Canadian irreverence

These are a couple of hilarious videos showing how refreshingly irreverent Canadians are about politics. For those of us who are used to the stiff formality of American politics, these come as a bit of a shock... yet we immediately fell in love with this down-to-earth, politicians-are-people-too type attitude.

A little quick background to set context for non-Canadians: Rick Mercer is a political satirist. All the other people in this video are high-ranking government officials. The lady in red at the gate is Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party, who has been trying to get a seat in Parliament but so far cannot because of the failings of the first-past-the-post voting system. The guy whose English is not so good was the leader of the Liberal Party at the time. The guy next to Rick Mercer while Rick is reading the paper is Prime Minister Stephen Harper.



Background: Prime Minister Stephen Harper continually claims to work with the other 3 political parties, while in actuality stubbornly refusing to do so. So the 3 parties finally joined up in a coalition against him where the Liberals and NDP would form the government and the Bloc Québécois agreed to support them. Because of this Harper was going to fail a confidence vote last month and thus be out on his ear, so instead he dissolved Parliament until Jan 26 (chicken!), but he'll still have to face the vote then and is expected to fail. In the meantime the Liberals picked another leader, Michael Ignatieff, who will likely be the next Prime Minister in short order. This video is Geri Hall from the show This Hour Has 22 Minutes getting *very* cheeky with Ignatieff.