You're kidding right? These were the alternatives?

CalgaryGrit is spending the weekend doing polling for The Greatest Prime Minister Canada Never Had.

The quick thing one discovers is that the choices pretty much all suck.

I have no dreams of doing an in-depth look at all of the choices, so let's review:

Dalton friggin' Camp, basically the definition of Red Tory (since Joe Clark was taken as the definition of "Albertan who was dumb enough to be from Ontario). Alexa McDonough, the socialist nutbar who seriously believes that profit is akin to murder (just not her Daddy's profits, of course...or the "profit" she got in her trust fund). "King Joey Smallwood", the man responsible (indirectly at least) for the garbage which is the Equilization Fund. How about Clyde Wells, who couldn't even stand up to a small smattering of protest over a fully sensible hydro privatization? And those are just from the East!

Quebec actually has nominations. Can you believe CalgaryGrit is concerned that not enough Prime Ministers have come from Quebec?

Ontario really has been shafted from the PM department, but with the choices CalgaryGrit provides, its easy to see why: Ed Broadbent, that pathetic carcass of Soviet-loving postwar socialism perhaps? "Screaming Sheila Copps", who's commitment to fairplay and democracy continue to mean if she sets foot in Banff Alberta ever again she will be instantly assasinated in full view of one hundred people who were all "looking the other way". There's CD Howe (he of the centre-claiming-to-be-centre-right think tank), or that lunatic racist cum "women's suffragist" cum pacifist Agnes MacPhail. Perhaps the brainless spineless Liberal toady Warren Kinsella should be selected, if he can spend time away from tarring and feathering people based on the "six degree of separation" principle. Pacifist UN toady Stephen Lewis? Alan "in my world only the police will have guns and I will send them against any unarmed citizens I disagree with" Rock, or maybe Barbara McDougall, the woman so intelligent she hitched herself to Belinda Stronach's star. John Mannish, er sorry, Manley? Sorry Ontario, you have nobody to blame but yourself.

Not surprisingly, the best choices are from the West. Alberta-West, of course. Tommy Douglas and Lloyd Axeworthy and Elijah Harper need not apply. Being CalgaryGrit, he finds it necessary to include Nellie McClung (who would not be qualified to be the Prime Minister of a kindergarten Model Parliament) or Clifford Sifton, who wrote about the west he was from:

What will western Canada do for the Canadian organism? Sir, it will give a vast and profitable traffic to its railways and steamship lines. It will give remunerative employment to tens of thousands of men... It will do more. It will build up our Canadian seaports... It will furnish a steady and remunerative business to the manufacturers of eastern Canada, giving assured prosperity where uncertainty now exists. These are the things the west will do for the east.

Two Mannings, Ralph Klein, Stockwell Day, and Bible Bill Aberhart can't hope to raise up this slime-cover dredge of choices. It's quite clear that Canada has failed because we have yet to have a leader worth electing to mayorality of a city let alone stewardship of a Parliamentary democracy.