Election 2010?

[Rifleman62]

I clarified my comment to indicate my thought that the Liberals would wipe their responsibility clean via burn barrels.

 

[a_majoor]

Speaking of responsibility, check out the list of shirkers who were absent for the budget vote (you know, that budget that does nothing for the ordinary Canadian). Not only should they be told in no uncertain terms to STFU whenever they open their mouths about the budget in the future, but their future prospects need to be looked at very closely given their actions undermine their words (yeah, I'm talking about YOU there Trudeau). Contact information is a click away on the site:

http://thealbertaardvark.blogspot.com/2010/03/29-liberal-mps-that-ignatieff-would-not.html

The 29 Liberal MPs that Ignatieff would not let do their job.
29 Liberals were absent from Parliament for a confidence vote on the budget earlier tonight.

29 Liberals were not there to do their job and represent the people who elected them to office, which is a bit ironic considering their biggest complaint over prorogation was that they were not allowed to do their job, in Ottawa, in Parliament.

Here are the Liberals that did not vote, either by choice or by being told not to show up.

Bagnell, Larry
Bennett, Carolyn
Bevilacqua, Maurizio
Byrne, Gerry
Cannis, John
Coderre, Denis
Cotler, Irwin
Dhalla, Ruby
Duncan, Kirsty
Eyking, Mark
Foote, Judy
Fry, Hedy
Garneau, Marc
Kania, Andrew J.
Karygiannis, Jim
LeBlanc, Dominic
MacAulay, Lawrence
Martin, Keith P.
McTeague, Dan
Murphy, Brian
Murphy, Shawn
Murray, Joyce
Pacetti, Massimo
Patry, Bernard
Regan, Geoff
Sgro, Judy
Silva, Mario
Russell, Todd
Trudeau, Justin

By being absent, these 29 Liberals allowed this motion: "That this House approve in general the budgetary policy of the government. (Ways and Means No. 1)" to pass 142-132 even though Michael Ignateff and the Liberals have stated that the budget is bad for Canada and they disagree with it. The Liberals are again playing games rather than doing their jobs or providing a real alternative.

Contact information is linked to names of the 29 Liberal MPs. Feel free to email, or call and ask them if Ignatieff forbid them from doing their jobs and representing you, or if it was their choice for them not to do their jobs.

Feel free to let us all know the responses.

(For some added fun ask them what was their biggest complaint against prorogation.)

 

[a_majoor]

An interesting scenario plays out here:

http://pragmatictory.blogspot.com/2010/03/how-deep-are-liberal-divisions.html

How deep are the Liberal divisions?

I am beginning to sense that there are deeper divisions within the Liberal Party than has been made public. They are moving forward with complaints that cast a pox on the previous Liberal Government, that actually highlights negligence of the previous administration. Perhaps the strategists are willing to throw Paul Martin under the bus because his life is out of politics, but how about the ten or so current sitting Liberal MPs who sat in cabinet from 2002-2005? I have yet to hear any rebuttal from these former cabinet ministers as to why they would not have included a monitoring mechanism if they were fully aware of the possibility of torture.

Of the people with the most to lose when we learn more of their incompetence, what proportion are in the Rae camp and how many are in he Iggy Camp? If Bob Rae were feeling spontaneously ambitious in light of Iggy's personal polling numbers, what would be the most likely and least damaging way to replace him? Probably losing an election. I wouldn't think there would be an easy harmless way to replace Iggy without a lost election, unless you could force him to resign which I doubt he's agree to do. Ergo, I suspect some of the driving force behind pushing a losing issue is specifically to lose under the assumption that the scandal diminishes the probability of a Tory majority. Get an election and if it is a Tory minority, Iggy steps down, former NDP Premier Bob Rae steps up and forms a coalition with his former party to defeat the throne speech and ask the Governor General to form Government.

Keith Martin, a sitting Liberal, was the parliamentary secretary for Bill Graham Minister of Defense. I bet you Keith Martin knows a whole lot about what happened. Should Keith have taken the initiative to constantly remind Billy the Graham that they should address torture allegations when drafting a prisoner transfer agreement? John McCallum has probably forgotten more than I'll ever know, but he likely has immunity among his colleagues because he knows where all the proverbial bodies are buried. Bill Graham can't like getting all these interview requests. Is anyone in caucus still loyal to Martin or Graham, or has that loyalty faded into the Rae and Ignatieff camps?

Was the deal that persuaded Rae to capitulate from the leadership race after the fall of Dion an agreement that Iggy gets one election, and if he loses Bob gets to take over? I don't doubt Bob Rae's ambition. Like Iggy, Rae joined the Liberal Party because he thought he could be Prime Minister. Time will tell how this plays out, but if I end up being right, I will be sure to remind you. If the next election were to produce another Tory minority, I would be willing to wager a very large sum of money that the throne speech would not pass.

