Howl, howl, Sheila Copps.
After her unceremonious ouster by the Liberal Party last year, where the former deputy prime minister of Canada was refused a job in Paul Martin’s cabinet; after her embarrassing and highly contested loss of her seat to Tony Valeri last March, there isn’t a chance in hell that Copps will be able to sustain a political career that isn’t doused with the stench of abjectness.
Copps is now joke material for the likes of penny newsrags like this one. But in the face of her unanimous lambasting by the major Canadian press, what would be the point?
After all, Ms. Copps has a lot of nice qualities. She likes the environment, for one. And although the folks at the (newly orientalist) Globe and Mail wish to paint Ms. Copps as a complete raving loon, she used to be one of the most powerful women in this country.
The weird thing is, although the yes-men of Paul Martin’s cabinet are falling all over themselves to deny Copps’s (admittedly confusing) damnations of their conduct, and though she has not come up with any real evidence besides her word to support her (admittedly unbelievable) story of Martin’s near-devastation of to the Canadian health system, she may still be telling the truth.
One only wishes that she had kept a copy of that faxed budget locked away in a safe for the past nine years, just in case. Instead, she’ll never work in this town again.
We all know the only way for this story to be settled for good: the former big man himself-Jean Chrétien-must weigh in to either defend Copps or Martin and his followers. Although we can guess the likely outcome of that eventuality, we can only hope for its opposite, and the apocalyptic ruckus that would come with it.
