Get Your OWN President

With inauguration-mania looming, Canadian news magazines are not going to be left out of the conversation. Day after day, newscast after newscast, the journalists and pundits pick apart Obama, his administration, what this all means to Americans and Canadians. They interview politicians, White House correspondents, “experts,” and people who have no obvious link to the subject. Today they talked with a series of comedians, trying to uncover what the comedic atmosphere will be in the coming four years. This is all well and good, except WHERE IS YOUR OWN GOVERNMENT?

Throughout all of this, there has never been a piece about Canadian politics, at any scale, in any regard. Do they not have a government here? I understand that the lives of these two countries are strongly intertwined, that what happens in the US affects Canada directly, but here Barack is discussed as if he will be the president of Canada, too.

My favourite part of this whole discourse, however, is how much everyone here is freaking out about the “possible protectionist rhetoric” of Obama. Starting a few weeks ago, the Sunday shows has pundits discussing the possibility that Obama might talk about making the borders tighter, and what that would/might mean for the economy here. But they never actually said anything concrete, never identified any real issues, never brought up the fact that nothing of a scale worth freaking out about would ever happen because that would affect the US too much, too. “Ooohhh, no, we don’t have president Bush to freak us out anymore, what are we going to freak out about now? I know, Obama mentioned something that sounded protectionist a year or so ago!” Get over it, Canada.