My creationist experience with Gary Goodgrief, Minister of Science

Gary Goodyear is attracting considerable criticism these days. All of it well deserved, I'd say.

I had the occasion/misfortune to encounter Gary Goodyear back on March 5, 2007 in St. Catharines Ontario at the announcement of the Seniors Council. This was quite the creationist experience on several fronts. None of them good. It was this experience more than any other single event that motivated me to run for the Liberal Party in the 2008 election, as I knew something had to be done to rid this country of the Conservative Party in general and MPs like Gary Goodyear in particular. It was on the way home from this event that I phoned Liberal MP Paul Szabo to inquire whether the Liberal Party had a candidate to run against Jim Flaherty in Whitby-Oshawa.

The Seniors Council was the creation of the Harper government and was designed to take the place of the 27 year old group known as the Council on Aging, which was obviously proving itself to be an obstacle to Harper, so it had to go. This Seniors Council announcement was a complete farce, as the Council was nothing more than a concept on a piece of paper. None of its members of the Board had even been identified or announced. And yet this merited a big PR production complete with a custom lectern and Seniors Council logo and back drop and no less than five Cabinet Ministers in attendance, including Senator Marjorie Lebreton (Minister for Seniors) and a gaggle of lesser light Conservative MPs, including someone who I later learned was Gary Goodyear, MP for Cambridge.

After the Council had been announced along with a statement of all the great things that Harper had done for seniors, there was an opportunity for the press to ask questions. In the end, mine was the only questioned asked. My question was why did the speaker (MP Rick Dykstra) only mention that the Tax Fairness Plan had introduced pension income splitting for seniors and not mention that pension income splitting only benefited 14% of seniors and why did the mention of the Tax Fairness Plan not include the fact that this was the tax measure that destroyed seniors’ investments in income trusts at a cost of $35 billion of their life savings?

This was recorded in the Candian Press’ news account of the day’s affair, as being the “one discordant” voice at the event.

After I had the chance to ask my question and didn’t receive any meaningful answer, the event ended abruptly. After which I approached Marjorie LeBreton to speak with her, when I found my path intersected by this Gary Goodyear person. I remember it quite vividly, extreme bad breath and all. Without any provocation or justification, this total stranger, Gary Goodyear, stands in my way, leans into my face and says: “If you touch her, I am going to call the cops”. What a complete thug! “If you touch her, I am going to call the cops”. Good grief, what a creationist comment if ever there were one. This guy is threatening to call the cops even before there is even a semblance of reason for doing so. He had himself all worked up into some creation worthy of calling the cops? I thought this guy was some kind of low end rent a cop. Imagine my amazement when I learned that this thug was a Member of Parliament? That increased my disgust tenfold. Here I am participating in a taxpayer funded public event, and I ask a simple question and it begets this kind of thuggish response.....from a sitting member of Parliament? That was it for me.

It was on the drive home that I was inspired to run for office, in my personal attempt to rid this country of low life thug MPs like Gary Goodyear. Only to fail in my attempt to do so, and only to see his kind of thug behaviour rewarded by Harper with Gary Goodyear’s elevation to Cabinet, as Minister of Science. Those events alone, make the Theory of Evolution, hard to fathom. More like devolution, I’d say.