 

[a_majoor]

The title belies the thrust of the argument, but this piece by Paul Wells has very interesting insight into how the CPC is preparing the battlespace for a 2010 and subsequent elections. Reading closely, the Harper team is fighting an insurgency against the arrayed forces and institutions of "Progressiveism", and are winning the Low Intensity Conflict quite handily.

To pull the analogy farther out of shape, while the CPC is comfortable in the first two stages of a Maoist revolutionary war (beginning by establishing a "revolutionary base area". As they grow in power, they enter stage two, establishe other revolutionary base areas and spread their influence through the surrounding countryside, where they may become the governing power and gain popular support through such programmes as criminal justice reform),  they are much less effective(for now) in prosecuting the third stage (building their own forces for a frontal confrontation with the established power).

http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/03/19/harper%E2%80%99s-hard-right-turn/print/

Harper’s hard right turn
Mar 19, 2010 by Paul Wells

It says in all the papers the well has run dry. The commentators keep writing that Canadian conservatism has died on the vine, that four years into his reign of tactical obsession and fiscal profligacy, Stephen Harper has forgotten why he ever went into politics.

“Where’s the big, strategic agenda for the next election?” John Ivison quoted a senior Conservative in the National Post. “I haven’t found one yet.” In the same paper, Terence Corcoran ran a string of columns identifying programs the feds should cut, because Harper seems unwilling to do the work himself. And Andrew Coyne delivered his annual post-budget verdict of despair and mourning. “Those Conservative faithfuls who have been hanging on all these years, in the hopes that, eventually, someday, with one of these budgets, this government would start to act like conservatives, must now understand that that is not going to happen. Conservatism is not just dead but, it appears, forgotten.”

But it’s a funny thing. If Canadian conservatism is dead, somebody forgot to tell Canadian conservatives.

Earlier this month, the Crowne Plaza hotel in downtown Ottawa played host to two consecutive conferences, a small one by the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada followed by a big one by the Manning Centre for Building Democracy. Both were well attended by current and former ministers, employees and strategists of the Harper government. Both drew energetic crowds of activists and ordinary people. Both gave free rein to an unabashed social conservatism that is rarely mentioned, and even less frequently championed, by even prominent fiscal conservatives in the big papers and magazines. And the mood at both gatherings was overwhelmingly optimistic, because the kind of conservatism that appeals to these organizations is demonstrably on the march in Ottawa and across Canada.

Look at the victories in only the past few months. At the quasi-governmental agency Rights and Democracy, a Harper-appointed board majority comprising unequivocal supporters of Israel’s Likud government and evangelical Christian social activists began firing employees left over from an earlier, more secular regime.

Harper announced, in the vaguest terms, a new plan to make women and children overseas the focus of Canada’s development assistance. When Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff insisted that such programs include funding for contraceptives and abortion, as they have consistently done under past Liberal and Conservative governments, Conservative MP Shelly Glover said no such schemes would be funded in the future. Bev Oda, the minister for CIDA, backed her up. When Ignatieff pushed back, he wound up on the front page of the Catholic Register newspaper next to the headline, “Ignatieff Urges Abortion for World’s Poor.”

In Winnipeg, the Christian charity Youth for Christ managed to secure $3.2 million in federal infrastructure stimulus funding toward building an $11.5-million community centre in one of the city’s toughest neighbourhoods. Even without provincial support, which is usually sought for these stimulus projects, the Youth for Christ centre looks set to go ahead. NDP MP Pat Martin didn’t like the idea of government money going to an organization that seeks converts. “What if this group was called Youth for Allah?” he asked.

(The project seems an odd fit for the Infrastructure Stimulus Fund, whose website says it will prefer “construction-ready” projects that can “be built during the 2009 and 2010 construction seasons.” Youth for Christ declined to answer questions from on how quickly construction can begin and when it can be completed. However, a spokesman for John Baird, who is responsible for the infrastructure program, said Youth for Christ is committed to finish by March 31 next year—just inside the fund’s final deadline.)

In Vancouver, the Insite safe-injection site for heroin addicts, which was once championed by federal Liberals like Allan Rock and Ken Dryden, learned Harper will appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada in his long-running legal battle to shut the centre down.
Harper’s hard right turn

And throughout the two-month period of Parliament’s prorogation, Justice Minister Rob Nicholson played a running blame game with Liberals over the slow progress of Conservative bills that would toughen penalties for a wide range of offences. Nicholson blamed the Liberals for stalling the bills. Each time, Liberal senators and MPs hurried to the nearest microphone to insist they shared the Conservatives’ punitive philosophy and were, in fact, in a greater hurry than the Conservatives to pass the bills. It was an odd dynamic. The Liberals (and often the NDP) were at pains to give the Conservatives free rein to replace rehabilitation with punishment as a cornerstone of Canadian criminal justice.

