Fresh off his diplomatic triumph in India, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau…. just kidding. The Prime Minister’s trip to India was less a triumph than a potential chapter in a book called ‘Diplomacy for Dummies - what not to do’. It will be filled with helpful tips such as why inviting an attempted murderer to a social engagement is frowned upon, and why showing respect through adopting a culture’s traditional dress can be taken a step too far.
Yes, it is a hopefully humbled PM who returned to these shores, followed, not by the international worship he has grown accustomed to, but more by international questions, such as ‘what’s with this dude?’
Still, many pundits have pointed out that overall the trip wasn’t the abysmal failure some made it out to be. Progress was made on several issues, and in international diplomacy and trade, any progress is positive.
But now he’s home and this week was budget week. Yay! Budget week! Budgets are so exciting! So… zzzzzzzzzzzz.
I’m sorry, I just nodded off there. We’ll get back to the budget in a moment but first, Barbra Streisand cloned her dog! Yup. This is how the other half lives. It’s actually not the other half. It’s the other one per cent. But in any event, it was revealed in a story in Variety that two of Barbra’s dogs, Miss Violet and Miss Scarlett, were cloned from her 14-year-old Coton du Tulear Samantha, who died in 2017. Before Samantha died, Streisand had cells taken from the dog’s mouth and stomach. And then cloned her. As you do.
One Twitter user said Miss Streisand’s actions were “peak rich white people”. But another countered. “Look, if I were unfathomably rich, I would absolutely clone my dog and so would you.”
I’m sorry about that brief break but, you know.. dog cloning.
Back to the budget. Billed as a gender equality budget, the 367-page document contained…… Lady Ga Ga owns a $47,000 ghost detecting machine!
Apparently Her Ga Ganess has a great fear of a ghost named Ryan and travels with a state of the art electro magnetic field detecting machine to pick up any ghostly presence. I mean, why not?
That why not attitude is carried on by the American secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson this week, as, in between slashing the budget for affordable housing for the neediest, he spent over $31,000 for a dining room table for his office.
Now this begs several questions, and ‘why not?’ may not fly as an answer.
First, where do you even get a $31,000 dining room table? Does it cook and serve your meals as well?
And more importantly, why does an office need a dining room table? Does Secretary Carson not eat his poutine over his keyboard like the rest of us schlubs? BTdubs, how do you get poutine out of a keyboard? I’m asking for a friend.
A $31,000 dining room table. That’s right up there with our everyman Finance Minister owning a chateau in France. Which leads us back to the budget.
A key feature was…. Actor Nicolas Cage, during his peak popularity, spent funds on two albino cobras, an octopus, a Gulfstream jet, a $276,000 dinosaur skull, a private island and a $1.6 million comic book collection. Also a haunted mansion. He later ran into financial difficulties. Go figure.
Spending money willy nilly on things you don’t need… that takes us back to the budget. The federal government is going to continue to run a deficit.
“There seems to be gaps between the plans laid out in the budget, and the money to make them happen,” says Kootenay Columbia MP Wayne Stetski.
Really? A gap between promises and actual money? How unlike a government budget!
I could give you more budget details but you’re probably more interested in knowing that $10 million in diamonds were used to fill a bathtub for Taylor Swift to bathe in for her newest video.
So I want to assure you that even though some are criticizing the federal budget as over-spending, it does not fund dog cloning, ghost detection, dinosaur skulls or a bathtub full of diamonds.
At least I don’t think it does. I haven’t read all 367 pages.