By the time this reaches you, Ms. Kellie Leitch, Conservative Party leadership candidate and Member of Parliament for Simcoe-Grey, will, I hope, have emerged from the uncomfortable spot she's worked her way into. Right now, Ms. Leitch, a mole close to the situation informs me, is in a dark place.
How did she get there? Well, that's an interesting story – early last week, it was discovered Ms. Leitch, had decided to dig a hole.
She'd broken ground on her political sinkhole, one that at its current rate of growth, may well become a UNESCO World Heritage Site by mid-October, by sending out a thoroughly questionable campaign questionnaire. Ms. Leitch asked her supporters, "Should the Canadian government screen potential immigrants for anti-Canadian values as part of its normal screening for refugees and landed immigrants?"
There was a loud, indeed somewhat bipartisan, cry of "Stop, put the shovel down!" but this was a thing Ms. Leitch did not do.
Ms. Leitch just kept on digging, and digging, and digging some more. She sounded more than a bit Donald Trump "extreme vetting-ish" and that's not the kind of orange wave most welcome around here.
"Where she's going with this?" the nation wondered as she went deeper, and then deeper still.
Perhaps the honourable (and clearly steel-toe-booted) member for Simcoe-Grey has a map to pirate gold, some speculated. This "xenophobic posturing" thing, does seem to bring in the donations. Ms. Kellie (Dig Dug) Leitch has raised more money than any of the other Conservative candidates so far, although they're admittedly a rather broken crew.
Right now the Conservative Party of Canada is a bit Barrett's Privateers. Only Barrett's decided he'd rather be premier of Alberta, and so Canadian Conservatives are being offered the likes of "Kellie Leitch and her Misguided Steam Shovel," barrelling down.
"Canadians can expect to hear more, not less from me, on this topic in the coming months," Ms. Leitch said, when many Canadians expressed alarm at the idea of their government behaving like a particularly intrusive condo board.
She's really putting her back into it – despite the increasingly loud cries of "Call before you dig! Immigrant votes were once our water main!" coming from members of her own party.
By "more," Ms. Leitch seems to mean "more of the same," rather than "more specifics," and mostly just more digging. She's been quick to chide anyone who asks, for example, whether the "tolerance" for "all sexual orientations" she claims to be so passionate about includes anything beyond not killing, specifically by stoning, LGBT Canadians.
Possibly due to the mechanics of all that digging she's doing, possibly just so we're reminded which cultural cliché she's conjuring up, Ms. Leitch does like to talk about stones. I've certainly not heard her talking about anyone clubbing anyone to death with bagpipes, baguettes or Belgian waffles.
Does this "tolerance testing" she demands of newcomers (only) include support for same-sex marriage – which her party, the one she's been with for 30 years, only went so far as to agree not to discuss this past May?
That question, Ms. Leitch says, "trivializes" the "conversation" she's trying to have. A "conversation" that she'd rather keep as a one-sided broadcast of white noise and shovelling sounds.
Down she goes! But this is not about race-baiting – she'll have you know, from the Pit of Ultimate Pandering. This is about protecting us, she explained, her voice barely reaching us from the depths of her tunnel.
"Where is Ms. Leitch going with this?" some continued to ask. "Who's she trying to reach? Are there Conservatives so jealous of Justin Trudeau right now that they're attempting to dig their way to China? Who, given the results of the last election, in which voters soundly rejected her party and its "barbaric cultural practices hotline" – unveiled to Canadians by, who was it again? Oh right, Ms. Leitch and then MP Chris Alexander – is she hoping to reach with her considerable excavation efforts?"
Well, whoever it was, by mid-week she'd passed the asthenosphere, made short work of the mantle and, certain subterranean sources inform me, has finally reached the Mole People, much to their alarm.
"We need to have a conversation about this Kellie Leitch," Doug McWormgrubber, Mole Person of Parliament for Somewhere Beneath You Right Now, Watching, Waiting, reportedly said.
"This sudden tide of would-be Conservative leader flooding our borders is alarming. We need to test her to see if she'll fit in."
"She'll already have to swear an oath to faithfully observe the laws of the Mole World and fulfill her duties as a Mole Person citizen," Felicity DuMoleHill, a digger from the riding of Undermin- ing the Foundations of Your House, Yes, Your House, While You Sleep, That's What That Noise Is, said in a mole-person-in-a-tunnel interview. "I'm just not sure it's worth sacrificing our longstanding traditions. Molians have always toiled in silence, keeping to our moleselves, as we prepare to one day rise from the deep place and overthrow the hateful surface dwellers.
"Now someone wants us to start interrogating would-be newcomers about a vaguely defined set of values, when their beliefs may well change once they've basked in the dark radiance of the Great Monolith, anyway," continued Felicity, a star-nosed mole-person, whose 22 nose appendages are said to make her extremely sensitive to both potential food sources in her tunnel and dog-whistle politics everywhere.
"Look, she's clearly a dedicated digger, and that's what we need around here. That hydro dam, you know, the one by the sleepy little town, isn't going to collapse itself! As long as this Ms. Leitch non-mole-person is prepared to keep digging, I don't care what she thinks about while she's at it.
And look she's digging again right now! She's digging while she mutters something about visitors to her country needing to be thought-screened as well!"
Ms. Diggy Leitch had also put this "visitors" idea forward this past Tuesday in an interview with the Canadian Press, back while she was still working her way through the lithosphere.
"How's that going to go over, Kellie," one can be forgiven for wondering; "Canada: Come for the skiing, stay for the Stasi"?
"She talks too loud, they all do," a tunneller-by interjected into the ongoing tunnel-talk, or so my mole mole told me, somewhat embarrassed. "I've never been convinced about this whole 'unified subterranean identity' thing anyway. Even my husband and I can't agree whether we should rise up and claim the surface for ourselves or drag its inhabitants down here to serve us for eternity, but we're still a family!" a caller to local radio said.
"I'm not opposed in principle," said Maxime Bermole, honourable member for Those Aren't Echoes You're Hearing From the Bottom of That Well, The One You Always Avoided As a Child, before scurrying away. "The applicant might say she'll partake in our tradition of filling subterranean larders with thousands upon thousands of paralyzed earthworms, but I've been told her kind doesn't even have paralytic saliva."
"I have heard dread whispers that, above ground, in certain strange lands, they drink the juice of clams and tomatoes, mixed together," said Moledoph Carter, a retired professor from the University of the Liquid Outer Core, a place Ms. Leitch clearly aspires to attend. "For the sake of my own sanity, I must believe this just a rumour."