Stephen Harper Loves Pussy

Photo by Cole Wagner

Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, is a bona fide feline-hoarding kitty lady in disguise, which is why, after the prisons he loves to build, his second-favorite housing facility is “Cat Parliament.” In the mid-80s some volunteers literally constructed a cat-scale parliament behind the real one, fit with heaters, litters, and feeding troughs (supplied by fucking Purina cat chow, by the way).

Photo by Cole Wagner

Since the 1960s, hundreds of stray cats gathered around the industrial heaters behind the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa to escape the winter cold. Turns out, the cute little bastards were all the descendants of brave cats employed back in the 19th century by the original parliamentary staff to rid the buildings of rodents. Chemicals replaced them by the 50s, and out of work with no purpose in life, the cats hit the streets.

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

That is, until they were saved, given a home, and rechristened the “Parliamentary Cats” like some shitty Disney movie (but really, the maintenance staff was just sick of pulling cat corpses out of heating shafts). Stephen Harper and his wife, Laureen, have been uncharacteristically empathetic to the plight of the cats, frequently championing the good work of Cat Parliament volunteers. Meanwhile Ottawa’s homeless population, a large chunk of which are Inuit, has the worst crack epidemic in the country and valuable drug-rehabilitation programs are set to be cut by the Conservative government’s new tough-on-crime legislation.