I didn't get a chance to post about one of the more ridiculous items I read this week. Jim Pankiw, an MP (Member of Parliament, as in one of the people who helps to run Canada) for one of the Saskatoon ridings, distributed a pamphlet to his entire riding letting everyone know, on the cover in big red letters, that we need to STOP (stop sign) Indian Crime. The (mis)information inside provides statistics that the Star Phoenix (Saskatoon's news paper) "won't print", basically some bar graphs and pie charts, representing in red native people as a percentage of population and percentage of prison population, and other such inflammatory data (from 1991 no less).

Jimbo brags elsewhere in the pamphlet about how is liked for his ability to "tell it like it is".

The back page shows a picture of a Canadian soldier at the Oka standoff (I'll let you kids look that one up yourselves), face to face with one of the protestors, with the caption reading: Indian terrorist confronts Canadian armed forces.

Now I know what you're thinking, this is just some nut who wants to be in politics. No, this is a man in his second term of office who will be running for a third. The story is that his riding is about half rural, half in Saskatoon, the rural section all voted Reform, and the city split NDP and Liberal (you might say "a vote for Bodnar is a vote for Pankiw"). You may also remember him from the Alliance Party fiasco where he was one of the people to get booted from the party. Hopefully his chances will be worse as an independent, since no other party will touch him. But I also hear that the riding boundaries will be redrawn, so that they are all-city and all-rural, so who knows . . .