Nova Scotian for Prime Minister

Ninth-grader gets chance to run Canada... for a bit
By: Mia Rabson / Hill Talk

Posted: 8/11/2010 1:00 AM | Comments: 0

OTTAWA -- For at least a few minutes last week, a Grade 9 student from Nova Scotia was running the country.

Melanie Lynn Renn won the Ultimate Dream Job Contest by the Learning Partnership and ScotiaBank.

For her grand prize, she got to go to work with Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

She started the day at 24 Sussex Drive, drove in the prime minister's motorcade to Parliament Hill, got a personal tour from Harper of the House of Commons and had a meeting with him in his Centreblock office, where she sat at his desk.

"He let her run the country for a few minutes," joked one of Harper's staffers.

Melanie Lynn, however, doesn't have aspirations to be prime minister. She'd rather be Indiana Jones and her career plans don't include Parliament Hill unless it is to excavate the site as an archaeologist. The Hill was alive with youth all day Wednesday as Melanie Lynn was joined by scores of other ninth-graders, who held reporters' tape recorders, learned how to use boom mikes, scrummed MPs, sat in on press conferences and glimpsed the daily ins and outs of life on Parliament Hill.

Melanie Lynn is not the only one whose day likely brought on some serious envy.

National Post columnist John Ivison brought his nephew with him to work that day and scored a trifecta.

In the span of one afternoon, 14-year-old Adrian Burger interviewed Harper, Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff and NDP Leader Jack Layton. Adrian is now in a pretty exclusive club of journalists granted a one-on-one interview with this PM.

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It was a great day for students to be on the Hill because last Wednesday was also the day government announced its decision not to allow a foreign company to take over Saskatchewan's PotashCorp.

No matter that most in Ottawa probably couldn't tell you exactly what potash is (one national reporter remarked it was the first time he'd ever written the word potash in a decades-long career on the Hill), the resource was all the rage in the nation's capital last week.

At least until Environment Minister Jim Prentice stunned everyone with his resignation.

The big question was whether or not the government was going to allow the hostile takeover of PotashCorp by Australia's BHP Billiton or whether it would deny a foreign takeover for only the second time in the last 25 years.

The answer was yes.

Although Industry Minister Tony Clement didn't really give the reasons for the rejection Wednesday, most knew it was done mainly for political reasons. Saskatchewan, where the minority Conservative government holds 13 of 14 seats, was soundly against the takeover. Say yes to the deal and Harper risked losing some of those seats.

The decision was surprising enough the opposition wasn't sure how to handle it, having spent the greater part of the last few weeks thundering at the government it should say no.

So all those students spending the day on the Hill will be able to tell their grandchildren they were there when the Harper Conservatives shed their fiscal-Conservative ideals rather than risk losing the next election by allowing foreigners to buy Saskatchewan's biggest company.

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Nothing screams Friday on Parliament Hill like a late-afternoon dumping of government documents.

Not just any documents mind you, documents the government knows the opposition and the media desperately want to see.

They did it earlier this year with Afghanistan detainee documents.

They did it Friday with the long-awaited specifics of where Canada spent more than $860-million on the G20/G8 summits last June.

Hosting world leaders certainly costs money. Nobody expects Prime Minister Stephen Harper to feed foreign leaders peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on paper plates or make them sleep at the Super 8.

But when the government is constantly preaching about spending restraint at a time when the deficit is at record levels, at a time when thousands of Canadians are still out of work, it's really hard for any government to justify some of the more opulent-looking expenses.

Like a $20,000 ice sculpture, $12,000 for tablecloths and $11,000 for 24 place settings.

Or the loot bags handed out to delegates such as $2,559 on eight Hudson's Bay blankets for political directors, $2,362 for crystal CN tower replicas, $1,260 for stained glass, $3,039 on woven shawls as gifts for leaders' spouses and $17,955 for 30 bowls given as gifts to the leaders.

mia.rabson@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 8, 2010 A4