STRICTLY PERSONAL
THANK YOU, thank you.
Please sit down. No more
applause. I just did what I
had to.

And, being magnanimous, |
want to point out that the
achievement wasn’! mine alone.

Some of the credit has to go to
my former colleague (and, briefly,
boss) Alan Fotheringham, who
also did the right thing.

We both made the necessary
sacrifice of our credibility to make
sure that Brian Mutroney an-
nounced he would quit.

No, no. Please. No more stand-
ing ovations. I'm starting to
blush. ‘

» The faithful reader will, of
course, have my late January col-
‘f umnetched indelibly in his or her
memory, the one in which | ap-
peared to confidently predict that
the prime minister would stick
around to fight the next election.

It would be, as I so elegantly
phrased it, because he would not
be able to resist the temptation to
‘pick the pocket of fate one more
time.” ;

+ Foth, being of slightly less
nobel laureate inaterial, put it
more bluntly, offering bets, but

saying the same thing.

A few astute readers may have
wondered at the time how either
one of ts could be so
precognitive, so certain, so plug-
ged in tothe inner workings of the
Mulroneyan mind,

Now, at last, the truth, which
tuany of you will have suspected
all along, can be revealed,

1 was faced with a terrible
dilemma back in January, when
rumors Were swirling about Lyin’
Brian's intentions.

Knowing, as | did, that the
prime minister's office
photocopies my faxed columns
and rushes them to the PM before
he puts the first of many shirts on
for the day, 1 have long been
acutely aware that a very special
responsibility rests upon my un-
Kitn-Campbell-like shoulders,

All those years, I have been

_ forced to write this column at two

levels, as it were (ignoring for the
moment the deeper spiritual
stratum).

First, there is the surface col-
umn, the stuff you actually see on
the printed page, wherein I write
on any subject that comes to
mind, expressing my ‘‘strictly per-
sonal" views, hopefully in the
langorous intellectual manner of
Trevor Lautens, the gentleman
journalist with whom I share this
hallowed space.

There, any similarity has to
end, because the subtext has for
many years now been geared to
my vastly larger responsibility to
the nation as a whole,

(admit there was one moment
of confusion in all this, when the
wires got scriously crossed. It was
at the time of the referendum on
the Charlouetown Accord, when |
wrote a series of columns oppos-
ing the constitutional package and
then, at the last minute, came oul
grudgingly in favor of a Yes vote.
I suspect the boys in the PMO
were thrown off by the fact that
Trevor, too, urged a Yes vote —
and what were they to make of
that?)

Poor Fotheringham suffers

| listen
to ancther soul before you call
Don. No monkey business.

Talk to

Don Eilers

Ae,

926-6233
REAAIX

EALTY INC.

re

under the same cross as me, al-
though not to quite the same ex-
tent, since his musings no longer
appear on the North Shore, except
for a tittle weekly gossip magazine
published in darkest Toronto that
can sometimes be found in den-
tists’ offices on the West Coast.

The North Shore, as you will
also have intuitively sensed, is the
bellweather community of cutting-
edge Canadian political opinion,
as duly recognized by the strate-
gists in the PMO — although they
are exceedingly (almost obsessive-
ly) careful to avoid letting the
hapless opposition purties in on
this secret source of intelligence.

One of the ways they preserve
their inside pipeline is by preten-
ding not to follow my every sug-
gestion,

When it comes to the day-to-
day administrative details of gov-
erning, Mulroney's braintrust in
fact makes a point of appearing to
do the very opposite. Crafty
devils!

ALL MAKES

SERVICE
ICBC CLAIMS WELCOME .

LIVINGSPACE

N T E R i o Rr
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1550 Marine Drive
North Vancouver, BC
987-2253

Thus, minor items like the GST,
the original Canada-U.S. Free
Trade deal, NAFTA, the Gulf
War, the dismantling of the
railway system, the phoney Green
Plan, Meech Lake, Hibernia, the
killing of the daycare bill, taxation
on reading, selling out to the
multinational drug corporation,
and the packing of the Senate
with old Tory warhorses (plus Pat
Carney) are put up as a
smokescreen to throw the Grits
and NDPers off the trail, lest they
find out how to plug into the Ca-
nadian Zeitgeist.

Accordingly, in January, I fac-
ed an aweseme decision.

Knowing that the PMO knew
that J knew they were secretly tak-
ing all their important clues from
me, despite the clever attempts
{GST, NAFTA, Iraq, etc.) to pre-
tend otherwise, | fad to predict
that Mulroney would stay, other-
wise the prime minister would
have been compelled to cling to
office in order to preserve ap-

pearance.

So T wrote that he would
definitely remain in office.

This freed the poor bloke to do
what he kaew | meant he should
do, which, of course, was to take
off, eh?

Fotheringham’s situation was
the same as mine, since, despite
the fact that he is published on
the back page of that little Toron-
to gossip mag I mentioned, his
musings likewise land amid the
silverware on the prime'minister's

- breakfast table — as witnessed by

how consistently Mulroney’s mi-
nions have gone out of their way
to pretend they aren't listening to
him either.

Oh, all right, go ahead. Get it
out of your system. Applaud to
your heart's content.

And Trevor, please, don’t get
into the habit of agreeing with
me. It confuses the brutes on
Parliament Hill.

re tu

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