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Federal Tories are a lot like the Flintstones

There is a joke going around that when Stephen Harper takes a seat in Copenhagen that the question going through all the delegates’ minds will be: “Who invited Fred Flintstone?”

There is a joke going around that when Stephen Harper takes a seat in Copenhagen that the question going through all the delegates’ minds will be: “Who invited Fred Flintstone?”

This reminded me of a joke that once floated around Red Deer, Alberta:

“Someone should tell the Conservatives that the Flintstones movie is not a documentary.”

Living in a hotbed of redneck conservatism, we have heard it all.

Elected officials telling us that all carbon dioxide is actually good for the planet, the Earth is only a few thousand years old, dinosaurs and humans co-inhabited the Earth, and add in lines like the Liberals will confiscate your long guns for the war in Afghanistan and the oil companies paid for the paving of our roads.

When the Liberals were in power, the opposing Conservatives were rabid in their efforts to derail the Kyoto protocol and to undermine the gun registry.

They were also telling us how to send in partially completed forms and unsigned cheques to overwhelm the gun registry bureaucrats, which they failed to remind us would increase costs to us the taxpayers.

They told us in their zealot manner that “climate change was a socialist conspiracy to destroy the economy” and that it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and perhaps even a billion dollars.

The Conservatives gained power after repeating in their hostile, patronizing manner that we will not go into a recession and that we would not go into deficit.

By the way, Conservative ideology does not work outside of the classroom.

Finding that free spending and big government is very appealing and very easy to garner votes, they dumped tens of billions off the back of their truck to encourage the economy.

With all that cash waiting to be spent, one would think it would be a good time to invest in green technology and a few hundred million dollars would create jobs and lower greenhouse gas emissions, but that was not to be.

So going back to the good old days, Harper concentrated on ensuring that big businesses like General Motors and Chrysler got their tens of billions and their friends in Conservative-friendly ridings got the rest, leaving scraps for everyone else.

It is believed that a Harper government, if it had been around in past eras, would have meant we would not now have things like seatbelts, airbags, fluoridated water, unleaded gas and the economically sensible GST.

These would have been too expensive to introduce, but ironically it is also believed we would have many more prisons and citizens would walk around visibly armed.

So, you can see the identity mistake would be a reasonable one.

Garfield Marks

Red Deer

Editor’s note: The letter writer will represent the Liberals in Red Deer during the next federal election.