Happy Birthday Joe Clark

Just so you don't think I'm a total hater, there are a few Tories I like. Well... One, anyway. It's a start.

Of course, it helps that I've met Mr. Clark and his charming family - including his lovely if intimidating wife Maureen McTeer and daughter Catherine - before. As you may have guessed, there's a dark secret at play here as to how or why I could have met them, but I think I'll save the details of that sordid business for another time.

Clark was Prime Minister of Canada for nine months in 1979-80, following which Brian Mulroney stabbed him in the back, in much the same way Ronald Reagan did to Gerald Ford in the United States at the same time; it's an apt parallel to draw, since after his election, Mulroney pretty much did whatever Reagan wanted him to do. For a consolation prize, Mr. Clark served as minister of External Affairs from 1984 until 1992.

For many years the butt of jokes (his nickname in the Canadian media has long been Joe Who?) by the time he finally withdrew from the stinking morass that is Parliament in 2004 - disgusted, as many of us have been, with the American-style social conservatism espoused by Stephen Harper - his name had become a byword for integrity in government, as his long career was entirely untainted by scandal, a feat rarely accomplished by someone of his political stripe.
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