The Top Secret Tory Handbook: What Every New MP Must Know and What Every Canadian Should Know

Nicholas Pashley was a bookseller and a freelance writer and editor in Toronto.

The Toronto publishing house of Lester & Orpen Dennys is not known for its ventures into topical humour, so The Top Secret Tory Handbook represents something of a new direction. Written by someone calling himself Deep Chin (the copyright belongs to Osher, Inc.), this purports to be a guide for new Tory MPs elected in the 1984 election. It begins by revealing the correct pronunciation of Brian Mulroney’s name and ends with a practical guide to Tory backstabbing.

Between these extremes lie chapters on survival in Ottawa, how to behave, how to deceive the press generally (with a Bill Davis primer on obfuscation), how to waffle on specific issues, and what to do about Joe Clark. Mr. Clark occupies a remarkable amount of space in these pages, about as much as the Liberals and the NDP, both of which get their share of abuse.

Like many current books of humour, this is largely a book of one-liners. Typical is this bit of advice for fundraising dinners: “If, during your remarks, people begin to screech, ‘Parlez français!’ — and you are speaking French — you should panic.” Unfortunately, for every good quip there are two or three that will amuse only card-carrying Tory humourists (not a large group, one would have thought).

Is it possible, even with generous spacing and ample illustration, to produce 138 pages of contemporary Canadian humour? There are only so many ways of expressing chin jokes, Joe Clark jokes, patronage jokes, bilingualism jokes, and John Crosbie jokes, and one may hope that this book will have exhausted all the possibilities for the time being. The reader for whom this book was intended almost certainly received at least one copy for Christmas.