Taken together, all this news gives heart to Canadian conservatives who vote on other matters besides budget balance. Of course, some of the biggest fights of old—over abortion, gay marriage, the death penalty—remain far outside the bounds of ordinary political debate in Canada. Social conservatives have had to content themselves with incremental victory. But it had been many years since they could expect even that. Conservatives who vote on faith, family and criminal justice felt so left out by Brian Mulroney’s governments that millions of them fled to Reform and smaller groups like the Christian Heritage party. Now they are back, rubbing elbows with power, not always running the show but never ignored. They have not had so much good news from Ottawa in half a century.

The Manning Centre’s annual networking conference, organized by Reform party founding leader Preston Manning, ran a crowded exhibition hall. Firearms activists from the new Canadian Firearms Institute stood cheek by jowl with representatives of Dr. Charles McVety’s Canada Family Action Coalition (“founded in early 1997 with a vision to see Christian principles restored in Canada”) and campaign strategy consultancies run by former Conservative campaign officials. One, Responsive Management Group, tells potential clients that it “works exclusively with right-of-centre campaigns to design and execute integrated programs that use direct mail, the telephone and online tools to build relationships that deliver results for our clients.” It boasts that it has helped elect over 400 conservative candidates and raised $75 million for their campaigns. The group’s founder, Michael Davis, won a Manning Centre Pyramid Award for Political Technology at the conference.

Earlier at the Institute of Marriage and Family gathering, a few dozen attendees listened to Miriam Grossman, a U.S. physician and author of You’re Teaching My Child What?: A Physician Exposes the Lies of Sex Ed and How They Harm Your Child. “When sexual freedom reigns, sexual health suffers,” she told the audience sternly. (Dave Quist, the institute’s executive director and a former federal Conservative candidate, says the organization is the policy branch of the fundamentalist Christian group Focus on the Family Canada. And while Quist’s group is notionally secular, it knows what kind of message it likes to hear.)

Then Mike Savage, the burly Liberal MP for Dartmouth-Cole Harbour, N.S., debated Diane Finley, the minister of human resources and skills development, on family policy. Savage is a friendly and plain-spoken fellow whose corny jokes about Sidney Crosby’s lost hockey stick drew ready laughter, but he didn’t stand a chance debating this issue in front of this crowd. Finley was defending the Universal Child Care Benefit, which delivers taxable $100 monthly cheques to every Canadian parent to care for each child under 6. Savage was defending some approximation of Paul Martin’s 2005 national child care program, which would pay for daycare centres for a smaller number of the nation’s children.

A man in the audience asked Savage why parents should pay into such a program through their taxes if they were going to raise their own children at home. “I know a lot of people feel that way,” Savage said, helplessly. “A lot of people felt that way about universal health care in Canada. I think we’ll be a stronger society when we have a national system of early learning and child care. And there’s no question that it will benefit some families more than others. But that’s your choice.”

Finley, by contrast, was in her element. She quoted the institute’s own research on child-rearing preferences chapter and verse. It’s true that $100 a month doesn’t pay for luxury, she said, but sometimes folks just need to buckle down. “You know, parents need to make choices every single day. And we say that, well, they can’t afford not to have both work. In some cases that’s absolutely true. In other cases it’s because parents have chosen a lifestyle.” She pronounced the last word the way somebody else might pronounce “pestilence.”

“When I grew up, we had one phone in the house, no extensions. It also functioned as the business phone. We had one car, we had one black and white television, no cellphone, no dishwasher, no microwave. No computer, no Internet. A lot of families expect that they should have all of those now. But I’ve met a lot of people, particularly in my riding, who tell me, ‘No, we don’t need all of those electronic things. What we need is time with our family.’ ” The audience applauded warmly.

In the crowd I spotted a fellow who sometimes does strategy work for the Harper Conservatives. I took him aside to ask about the contrast between the ink-stained fiscal conservatives of the press, who see so little to redeem this government, and the social conservative grassroots.

“The days of winning on economic conservatism are over,” the Conservative adviser told me. “No real conservative government is going to win without having a significant portion of our agenda on social issues.”

An election run on free trade, deficit reduction, tax cuts and productivity is one where any of the major national parties can appeal to voters who care about those issues—certainly the Liberals, under Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin or Michael Ignatieff, perhaps even one day the NDP. “If we have an election about deficits, it’s going to be, do we get rid of them in three years or four years? It’s not going to be, do we get rid of deficits or not?”

