Canada - a little tongue in cheek

On my drive back from picking up my work yesterday morning, I caught Mike McCardell on CKNW, doing a parody of a Johnny Carson take on Canada.

I love stuff like that and this piece was sly and clever. In a fit of unaccustomed cheek, I emailed Mike (yes, that Mike McCardell - the one that does the human interest spot on the 6 o’clock news over at Global every night) to see if he had the piece, would send it to me and if so (yikes, I can’t believe I asked this) would he give me permission to put it on my blog. He graciously said yes. Here it is. Thanks so much Mike!

CARSON'S CANADA

Can you imagine if Johnny Carson ever did his monologue about Canada... There is a country with a state of mind that is like a mind after it’s had a few martinis, Sez Johnny while swinging his imaginary golf club: Ok, so imagine you kill someone in Canada. You go to jail for six months, with time off for good behavior, which means you didn’t kill anyone else in jail, or if you did kill them you didn’t do it with prohibited weapons.

Now what exactly is a prohibited weapon? Well, that is being worked out by the government in a program that cost more than it would cost to run an army. So they got rid of the army.

And replaced it by a gun registry program which is trying to get people to register guns in a Country famous for not having guns. The gun registry program has replaced welfare as the largest expense by the government. Which means more Canadians are paying taxes to register guns that they don’t have in Canada than there are Canadians who are Not paying taxes after making a living washing windshields on the street, which is the second largest growth industry in the country after farming.

They are bright, these Canadians, says Johnny. Since winters are very long they have learned how to farm under light bulbs, in their basements.

And you don’t have to worry about cooking their farm products. They smoke it, such a pure and simple method.

And there is socialized medicine. No one pays for medical treatment up there, sez Johnny. The only problem is they haven’t found a cure for a local affliction called the waiting list, which kills more Canadians than cancer or heart disease.

And the funniest thing about all this, says Johnny, is …I got this not from my writers, but from the newspapers.

© 2005 by Mike McCardell