Are Canadians up for a tea party?

On January 20th I wrote about the election of a Republican senator in Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy's old fiefdom, thanks in part to the burgeoning Tea Party movement. This week the movement -- it may be premature to call it a political party -- had a convention, at which Sarah Palin was the featured speaker.

The 2012 presidential wannabe gave a rousing speech, according to all reports, in which she poked rather a lot of fun at President Barack Obama’s failure to live up to his promises.
“A year later, how is all that hopey-changey stuff working out for you?” she asked, rhetorically. For those listening, indeed for millions of Americans, the answer is clearly: not too well. [Wouldn't an American say "Not too good?" ed.]

In today's Globe & Mail, John Ibbotson ponders what it would take to provoke Canadians to the sort of righteous indignation we see in the USA. He says that if prorogation of Parliament, a provincial premier going outside Canada for surgery and the federal government's covering up a brewing scandal in the Public Works Department won't do it, nothing will!

Here are two very cogent excerpts from Mr. Ibbotson's piece:

Canada and the United States are remarkably similar countries.... Yet politically, we are solitudes. Americans are perpetually in full-throated reaction to the status quo. Their grassroots abhorrence of the war in Iraq, the mismanagement of Katrina and the other follies of the Bush administration helped get Barack Obama elected President of the United States.
Now it would seem that an equally large, though very different, assembly of Americans is rallying in reaction to Mr. Obama’s statist interventions in the economy, his hopes to reform health care, his government’s projected deficits.

Yet here at home all is quiet.... For all our shared geography and history, Canadians are more Japanese than American. Or more German. Or Norwegian. We accommodate ourselves to the political reality we inhabit. Only the Americans are perpetually up in arms against the status quo. It makes for more unstable, more dysfunctional, but ultimately more democratic politics.

Walt would like to see a little more American indignation in the Canadian psyche and Canadian politics. "Not so bad, eh" is not good enough! Tea party, anyone?