But social conservatism offers Harper what he has always coveted: a sharply divided electorate where he owns a sizable chunk of the voters and the other parties fight over what’s left. My interlocutor reminded me that social conservatism is not always, or even often, an explicit appeal to religious values, because Harper sees social conservatism as a set of values that can reach voters across and beyond denominational boundaries, but simply a constant appeal to “education, children’s welfare, family—the institutional foundations of our society.”

In this context, the debate between Savage and Finley wasn’t of merely anecdotal interest, the adviser said. “This is the future of conservatism. This is an absolutely fundamental question: do we take children out of homes so they can be raised by the state, or do we put money into homes so parents can raise them?”

It has been habitual in Liberal campaigns since 2000, when Jean Chrétien shut down the Canadian Alliance under Stockwell Day, to deliver dark warnings about a Conservative “hidden agenda” at odds with Canadian progressive values. This has been getting harder for two reasons. First, very little about what Harper is doing is hidden. Second, much of it is solidly in line with the values of millions of Canadians. Not the ones who used to be in power, to be sure. Just the ones who support this government.

For many years, Harris Decima pollster Allan Gregg has asked respondents whether they consider themselves conservatives, liberals or centrists, and he’s also asked them how they vote. In recent years, he told the Manning Centre conference, the number of self-identified conservatives has been growing. But what’s almost more interesting is that the political allegiance of self-identified centrists has shifted, too. In 1997, 41 per cent of centrists voted for the Chrétien Liberals. In 2008, 48 per cent voted for the Harper Conservatives. Two things have happened. As the population ages and is buffeted by polarizing events like the struggle against international terrorism, the centre has shifted rightward. And the Harper Conservatives have pushed the Liberals, sometimes with their hearty co-operation, off-centre.

Gregg found that 89 per cent of respondents, nearly everyone, agrees that “nothing is more important than family.” Sixty-seven per cent agree that “marriage is, by definition, between a man and a woman,” 60 per cent that “abortion is morally wrong.”

For as long as he’s been observing politics, many of them as a pollster for Progressive Conservative leaders Joe Clark and Brian Mulroney, Gregg has watched conservatives argue about whether to satisfy an activist base or reach out to a broader, less partisan coalition. Clark and Mulroney opted for the latter and their party did not long survive the fragmentation that ensued. The former strategy has its dangers, too: Conservatives could “set a ceiling on their support,” a real concern to Harper as he consistently falls short of electoral majorities. But while the debate has been going on, “the centre has moved to become more conservative,” Gregg said. So a strategy of explicit appeal to social conservatives is “much more available than it used to be.”

You know who has provided the most elaborate analysis of that phenomenon? Stephen Harper. He delivered it in private, at a closed-door meeting of the conservative social group Civitas in April 2003, but a month later he published it in the now-defunct Citizens Centre Report magazine. Rereading it in the context of current politics is an uncanny experience.

Speaking as the new leader of a Canadian Alliance that had not yet merged with Peter Mackay’s Progressive Conservatives, Harper argued that “on a wide range of public policy questions—including foreign affairs and defence, criminal justice and corrections, family and child care, and health care and social services—social values are increasingly the really big issues.”

First, he said, “Conservatives have to give much higher place to confronting threats posed by modern liberals” to the family, a “building block of our society.” That meant Conservatives must push hard on such issues as “banning child pornography, raising the age of sexual consent, providing choice in education and strengthening the institution of marriage.”

Harper then laid out guidelines for choosing issues to fight on. First, the issues “should not be denominational, but should unite social conservatives of different denominations and even different faiths. It also helps when social conservative concerns overlap those of people with a more libertarian orientation.”

Second, gains would have to be slow and incremental. Third, “rebalancing means there will be changes to the composition of the conservative coalition.” “Old Conservatives” like Joe Clark might leave, as Clark soon did. But “many traditional Liberal voters, especially those from key ethnic and immigrant communities, will be attracted to a party with strong traditional views of values and family. This is similar to the phenomenon of the ‘Reagan Democrats’ in the United States.” It is no coincidence—it is a keystone of Harper’s strategy—that perhaps his closest cabinet ally is Jason Kenney, a devout Catholic and former federal Liberal in his student days who has been responsible for ethnic outreach since long before he became immigration minister.

Because it is incremental, Harper’s social project is not close to being done. For next steps, many conservatives are turning to Fearful Symmetry: The Fall and Rise of Canada’s Founding Values, a new book by Brian Lee Crowley, an economist and founder of the new Macdonald-Laurier Institute. Crowley does not regard himself as a social conservative. But many who do see themselves that way like what he’s saying.

