Dolphins 30, Bills 23

I spent another Sunday afternoon working on firewood and listening to John Murphy and Mark Kelso tell me about another Bills loss - their seventh straight. The Washington game at Rogers Centre seems like it was about three football seasons ago. Thankfully, there are only two games left in what has become another train wreck of a season. Eventhough Tim Tebow's luck ran out yesterday against the Patriots, amazingly, my Christmas Eve Denver Broncos tickets sold yesterday after I reduced the price a little on NFL TicketExchange. The NFL prides itself on being a league with parity. I can think of a great example. Remember week one of this season? The Bills travelled to Kansas City and demolished the favoured Chiefs. Yesterday, the Chiefs handed Green Bay their first loss of the season.

Driving to Muskoka on Saturday morning, I was listening to The House. Reporters Greg Weston and Joan Bryden were asked to make a list of who has been naughty and who has been nice in federal politics this past year. Weston's naughty choice was Defence Minister Peter Mackay whose use of military helicopters and private jets has been widely reported and, last week, we learned that he stayed in a $1,400 per night hotel at a security conference in Munich last year. The Conservatives spent considerable time in opposition digging up examples of such government largesse. His nice list included two non-elected federal officials who are widely respected and represent, he says, what many Canadians look for in their political leadership: Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney and Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page.

Joan Bryden's naughty choice was the Conservative Party. She chose the party because of its attutude toward certain court rulings. She gave two examples and a third occured to me as well. During the 2006 federal election campaign, the Conservatives used what became known as the "in and out" move where national campaign funds were distributed to certain ridings and then funnelled back to the national campaign, allowing them to spend more on the national campaign than the rules permitted. The party plead guilty recently and was ordered to pay a $52,000 fine but the Conservatives claimed victory anyway, reiterating their position that the strategy is actually legal. They plead guilty, I presume, because they were not confident that they could convince a judge of its legality.

The second example Bryden gave was the court ruling about the dismantling of the Canadian Wheat Board. The court ruled that the government was required to have formally consulted with farmers before proceeding to change the Wheat Board's mandate. Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz responded by saying that the important thing is that Canadian farmers will now have the ability to sell their wheat wherever they want. He went on to say that in the event that an injunction is obtained in the future, they will ignore it. Ignore it. Should the rest of us take the same approach and simply ignore court rulings we don't like?

Just before the May, 2011 election, the Speaker of the House found the government to be in contempt of Parliament for not disclosing the cost of its crime legislation, corporate tax cuts and the purchase of fighter jets. In the leaders debate, the Prime Minister referred to this as a "technicality" and the result of partisan "bickering". In keeping with the Conservatives philosophy, there clearly should be a mandatory minimum sentence for being found to be in contempt of Parliament. And for growing six pot plants. It only makes sense.