This is what I am looking forward to (so are others, checking the comments at the end of the piece):
http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/mark_bonokoski/2011/01/04/16762171.htmlThursday, January 6, 2011
Comment Columnists / Mark Bonokoski
Harper Tories' 'stupidest decision'By MARK BONOKOSKI , QMI Agency
Maybe it's the air in Ottawa.
Maybe it's because much of the national press gallery lives in a subliminally gated political community where the pack mentality is nurtured and then contained by a white picket fence so high that the rest of Canada, over time, becomes foreign.
But it must be an explanation for its distance from reality.
A case in point was Sunday's edition of Question Period, a CTV panel show where the Top-10 political stories of 2010 were being "discussed" by five political correspondents with long imprisonments in Ottawa -- the Globe and Mail's Jane Taber and Gloria Galloway, CTV's Craig Oliver and Bob Fife, and the Toronto Star's Jim Travers.
There was, however, no debate, only discussion and wholesale agreement.
People in small-town Canada -- meaning anywhere outside a 100-km radius of insular Ottawa -- must have felt their blood pressure rise when Travers went unchallenged as he described the Conservatives' end of the mandatory long-form census, supposedly the fourth most-important story of 2010, as an "act of public vandalism."
Or when Fife, CTV's Ottawa bureau chief and once-upon-a-time Sun Media's conservative-minded man in Ottawa, emphatically pointed out the 492 Tamils who arrived uninvited to our shores aboard a smugglers' ship from Sri Lanka were "not queue jumpers."
If they were not "queue jumpers," then what in hell were they?
Again, no one on the panel asked Fife to explain.
This is due to being Ottawa-ized by institutional liberalism.
Venture beyond the 100-km radius that insulates Ottawa from the rest of us, however, and the good folks who sit in the coffee shop in Griffith, Ont., for example, or further down the road in Saidie's Eagle's Nest Restaurant in Bancroft, Ont., (which is my rural haunt) would have no trouble calling a spade a spade, and a "queue jumper" a queue jumper.
Nor would any of them put the end of a mandatory long-form census on any Top-10 list. The survival of the gun registry by a close vote, maybe, because rural folk hate it for all the right reasons.
But not the long-form census.
Full disclosure: For 10 years I lived in insulated Ottawa, first as editor and then publisher of the Ottawa Sun, followed by a stint as Sun Media's national affairs columnist, and then two years of self-imposed sabbatical.
Today we live in Ontario's near-north, equidistant to both Ottawa and Toronto, while I maintain a basement apartment in a rather dodgy part of downtown Toronto for times when the office calls.
This arrangement provides the best of two worlds -- no picket fences so high that the rest of Canada becomes foreign, plus a blending of
helter-skelter urban with common-sense rural.
It also provides a perspective lacking by many of those who, over time, are infected with the liberal spin of institutionalized Ottawa politics and explains why the best commentary usually comes from outside Ottawa.
During that particular episode of CTV's Question Period, for example, Fife called the end of the mandatory long-form census the "stupidest decision the (Harper) government has ever made."
The stupidest decision ever made?
If that was the "stupidest decision ever made" by our government, and the long-form census was the fourth most important story of 2010, then what a great country we must live in.
mark.bonokoski@sunmedia.ca 