To caricature a complex argument, Crowley says the modern welfare state has overextended itself, is unsustainable, and causes more harm than good to institutions like the family. These trends will only get worse when an aging population sharply increases the cost of delivering most social programs. One size can no longer fit all. Social services will have to be narrowly aimed at those who need them most, and delivered only as long as recipients are willing to improve their behaviour by attending to their family, keeping or seeking a job, and so on. Government is no good at any of that and, in the opinion of most, shouldn’t try.

“It is precisely for this reason, in my view, that we have seen in both the United States and the United Kingdom a growing use of the private sector, including the not-for-profit and so-called faith-based charities, for the delivery of social services,” Crowley writes. “Such private agencies may be more demanding of their clientele and expect more in the way of improvements in behaviour.”

Crowley’s book was published last autumn. It seems to have been barely one step ahead of the news. This month’s Throne Speech contained a single line saying the government “will look to innovative charities and forward-thinking private-sector companies to partner on new approaches to many social challenges.”

Such charities and companies were much in evidence at the Manning Centre conference. The changes Crowley anticipates are expected and embraced by social conservatives. Meanwhile, the federal Liberals are still defending policies from five years ago, policies Harper has taken pains to ensure future federal governments won’t be able to afford, with his GST cuts and his massive cash transfers to the provinces. If the Liberals cannot begin to make a case for a return to larger, more activist—and more expensive—state-run social welfare, then Stephen Harper’s social conservative revolution will only accelerate.

 

[Kirkhill]

....I think we’ll be a stronger society when we have .........

per MP Mike Savage above.

And therein we find, yet again, the ultimate expression of the left wing ideology: the communal enterprise.  Despite his later assertion, it is not about the individual and choice.

 

[GAP]

Hébert: Will Speaker's ruling on detainees spark election?
Article Link
By Chantal Hébert National Columnist

Over his nine years as Speaker of the House of Commons, Peter Milliken has ruled on hundreds of points of privilege but none of his many decisions falls in the same high-stakes category as the ruling he will soon have to render as part of the latest battle of wills between the opposition parties and Stephen Harper's minority government.

As Milliken – a lifelong student of Parliament – is well aware, his verdict on the handling of the documents pertaining to the Afghan detainees issue is bound for the history books.

It will almost certainly come to the attention of the Supreme Court and it also could set off an election campaign.

If he rules that the government is within its rights to ignore a House order to hand over the documents until they have been vetted by an outside party of its choice, Milliken will have clipped the wings of Parliament in a way that stands to accelerate its current decline into irrelevancy.

The executive powers of the government will have been reinforced for all time at the expense of Parliament.

But if he rules in favour of the opposition and orders the government to find a process that allows parliamentarians to be the judges of the balance between national security and accountability, the Speaker could set the ground for a spring election.

The opposition parties and, in particular, the Liberals are adamant that they are not seeking a snap campaign. But the matter is increasingly out of their hands and into those of the Speaker and, eventually, the Prime Minister.

No one who watched Harper in action over the time of the 2008 parliamentary crisis doubts that he would be sorely tempted to take his latest conflict with the minority Parliament to the people rather than bow to the opposition and the Speaker's will.

A campaign triggered by this showdown would stack a prime minister wrapped in the Maple Leaf flag and claiming that it is standing on guard for national security and the Canadian military against three opposition parties waving the more virtual standard of parliamentary democracy.

The last thing Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff needs is to spend his first campaign fending off Conservative assertions that he would be willing to give the Bloc Québécois – a party described by its leader as a resistance movement only last weekend – an inside track on national security matters.

While polls have blown hot and cold on the election prospects of the Conservatives since the New Year, the Liberals have so far proven to be devoid of momentum. Ignatieff is not as ready to fight a campaign now as he might be in six to 12 months and Jack Layton is functioning on less than full capacity while he is undergoing cancer treatment.
More on link

 

[Edward Campbell]

Interesting (ongoing) poll from CARP (The Canadian Association of Retired Persons); thus far 1188 members have voted. Here are their views on the next federal election:

