Rex Murphy: Perhaps within the shadowed cloister where the prime minister’s super smart political ferrets dwell, it was thought “clever” to call an election in August, during a pandemic, two years in from the last one, and during the gift of Afghanistan to the Taliban.
But clever can very quickly become cute, and cute is not a nice word. It is not a generous word. It lives very close to sneaky, sly and tricky. Cute is always wrapped around personal advantage and gain, and is so close to what is referred to in common terms as “pulling a fast one” as to be shorthand for it. Cute is also the very opposite of generous, public-minded, worthy and noble … well, actually noble isn’t even in the same semantic country as cute. I can imagine what they would be pleased to call their strategy session.
“Hey, if we call it in August, two years before we really have to, with Canadians exhausted from all the toils and anxieties of COVID, weary to numbness from lockdowns and ever-changing mandates, and of course so very many in the deepest distress over job losses, the failure of small businesses built up over the years, their children out of school for over a year, and stressed to breaking point from the imposed claustrophobia of the pandemic — well, let’s just say, in that atmosphere the population will let the premature call just slide by. Who notices a stream when the flood waters are high?
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