Random Access

That Tony Clement is a political chameleon, isn't he? He keeps popping up in the darndest places.
You half expected to see him goggle-eyed and chipper, floating around in your breakfast cereal this morning, advising you that you should be eating oat bran with ground flax seed, not Fruit Loops.
Yeah, Tony is a health minister again.
He may not have won any leadership races, against Mike Harris for the Ontario PCs or against Stephen Harper for the federal leadership, but the British-born lawyer obviously managed to impress his party opponents along the way.
After all, both Harris and Harper have now turned to him at various times to handle the minefield of health, always a Cabinet hot spot.
Clement was one of the driving forces behind the formation of the Canadian Alliance Party and then its merger with the Tories, so you could argue that Stephen Harper wouldn't have been PM without him (and loads of other people, of course).
Clement is a pseudo-Mississaugan, having represented Brampton West-Mississauga and held three provincial Cabinet posts, culminating in his time as health minister in the midst of the SARS crisis.
The unflappable Clement, who always seems to be eminently well-prepared for intellectual combat, acquitted himself well throughout that trying time.
In fact, the SARS debacle was one of the factors that motivated the bilingual Clement to try federal politics (not to mention being unceremoniously turfed from office in 2003 by the good voters of the aforementioned riding).
At the time of SARS Clement said, "there was a near-total vacuum of leadership in Ottawa. I can tell you honestly that the challenges we faced in our hospitals were a direct result of the personal decision by Paul Martin to balance the federal budget by massively cutting health care funding instead of waste in the federal government in Ottawa."
The lawyer with the seemingly-charmed political life now represents the riding of Parry Sound-Muskoka after taking the seat on a recount by just 29 votes.
Ironically, he knows the mantra of how Ottawa damaged provincial health care systems with transfer payment cuts better than many of the provincial ministers do.
Now he finds himself on the other side of the divide. Expectations for co-operation by the provinces will be sky high, especially with Ottawa sitting on a huge surplus.
It's going to be an interesting place for a political disciple of cost-cutting, bureaucracy-bashing Margaret Thatcher to be sitting.
With pressure for creeping privatization of the health care system coming from Alberta and beyond, how long will it be until we hear the nickname that used to make Mr. Clement so extremely nervous?
The headline writers at The Toronto Star are probably already fitting Clement out with his own type style for the inevitable day when "Two-Tier Tony" hits the front page again.