http://www.imakenews.com/eletra/mod_input_proc.cfm?mod_name=multisurvey&XXDESXXuser=carp&mode=new&XXDESXXthanks=Thank+you+for+participating+in+our+survey.&XXDESXXbgcolor=%23FFFFFF&named=F&XXDESXXbackto=http://www.imakenews.com/carp/index000432199.cfm&XXDESXXsubscriber_id=b3TDwdNR&XXDESXXlog_id=bgKkVSk&XXDESXXsurvey.type=multi&XXDESXXsurvey.id=37371&XXDESXXsurvey.directory_id=&XXDESXXsurvey.show_results=T&XXDESXXshow_votes=T&XXDESXXsurvey.q000023371=4&XXDESXXsurvey.q000023372=1&XXDESXXsurvey.q000023373=3&XXDESXXsurvey.q000023374=1&XXDESXXsurvey.q000023375=1&XXDESXXsurvey.q000023376=3&XXDESXXsurvey.q000023377=1&XXDESXXsurvey.q000023378=4&XXDESXXsurvey.q000023379=4&XXDESXXsurvey.q000023380=8&XXDESXXsurvey.q000023381=3&XXDESXXsurvey.q000023387=7&XXDESXXsurvey.q000023382=3&XXDESXXsurvey.q000023383=4&XXDESXXsurvey.q000023384=3&XXDESXXsurvey.q000023385=1&XXDESXXsurvey.q000023386=2&B1=Submit

If a FEDERAL election were held tomorrow, which party’s candidate would you vote for?
Conservative 605 Votes 50.9 %
Liberal 383 Votes 32.2 %
NDP 113 Votes 9.5 %
Green Party 83 Votes 7.0 %
Bloc Quebecois 4 Votes 0.3 %
----------
Total 1188 Votes

Of those 1188 votes, 967 were cast by those in the 55-74 year old cohort which is, if memory serves, the age group with the best voter turnout in general elections. They are the voters you need to win.

<s><i>Iggy</i></s> <s><i>Iffy</i></s> <i>Icarus</i> is falling faster and faster towards the trash heap of history.

 

[larry Strong]

"Iggy's last stand"  by Micheal Den Tandt in todays Calgary Sun

http://www.calgarysun.com/comment/columnists/michael_dentandt/2010/03/25/13359271.html

Michael Ignatieff has one last chance to shore up his position ahead of an election later this year. That is his keynote speech to the Liberal faithful, and some notable non-Liberals, at this weekend’s policy nosh in Montreal.

If he blows it, he’s done. Within a year he’ll be gone, striding the moors somewhere, looking Byronic, writing a book.

Tuesday’s debacle in the House of Commons, which saw the Liberals defeat their own motion on reproductive health, was a new low for this leader. Once again he found himself eating crow before his own caucus. (The first time was last fall, after he vowed to bring down the government, come hell or high water).

Ignatieff gets kudos for taking responsibility. Far better, though, not to have to apologize at all. How on earth could he have gone into the vote without first doing the math? You can hear the attack ad already, delivered in that smug, stentorian tone: He can’t manage his own party. He wants to manage the country. Is he serious?

So onward, Ignatieff must be thinking, to Montreal. Look forward, improve. But what will he say?

Heavyweights

The Liberals, at Ignatieff’s urging, have gone out of their way to frame this conference as a reboot of party policy. That’s why the brass pointedly told Grit parliamentarians that it might be better if they viewed the proceedings from home, on video. And it’s why they’ve invited some non-Liberal heavyweights, such as former Mulroney chief of staff Derek Burney and former Bank of Canada governor David Dodge, to speak.

The last thing the organizers want is a bunch of know-it-all Liberal warhorses, braying about the achievements of the ’90s.

So, at root, the policy conference is a promising idea. It harkens back to the 1991 Aylmer Conference, which led to the famous Red Book. It could generate ideas that no one has thought of yet. In fact, it seems designed to do so.

Here’s the trouble for Ignatieff: Canadians still have no idea what he himself thinks or where he wants to lead the country, beyond a vague notion of resurrecting Pierre Trudeau’s ghost and paying homage to his nation-building ancestors. That’s a problem.

It’s not as though there are no big ideas out there for Ignatieff to seize. There’s electoral reform, which we need more with each passing year. There’s the rural-urban divide, growing by the month with no leader stepping in to fill the breach. There’s the racist federal Indian Act and racism in the application and enforcement of the Criminal Code, which is a stain on our country’s claim to egalitarianism.

There’s food security and our food production system, which is ripe for radical reform. There’s energy — soaring demand, but no federal leader stepping in to champion, for example, better, cleaner nuclear power. There’s the environment where we have seen no effective leadership from any major federal party since the Kyoto Accord was signed in 1997.

Mishmash

There’s the mishmash of Liberal foreign policy, which seems to be that we should robustly come to the aid of failed states, unless the Conservatives want to do that too, in which case we should disagree with it.

What are Ignatieff’s own ideas? What does he want to do? He needs to tell us this Sunday in language that is fresh and not beholden to Liberal sacred cows. Or he’s finished. He will fight an election this fall. He will lose. He will resign and move on to other things.

