ON THE worldwide web last week, agriculture minister Gerry Ritz’s smiling face was floating west to east over Ottawa’s Parliament Buildings.
Viewers on the satirical site www.deathby1000coldcuts.info were encouraged to use their computer mouse to manipulate a Canadian tank that fired pieces of salami at the floating heads.
Every direct salami hit that blew up a head was a blow for Canada.
Oh dear. Mockery can be the cruelest (cold) cut of all for a politician.
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This came after some appalled (or Liberal or union opponent) bureaucrat on an Aug. 30 conference call with Ritz heard him joke that the daily news of illness or death from the fatal outbreak of listeriosis carried by products produced at a Maple Leaf plant in Toronto was for the government “death by a thousand cuts, or should I say cold cuts.”
And when someone mentioned that there was a new death reported in Prince Edward Island, the Saskatchewan-based minister quipped that he hoped it was his Liberal critic Wayne Easter.
For more than two weeks, Ritz had been the public face of government efforts to deal with fallout from the contaminated food incident.
Publication of the remarks Sept. 17 in the middle of the election campaign threatened to create a food safety campaign issue that could hurt the Conservatives. Critics said it also shows the Conservatives to be callous, professing public sympathy while cracking jokes behind the scenes.
The optics were not good as a grim-faced Ritz issued a public apology and then was hidden away from further questions or scrutiny while political, union and health sector opponents piled on.
Senior Conservatives pronounced the comments offensive and embarrassing but refused to fire the ag minister. For Ritz, a year into his dream job, it was not a good career move. There was speculation last week he could be demoted if the Conservatives are re-elected.
Then again, Conservatives asked, who among us has not made some comment that if displayed publicly would be at least embarrassing and probably worse?
Ritz is far from the only agriculture minister caught making controversial remarks.
In 1993, former agriculture minister Bill McKnight, a Progressive Conservative from the riding Ritz now represents, famously said that if Conservative delegates elected Kim Campbell to replace Brian Mulroney as prime minister, they would be “drinking the Kim Campbell Kool-Aid.”
Fifteen years before, almost 1,000 followers of fanatical religious leader Jim Jones committed suicide on his instruction by drinking poisoned Kool-Aid in Guyana.
Months later, McKnight’s prediction did not seem so bizarre when Campbell led Conservatives to a mass political suicide. She had to live with McKnight’s quip.
In 1984, agriculture minister Eugene Whelan branded Liberal leadership contender John Turner an elitist when he said in a heated leadership exchange: “I will put corn flakes on the breakfast table rather than gold flakes in the windows.”
Turner, who worked at a nearby corporate tower with gold-flaked windows, never quite lived down the image.
What fun web satirists would have had with Whelan, his green Stetson, fractured English and homespun truisms.
Maybe Ritz just got into politics 40 years too late.
