Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Attention downtown elites: Harper has you in his sights. Conservatives have already started planning commercials for the next federal election that will at last crack the left-wing nut that is downtown Toronto and make the Conservatives Canada's next "natural governing party." Herewith, a sneak peek at the scripts airing some time in 2015.
"It's About the Arts"
The Toronto Fringe Festival, 2013. On a spot-lit stage, a twentysomething Ryerson acting student delivers the final monologue of a one-woman show about the torn loyalties of a gay Métis geologist working in the oil patch. As the curtain falls, pan to the audience, where a wildly ecstatic Stephen Harper rises to his feet clapping furiously and shouting "Bravissimo!"
Harper voiceover: "Some call it art, others call it life. I call it Canada."
"He Doesn't Hold a Grudge"
The DeVry Institute of Technology, Scarborough. A tired-looking Michael Ignatieff delivers a lecture to an auditorium filled with bored students listening to MP3s and chewing gum. Pan to the first row, where a grinning Stephen Harper, seated next to a Muslim student in a niqab, gives his old foe the thumbs up. Pan back to Mr. Ignatieff who pauses for just a moment, cracks a genuine smile, and continues with the lecture.
Harper voiceover: "I forgive you."
The Value of Life"
A living room in Cabbagetown. The curtains are drawn and the floor is covered in towels as a midwife guides an arts administrator with salt-and-pepper hair through the final moments of an excruciating but beautiful home birth. As Canada's newest citizen gulps its first breath of air, the midwife hands the child to a teary Harper, who swaddles it in a hemp-fibre blanket scented with macrobiotic juniper and presents it to the mother's euphoric lesbian mother.
Harper voiceover: "Being Conservative means believing in the value of all life."
"Cyclists Are People, Too."
Rush hour on Jarvis Street. A George Brown student on a fixed-gear bicycle is cut off by a black Cadillac Escalade. Pan to the opposite bike lane, where Stephen Harper is pedalling a Bixi bike. He pulls a walkie-talkie from his breast pocket, says something into it, and moments later a gleaming F-35 descends from the clouds and drops a laser-guided smart bomb on the Escalade. Jubilant cyclists cheer and high-five Mr. Harper.
Harper voiceover: "Only with a strong armed forces can we protect the rights of Canadians."