 

[a_majoor]

The long term disarray of the Liberal Party bodes ill for their electoral chances in the near future (indeed probably into 2011-2012). The economy, demographics and new electoral seats in Ontario and out West change the ground from under them (their "Thinker's Conference" was unable to conceptualize many of these issues) and the many corruption scandals from their time in power still haunt them. Because they have a dedicated voter base who will vote for potted plants running as Liberals, they will not get the Kim Campbell treatment in the next election; but since they are posing as NDP lite, they may take a lot of damage  from the NDP, Greens and BQ; real socialist parties who won;t sit back and have their lunch eaten by someone else. The CPC is running an effective insurgency against the forces of Progressiveism in Canadian society (in Maoist terms they are now at "Stage 2"; creating parallel structures to oppose or undermine the legitimacy of Progressive institutions), which makes the job of the Liberals that much harder. I still think the NDP will be able to successfully unite the left and fracture the Liberal Party, with the "Blue Grits" having to move to the CPC or risk irrelevance.

http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/04/07/the-end-of-the-liberal-emp

The end of the Liberal empire
Apr 7, 2010 by Andrew Coyne

Going into the Liberal policy conference in Montreal last weekend, the papers were full of comparisons to the Aylmer conference of 1991, or even the Kingston conference of 1960—places of lore, where deep thinkers conjured up new ideas that later propelled the party to victory.
This is how the media imagines policy is born. You close the doors, pour some coffee, and brainstorm for a few hours, like advertising copywriters on a deadline, until a new idea pops into your head. The new idea is so obviously superior to the old that you are elected. Or, conversely, parties fail to meet the media’s demand for “new ideas” and are condemned to electoral hell.

By that standard, the conference was a failure: the only “new idea” to emerge from Montreal was a proposal to freeze corporate tax rates. But perhaps that wasn’t the point. Perhaps the point of the conference was rather to educate Liberals in some unpleasant realities: fiscal, social, political. The point, it seemed to me, was to tell them this wasn’t Kingston. The country’s problems are much different than those it faced in 1960, and so are the solutions.

Which is to say: the Liberal party itself is in a vastly different place than it was then. In 1960, the intellectual winds were blowing the party’s way. The solutions it proposed—public health care, public pensions, a vast expansion of the welfare state—were on the leading edge of contemporary thinking. By 1991, they were playing catch-up, grudgingly accepting the wisdom of free trade and balanced budgets. But against an exhausted Conservative government, it proved enough.
Today the situation is far more dire. In 1960 or 1991, it was still possible for Liberals to hope that, with a turn in the political tides, they could be carried back to power in relatively short order. In 2010, that is a harder case to make. Much is made of the failings of their current leader, Michael Ignatieff, as much was made of the failings of the last, and of the one before that. But the truth is that the Natural Governing Party is in the grip of a historic political realignment, which it is all but powerless to resist.

The only surprise is that we did not see it coming long ago. As recently as 2003, it was still common to refer to the Liberal party as an unstoppable political dynasty, and to Canada as a system almost of one-party rule. Yet that impressive imperial facade concealed deep fissures. The Liberal empire was cracking up, and had been for more than 50 years.

Go back to 1949. In that year’s election, the first under Louis St. Laurent, the Liberals took 191 of 262 seats to win their fourth straight majority. More impressively, they won a majority of the seats in every region: Ontario, Quebec, the West, and Atlantic Canada. Today they control only the last.
The West was the first to go. The Liberals’ western caucus was cut to single digits in 1957, then obliterated in the Diefenbaker sweep the following year, a calamity from which it has never recovered: 1949 was in fact the last time the Liberals carried the West. In most elections since they have struggled to win a dozen seats.

But that was not so much of a problem for the party, so long as it maintained its historic lock on Quebec. The Liberals won six of seven elections from 1963 through 1980, yet only once (1968) carried the rest of Canada. The difference was Quebec: under Pierre Trudeau, the Liberals routinely racked up more than two-thirds of the seats in the province. But the Mulroney sweep of 1984 ended that, and the party has never really recovered there, either.

Still, even then the party could eke out a majority on the strength of its near-total domination of Ontario. In three straight elections under Jean Chrétien from 1993 to 2000, the Liberals averaged over 98 per cent of the seats in Ontario. But with the formation of a unified Conservative party, that’s over, too.

One by one, the engines of Liberal supremacy have been failing. The party has been operating off of a narrower and narrower base, to the point that it is now largely confined to Montreal, Toronto, and Atlantic Canada. Worse, it is hard to see how that can change, so long as it remains shut out of the West, where the party now holds just seven seats. In the short term, it could perhaps scrape together a minority government without it: all it would take is another near-sweep of Ontario and the collapse of the Bloc in Quebec. But in the longer term, the money, the population and the seats will continue to flow to the West, whose political culture—populist, self-reliant, suspicious of Ottawa—will if anything grow more alien to traditional Liberalism. In 1980, Quebec had roughly as many seats as the western provinces combined. In 20 years, it will have perhaps two-thirds as many.

