Sick Day: economics, theatre, and the missing coffee and donuts...

Aye, me... I've been out of commission all weekend, and even now am still fighting the good fight against the shape-shifting headcold, now squatting in the back of my throat. On the plus side, I've managed to spend all day lounging around, reading the latest issue of the Economist, followed by a dreamy trip through my favorite theatre text, The Empty Space, by Peter Brook. It may sound like an exercise in contradictions, but world economics (and the ensuing geo-political chin-wagging) is much better understood with theatre on the brain. But enough of my intellectual pet-projects...

On the 'possible-election-to-appease-angry-Canadians' front, there was an excellent column by Jim Stanford in the Globe and Mail today (forwarded to me by a good friend who went to the trouble of scanning it from hard copy!), that I wish I could post a link to, but it's in the 'premium' Insider section of the Globe, under 'lock and key'...if you can scam a hard copy of the paper, or know somebody with the passwords to get online, it's worth a look. My summary of Stanford's column, in two bullets:

• the 'Sponsorship Scandal' cost each Canadian taxpayer approximately 0.01% of their taxes paid over the course of six years;
• by way of example: Jim Stanford says he paid $107,000 in income tax over 6 years, meaning he's out a whopping $10.70 as a result of the 'Sponsorship Scandal'.

I mean come on, is that really much of anything, when, as he points out in his column, there are plenty of other pressing matters to deal with, and far greater reasons for Canadian to feel outrage at the government. He then went on to plug the national childcare plan, making me suspect he's acting a bit of the sympathetic 'mouthpiece' for the government: all Martin can seem to mention these days is childcare or healthcare to counter adscare (for the Libs), or 'adscam' to the rest of us. But nonetheless, his is one of the first published pieces to outline just how 'small peanuts' this scam really is. Bravo, it's about time somebody cut through the opposition shouting and public cries for blood, to point out we're going hoarse over little more than the cost of a few cups of coffee and a couple of donuts per Canadian taxpayer.

But like the shape-shifting virus that has taken hostage my head, the sponsorship scandal has mutated and expanded into something no 'over the counter' remedy can seem to combat. Not even a live TV spot, a rather desperate prescription, has made any real impact. In the end the options are few for the ailing PM: make a deal with the NDP to make the yet-to-be-approved federal budget less cozy to corporations (a scenario with many possible consequences for both Martin and Layton), or acquiesce to the opposition's bloodlust, and go with the flow as we're pulled into an election that will certainly cost us more that 0.01% of our taxes paid over the course of 6 years (a scenario with inevitable consequences for the country at large).

As my mother, a former graduate student of political science and now-retired federal government executive put it today: "between a rock and a hard place doesn't even begin to describe this one..."