I’m an information junkie. It will come as no surprise, then, that I am also a CBC junkie, particularly in the evenings when I can get a four-hour fix listening to programs like Ideas with Lister Sinclair.
On a recent Tuesday evening, I was particularly interested in an Ideas program on a little-known pioneer illness which often left its victims in a death-like state from which they might revive after four or five days. It was an excellent program. But, as Sinclair confessed at the end, it was all an April Fool’s hoax.
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Lister Sinclair may have fooled me, but Saskatchewan Tory leader Bill Boyd did not. With tongue in cheek, Boyd issued a press release replying to the provincial Liberal leader’s charges that the Tories and the NDP were ganging up on his party. The release stated: “It’s all true,” Boyd confessed, speaking from his secret out-of-province meeting with Roy Romanow, where the two are reviewing the new secret handshake and new code words for April. “Roy and I got together and plotted the whole scheme to have the Liberals go through a year and a half of bitter in-fighting, dump their leader, and replace her with Jim Melenchuk. Then, using sophisticated mind-control techniques, we got Melenchuk to say he wants to close more rural hospitals and raise the PST through harmonization. … It’s not just the PCs, the NDP and the media. … It also involves the CIA, the FBI and the Cubans. It’s a vast worldwide conspiracy. After all, do you think we could be making the Liberals look this bad on our own?”
This just goes to show that Boyd has a sense of humor and the Liberals have a lot of egg on their collective faces.
Too often these days, politics resembles one long April Fool’s joke.
In B.C., the government of the day is being taken to court for alleged lies during the last election campaign. In Ontario, the opposition parties have put forward more than 1,000 amendments to a bill which would see Toronto the Good governed by one megacouncil.
At the federal level we have the Somalia debacle, the continuing saga of the wheat board, defence minister Doug Young insulting poor Reformer Deborah Gray in the House and the lady herself putting her foot in it with tasteless PMS jokes, not to mention the Liberals’ new campaign booklet warning female candidates that their wardrobe savvy is as important as their policy knowledge. Who says April Fool’s lasts for only one day?
