If Tom Lukiwski had gone to some of Debbie McGladdery's speech arts classes, maybe none of this would ever happened.
McGladdery taught a generation of Prince George children how to properly enunciate (ee-NUN-see-ate) their words for many speech arts and drama festivals over the years.
Lukiwski, the Saskatchewn Conservative MP for Moose Jaw-Lake Centre-Lanigan, stepped into a big pile of the same stuff you're likely to encounter during a visit to a farm in his riding with some comments he made on the night of the federal election.
After lamenting about his party's loss of power, Lukiwski tried to rally the troops by saying there's a provincial election just around the corner in the spring and it's more important than ever for the Saskatchewan Party's Greg Lawrence, the MLA for the Moose Jaw area, to be re-elected.
"We've got to get Greg back elected," Lukiwski said. "He's too important of an MLA to let go down to an NDP horde just because of a bad boundary."
Lukiwski, of course, insists he said "horde," but there's a good case to be made that what he really said was "whore."
The video, shot by Moose Jaw Times-Herald reporter Mickey Djuric, is being played over and over, particularly the quote, looking for whether the "d" sound is there or not.
On a side note, Djuric resigned when her newspaper refused to run a story about the comments in the video.
Rona Ambrose, the interim Conservative leader, issued a statement Thursday standing by her man, insisting that "it is very difficult to determine what was said (and) Mr. Lukiwski strongly denies that he used the word in question."
Yet the very next morning, she informed the world how she really feels about Lukiwski and his inability in enunciate his words clear enough to keep himself out of trouble.
When she announced her list of Conservative MPs for the shadow cabinet and critics, Lukiwski's name was nowhere to be found. Lukiwski, an MP since 2004 who has won five consecutive elections in his riding, was left behind while second-term MP Bob Zimmer of Prince George-Peace River-Northern Rockies was named deputy critic for Families, Children and Social Development and rookie Conservative MP Todd Dohery of Cariboo-Prince George was appointed deputy critic for Indigenous Affairs and the critic responsible for the Asia-Pacific Gateway portfolio.
With no apparent sense of irony at all, Ambrose, the Leader of the Opposition, kept one critic portfolio for herself: Status of Women.
If actions speak louder than words, Ambrose clearly enunciates much better than Lukiwski.
Or perhaps she's just hoarding Lukiwski away for more important work.
Word play aside, Ambrose missed an opportunity. Even if Lukiwski meant to say "horde," it's easy to understand how a reasonable person can hear "whore" and it doesn't help that the NDP candidate in the area is a woman.
In the final analysis, however, it doesn't matter what he meant. It sounded like "whore" and the damage was done.
Ambrose certainly wouldn't have tolerated this nonsense from a male Liberal or NDP talking about her as the "Conservative horde." As the new leader, she needed to send a clear message to the remaining Conservative caucus that she's in charge and she will not tolerate this kind of hurtful foot-in-mouth disease.
Kicking him out of caucus for six months or a year would have been the right thing to do, instead of the passive-aggressive move of denying him a critic's position or a place in the shadow cabinet.
In teaching how to pronounce a word like horde, a teacher like McGladdery would likely have insisted that after pursing the lips and pushing from the throat to make the "hor" sound, the lips would then pull back in a half-smile while the tongue bounced off the back of the top teeth to make the "duh" sound clearly while still skating right on the line between keeping horde as one syllable and not making it two syllables as "hord-ah."
The audio doesn't seem to capture any effort to make the "duh" sound nor does the video show his mouth moving to make it. That doesn't mean he said "whore" but it also means he made no extra special effort to say "horde."
Meanwhile, there is another video of Lukiwski, shot in 1991, commenting about "homosexual faggots with dirt on their fingernails that transmit diseases."
Stephen Harper forgave him for that one when the video came to light in 2008.
