That being said....

It’s that time of year when we free ourselves from the accumulated gumpff of the year, opening our lives to the warm waves of light and the promise of a late-breaking spring. Time to lose those extra pounds and those ideas that have been weighing us down, making the glass appear persistently half empty; time to detoxify our minds from a year of discouraging news on the political and economic fronts and prepare to turn a new leaf. •It appears some progress has been made on the language front, even if my friend Iggy apparently doesn’t know what “beg the question” means. Hard to believe that a guy with a reputation of a leading scholar wouldn’t know, but perhaps he was using the vernacular in his recent question in the House, trying to get closer to people. Yup, that must be it.

Still, I’m glad to see we’ve stopped “celebrating” everything but the kitchen sink and that the Minister of Environment has stopped using “aggressive” every sentence, like those neighbourhood toughies who can’t seem to form a thought without the ‘f’ word. Now if we could just stop using “that being said” every second paragraph, in every radio and TV interview, every speech given by damn near everybody. Yeah, we know that that has been said. We were there; you said it, we heard it.

That phrase has a place, but my guess is if we use it more than once a year, we probably don’t know it. Otherwise it’s just a way of saying, “I don’t really know how to get from one paragraph to another.” There are other paragraph transitions; really there are! •That being said, it’s hard to believe how quickly, after essentially ruining CBC 1, the putative minds at the top have decided to eviscerate CBC 2 too. I know that they’re just trying to keep the neo-cons happy, but good grief! Light classics talked about by people who really don’t have much depth is simply not how the CBC serves the best interests of the country.

The market produces enough middle of the road stuff. We don’t need the CBC to produce more. And what’s wrong with spending a few dollars declaring that Canadians produce and enjoy high culture. Guess we’ll all have to turn to those American stations that may be the last bastions of serious music and talk radio in North America. And here I thought Americans were the authors of the culture of mediocrity! •There has been a host of polls recently about current federal party preferences. The three most reliable were the Nanos crew (the most predictive, in my view), who had the Conservatives and Liberals neck and neck at 36 per cent, followed by Ipsos Reid and Decima finding a slight lead for the Conservatives. Oddly, the Globe and Mail focused instead on two polls by Quebec firms and their own polling preference, the Strategic Counsel (to my mind the least convincing of the major pollsters), which had the Conservatives ahead in both nations, though falling a bit in Ontario.

Putting the most likely read on all the polls, it appears that if an election were held today the Conservatives would compete with the Bloc in rural Quebec and in and around Quebec City, though the Bloc will likely lose only a few seats to them, while in Montreal the Liberals would hold the federalist seats they have and perhaps even gain a couple. The rest of the nation has changed hardly a bit since the last campaign. The outcome will again be determined by New Democrat and Green supporters, who must decide whether they wish the Conservatives or Liberals to govern. The only question is when. •To end on an unexpected note, it appears the Provincial Tories have awoken from their slumber, with an activist environmental minister doing them some good; by the Cabinet deciding to buy more seaside land that we’ll need if we are to become a tourist destination for more Europeans; and in giving the universities a chance to recover their enrolment and refocus on their traditional values. These actions are probably not enough to turn back the Dexter Effect, but they are still worth noting, albeit by one who has an interest in preserving our post-educational sector and who finds a quiet, natural campsite as close to heaven as he’s likely to get.