“Every killer should have the right to his own rope in his cell. They can decide whether to live.”
... Senator Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu

The pundits and the political opposition came out in force last week after the good Tory senator from Quebec innocently launched that little money saving salvo onto the Canadian consciousness.
But did he get any thanks for offering up a way for the government to save taxpayer dollars?
Nosireebob!
Instead, the media managed to harass the well meaning politician into admitting the remark had been “inappropriate.”
That’s just the trouble in politics and the media nowadays. The parliamentary press gallery is like a hungry wolfpack, circling around potential victims and then leaping enmasse to tear them to pieces should they make a simple misstep, or misspeak themselves a tiny bit.
You know, like billionaire Mitt Romney saying he didn’t care about poor people.
They did it again with that dear man Jason Kenney, the beloved Minister of Immigration, you know, the one with “logistic problems.”
But I digress from my major point in this week’s rant.
Which is this.
Such vindictive outpourings from the mainline media may satisfy the political bloodlust in winter when there isn’t much else to do while you wait for your cheap flight to Cuba or the Dominican Republic, but we become bemused by negativity, missing opportunity disguised as political correctness.
See, you can’t take occurrence out of context. You’ve got to connect the dots with the glass half full, if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphors for a moment.
Then, opportunity presents itself like a beautiful butterfly emerging from a cocoon.
It just could be that the senator was flying a trial balloon.
(Oh yeah, some of you are saying, a lead balloon).
But I don’t think for one minute that it was a happenstance remark.
No reporter I have read, has connected the senator’s remark with something His Eminence the Prime Minister of Canada spoke to the assembled power brokers and rich guys meeting in Davos, Switzerland.
When he revealed that he doesn’t like old people.
For one thing, the PM thinks they cost too much money.
They are more than useless, they aren’t disposable and barely recyclable. They are a drag on the economy and contribute nothing to it any longer. They don’t earn their keep.
It’s obvious the PM can’t stand having them around, just lollygagging about being a drain on the economy.
His exact words were these, “... one of the backdrops for my concerns is Canada’s aging population ... this has the capacity to undermine Canada’s economic position ...”
Now, I haven’t the foggiest notion just what “Canada’s economic position” actually is, whether it is a sort of squat position with the rich squatting on the poor and the Aboriginals, or something more supine. After all, we are famed abroad as a nation of appeasers and apologists.
So you have to thematically link that statement of the prime minister, with another in the same speech. That’s when he said, “we will continue to make the key investments in science and technology necessary to sustain a modern competitive economy. But we believe (I guess that’s the royal ‘we’ of the divine right of kings) that Canada’s less than optimal results for those investments is a significant problem for our country.”
So there you have it, right from Mr Bossypants hisself, what Canada needs is original ideas and the wherewithal to make them work for the economy.
Now put those things together, a massive undermining of the economy by useless old people, and the need for something to control the costs of putting more and more people in jail for longer and longer sentences.
Think Positive. Think Opportunity. Think business.
What you get is, Do It Yourself Goodbye Kits?
Okay, okay I know that idea could come at you as being sort of far out.
But think about it for a minute, why should the senator’s idea be restricted to murderers if it is all about cost saving?
If the senator wants to save taxpayer's money by giving murderers a choice, why not extend the same privilege to old people not contributing anything to the economy? And there are a lot more old people than common murderers, so the government could save much more money if enough made the choice, and the threat of undermining the Canadian economy would be gone.
Poifect. Two boids wit’ one rock!
After all, shouldn’t old folks living miserable lives of penury be entitled and encouraged to make a choice between being starved to death by cuts to retirement incomes and taking matters into their own hands?
It would cost the government a lot less to fabricate and distribute the kits to anyone reaching retirement age than paying them when their pensions kick in.
You sell the plan as a “noble last gesture”, as your contribution to the holy purpose of helping Mr Harper’s economy to survive.
That has quite a ring to it, doncha think?
Think of the marketing strategy, “Geta Goodbye Kit - Help Your Country One Last Time," might be the theme line.
Now that’s noble.
It takes the less out of useless.
I listened with some fascination the other day to another minister of the government making the case to Evan Soloman on his TV program “Power and Politics,” that extending the retirement age to 67 or 69 or whatever, would be doing a kindness to old people because it would delay the stigma of retirement and provide them greater motivation to make a career change in order to avoid starvation.
Now that’s what I call realistic forward thinking (we all know there are thousands of jobs going begging for 65 year olds) and right in line with my proposal.
Instead of sitting on the shelf and whining about their lot, some of these old folks could make that career change and be hired or franchised to undertake the manufacture, marketing and distribution of the kits to other oldsters.
As I see it, this whole matter is one of business opportunity very much in line with current federal government policies.
As a matter of fact, I think I’ll whip up a proposal and send it off to the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency to get some financing.
We’ve got several abandoned plants right here in PEI that could be converted into facilities to assemble Do It Yourself Goodbye Kits. The project could be a solution to finding jobs for displaced fish plant workers, since the current provincial government doesn’t seem to be doing very well at that task.
I’ve got another suggestion as well, this one flowing from the “logistics problem” mentioned by Immigration Minister Jason Kenney which involved several bureaucrats ordered to masquerade as New Canadians at a re-affirmation of their Canadian citizenship ceremony.
Everything went off without a hitch until a nosy reporter named Jennifer Ditchburn decided to bring attention to herself by “exposing” Senator Kenney’s ingenuity and quick thinking.
But here’s another idea quietly germinating behind the media cries of outrage at the bit of theatre perpetrated by the senator.
Why not save another lot of taxpayer’s money by putting together a company of actors with good voices, kids, women, men, young people, old people, who could tour the country staging fake ceremonies whenever they were needed, like on July 1.
All you would need is a bus and a central booking office, and you could fire a couple of hundred bureaucrats and save all that money.
You would teach the actors to sing and dance a little, and they would just memorize the script, and you’d be sure of a good show.
You might even want to have the fake ceremony play night after night as a theatre piece at the Charlottetown Festival to save money, instead of bringing in turkeys like The Full Monty and the evening of John Cash songs scheduled for this summer.
You wouldn’t even need much of an orchestra like you do for Anne of Green Gables.
The thing of it is, it’s now become near impossible to tell the truth from the fakery in politics, so why not go the whole hog, as the saying goes?
Mr Harper’s government is setting the example.
All it takes from there is a little ingenious thinking.
That’s the view from here.