You've Got To Be Kidding

I've said for a long time that just beneath the veneer of civilized that the current owners of the name 'Conservative' in Canada is a squirming base of ugliness.

It appears the veneer's wearing thin:

Ezra is definitely in the Harper war room, a place he jokingly considers to be more of a "peace room. It's more huggable.

"I'm a volunteer helping out. I do burger runs. I do TV panels as a Conservative strategist. It's not that big a deal," says Ezra.

Well, when Ezra is contacted, he is not about to do a burger run but he is about to go on CTV as a Conservative strategist. Ezra tells us nothing about the burger preferences of the Tory war room but he lets us in on strategy.

"Huggable"??? Harper? Right ... but then again the odds of me seeing eye to eye with Ezra Lerant on anything are pretty slim.

Anyway, Chandler is back in the game and he plans to be working on the Harper team, almost certainly being in a Tory phone room wooing undecided voters in Ontario.

"I've been asked by the Tories to be involved heavily in this campaign. I get up from one fight with a black eye and it heals and I get into another one," says Chandler, who no one accuses of staying on the canvas long.

"The federal party is not like the provincial PCs. We work well together. We don't have a problem. I will have an involvement. It's a 99 percent guarantee. It will be in the phone rooms, wherever they are."

Chandler also says when Calgary gets new seats in Parliament because of the city's growth, some top Tories want him to run for one of the open spots.

"I've been asked to seek one of the seats," he says. Who has asked?

"These are people who are high-profile in the party."

The man also has a book coming out next year.

Chandler is well aware his presence in the campaign will raise some eyebrows.

"People can complain all they want. Democracy takes all kinds. We have to learn to play in the sandbox. If they can't grow up, that's their problem," he says.

"I'm not going away. Politics is a blood sport and I'm just going to get better at it."

Half of Chandler's problem is that he has no idea how to compromise. I've yet to see him in a contentious situation where he hasn't tried to bully and bluster his way through it - and then have a major hissy fit when it doesn't go his way.

To hear him talking about 'learning to play in the sandbox', it's almost laughable. It's not like his track record exactly shows us that kind of willingness to cooperate with anyone who dares disagree with him.

If the HarperCon$ are inviting him to run for a seat, they are either just as nutty as Chandler himself has proven to be, or they are oblivious.

Whatever vestiges of the old PC party that used to exist are long gone indeed.