It turns out Quebec cares about the arts after all. No one was more stunned by this revelation than the Conservative Party. Although they’d still love to cut funding for all those wealthy, elitist, gala-attending starving artists who make their living carving doohickeys out of whatsits and selling them for two bucks a shot, they’ve had to dial it down a bit for the election. In what was supposed to be a magnanimous move, the Conservatives have killed Bill C-10, the law that would have given a committee of their lackeys censorship oversight on government-funded film projects. Their efforts to save our morality from movies with naughty titles like Young People Fucking were abandoned to shore up support from all those artsy-fartsies in Quebec who stubbornly continue to put some stock in homemade culture. It seems all those seats they picked up in La Belle Province last election were going poof as more and more local artists assembled to point out that Stephen Harper is a poopy pants.

Much as this flip-flop in culture-fund legalities is supposed to turn my crank, I still can’t get behind the Conservatives and support their power-grab at a majority government. It’s their leader, you see.

I will not vote for Stephen Hussein Harper. I don’t trust him, he’s an Arab.

There, I said it and I’m not ashamed.

I’m not too sure about the other candidates either, frankly. Like Stephane Hussein Dion, Jack Hussein Layton, Gilles Hussein Duceppe, and Elizabeth Hussein May. I don’t trust them either. They all look a little Araby to me. Especially Layton. He has facial hair. Facial hair is very middle eastern, I’m told.

You might say I’m being put off by their names, but nothing can be further from the truth. I appreciate that our enlightened cousins to the south continue to elect and support candidates with dodgy-sounding names that, on the surface, seem to cast them in a poor light. But the American electorate has wisely accepted that George Pol Pot Bush, Dick Mengele Cheney and Sarah Goebbels Palin cannot be fairly associated with their namesakes. Unfortunate middle names are an accident of birth, and don’t reflect the character of their owners. It’s up to each individual politician to create his or her own nefarious reputation through first-hand involvement in corruption, human right violations, war and genocide, without relying on a sinister name with some historical context to pad their résumé.

Through this long election process in both our nations, I’ve learned one very important thing. There are a fuckload of Husseins in this world. Why can’t they all have a less common name? Something more unique and exotic, like “John.” As in John Wayne Gacy McCain, for instance. There’s a name you can trust.