart, has more;

“the improvement of the information is too low”
“the necessity to speed up what we have to do is bigger than otherwise”.

So, here’s the deal. We’re unlikely to find passages this rich reprinted in their raw form. But with the growing availability of original audio files, there should be ample opportunity to capture Mr. Green in his unspoiled, natural state.
Bonus points for catching media translation/sanitization of what is rapidly becoming known as “Dionglish”. (eg. rewriting a quote on his behalf, or extracting two or three words and replacing the grammatically challenged portions with their own helpful rephrasing.)
Oh. What’s that?
Having fun with a politician’s mispronunciation and garbled syntax is unfair and mean-spirited? A smear campaign?
You know, that’s the part about politics I hate – it’s so hard to keep up with the rule changes..
(Ottawa Watch has more!)