An autobiographical cartoonist makes the best kind of aspiring Member of Parliament. They have no cached blogs to unearth, no Facebook pages to scrape, and no deep secrets lurking in far reaches of the internet. Chester Brown, now officially on the ballot for the Libertarian Party of Canada in the riding of Trinity-Spadina, is also the only Canadian federal election candidate being noted by Publisher’s Weekly, The Comics Journal and Spanish-language blog Con C De Arte. Reason magazine heralded Brown whilst reporting that Canada ranks ahead of the USA in terms of economic freedom.
That coverage is definitely orbiting around different places than the other bit of buzz captured by the Libertarians over the past week — advance word of an election platform that calls to an end any funding of abortion, although not abortion per se. This only appears to confound some pro-life activists frustrated with the fact that the Conservative Party won’t address their cause — although Maclean’s, which dusted off the abortion issue this past summer as a “debate that Canada is afraid to have,” can always feel vindicated.
Libertarian Party leader Dennis Young — whose own day job is a traffic ticket-fighting agent — also earned ink in the Calgary Herald due to the fact that he’s running directly against Stephen Harper in the riding of Calgary-Southwest. While the Libertarians aspired to field 50 candidates across the country, current information places the total around 35, which is still about four times the number that ran last time around.
The notorious graphic novelist from Trinity-Spadina remains the best-known of the Libertarian lot, of course, even if further discussion of Chester Brown’s candidacy in mainstream Canadian media hasn’t yet travelled farther than the weblog at Quill & Quire. There, news that Brown is working on a graphic novel about paying for sex at the same time he’s accepted a $16,000 Canada Council grant — through a program which, as a card-carrying Libertarian, he would rather not exist — met with some apparent weariness: “Is anyone else worried that the Tories are smelling blood in the water?”
Well, the claim that Harper is on the warpath to stifle all sorts of self-expression found itself with a new set of allies over the weekend after the withdrawal of 28-year-old Chris Reid from the ballot in Toronto Centre — having taken over where Don Meredith, a Pentacostal minister from Richmond Hill, left off in March as a by-election opponent to new Liberal MP Bob Rae. And that door only started revolving after Mark Warner was asked to stand down from running for the Tories after making clear that his stance closer to the federal Progressive Conservative position that once stood a chance of winning in Toronto, rather than portraying the big city as a crime-infested jungle where freaks subsidized by government can unrepentantly prance about.
Reid couldn’t have asked for a greater boost to his own celebrity than the criticism leveled his hidden blog, Political Thoughts From a Gay Conservative which chastised Canada’s “effeminate castrated population.” Just one day after his Conservative candidacy was scuttled — the official explanation was that he wasn’t willing to serve a four-year term once elected — Reid was back online to clarify the positions that landed him in hot water: “If solving societal problems was as simple as writing government cheques or passing another regulation, problems would have been solved by now in the thousands of years of history we have of government existence in the world. But liberals are still waiting for the Messiah, like an Obama or Trudeau, to lead them to the socialist promised land, of money without any personal responsibility. You'll have better odds playing the lottery.”
And a right-wing media darling is born — with Reid appearing this week on the Charles Adler and Michael Coren shows, along with being invited to serve as an election analyst on AM640 Toronto Radio. Ryan Warawa, the Conservative candidate in the NDP stronghold of Vancouver East, should only be so lucky, as his own past blog posts documented his putative enthusiasm for the legalization of brothels and pot.
David Gentili, the replacement candidate for Reid in Toronto Centre will presumably not be mistaken for a closeted Libertarian — given how he was deployed after a stint in the Prime Minister’s Office. A domain name was registered — and Gentili’s page on Facebook hidden from view — almost immediately after it was announced he would be taking over as Bob Rae’s next debating piñata, fourth in a series of Conservative opponents with practically nothing in common save for a willingness to play for a winning team.
scroll@eyeweekly.com