This is more than a dilemma. For the Liberals, it is an existential crisis. For most of the last century, the party was an endlessly adaptable vehicle for talented office-seekers of various stripes, donning whatever policy guise was needed to deliver itself into power. In the first half of the century, it was the party of the provinces and free trade; in the latter, the party of Ottawa and protectionism. In the 1950s it was the party of frugality and prudent government; in the 1960s and 1970s, of deficit spending and welfare statism. But always, it was the party of power. By the end of its run, its appeal was as much rooted in inevitability as anything else: you might as well vote for us, because we’re going to win anyway.

But if it is no longer the party of power, what is it? If it is now a party like the others, what does that party stand for? The party’s legendary flexibility in matters of principle, once a source of political strength, is now a liability. In a crowded political marketplace, it cannot simply rent out a stall: it needs a distinctive brand. Never has it been more necessary for the party to define itself in policy terms. Yet never has it felt itself so boxed in.

Whatever twists and turns it has made since then, the party is still very much the child of Kingston: its natural inclination, only temporarily muted by the deficit fight of the 1990s, is still toward activism. Many Liberals undoubtedly see their salvation in a return to government activism—a new social program, perhaps, or a high-speed rail line: a dramatic, headline-grabbing “national project.” But the world is a very different place now, and the constraints on activist government are much tighter.

In the 1960s, productivity growth was soaring, while the arrival of millions of baby boomers at working age provided an abundant source of labour. Revenues poured into federal coffers, and poured out even faster. It was an age, it seemed, of limitless possibilities. And even if, as we learned in later decades, there were limits, the challenge was merely to recover our balance, to live within our means.

But now it is 2010, the first of the baby boomers has reached retirement age, and suddenly the picture looks very different. If it were just the deficits we are now running that we had to contend with, that would be one thing. But it is the far worse imbalances facing us in future years, as the number of retirees mounts and the working-age population shrinks, that pose the real challenge—as speaker after speaker impressed upon the Montreal conference.

From the economist Pierre Fortin, the conference heard of the extraordinary strains this will place on government finances; from David Dodge, the former governor of the Bank of Canada, of the hard choices this will force us to make with regard to medicare and other social programs; from the management consultant Rick Miner, of the coming of an era when labour shortages will be as much a problem in some areas as unemployment is in others.

So the first check on Liberal hopes of spending their way out of trouble is this: we don’t have the money. Not in the short run, and especially not in the long run.

A second, related constraint is public opinion. People keep predicting a big swing back to big government, and it never happens. Even after the worst economic crisis in 75 years, widely claimed to herald the collapse of capitalism, there has been no surge in support for left-wing parties and ideas around the world. That seems even less likely in the straitened age into which we’re heading.
And to the extent that there is a constituency for such a program, Liberals face another problem: they have to share it with three other parties. Perhaps they hope to corral those votes for themselves—the intent, one supposes, of the corporate tax freeze, a direct steal from the NDP. But if it didn’t work for Stéphane Dion, it’s hard to see how it might for Ignatieff, whose past support for American imperialism and the Iraq war make him anathema to many on the left.

A third constraint: the Constitution. Time and again, the conference heard of the need for a “national strategy” to do X. Only, as often as not, X was in provincial jurisdiction: health care, education, housing and so on. Time was when Ottawa could worm its way into provincial jurisdictions via the federal spending power, but not only is there no money for this, but successive federal governments have promised not to do so without the provinces’ approval.

And fourth: it’s been done. Kingston happened. The essentials of the modern welfare state are already in place. Any new entitlements, like a national daycare program or pharmacare, are a harder sell, not least given the troubles we’re facing with the ones we have.

Perhaps this accounted for the general air of listlessness at the Montreal conference. Speakers did a good job of describing the challenges facing the country; they were rather less successful at proposing solutions. A panel on health care offered little but exhortations to appreciate how wonderful our system was, together with a caution that any reforms be “evidence-based.” A panel on “culture and the digital world” prescribed more support for Canadian content and emphasized the vital role of public broadcasting. A panel on foreign policy dwelled mostly on past glories, when apparently we bestrode the world like titans.

All in all, it felt more like a party playing to protect a lead than one in danger of irrelevance. It’s a strange mixture of complacency and despair, and neither is what the Liberals need. Their fate is not sealed. They are not doomed. If they are unlikely ever to be the Natural Governing Party again, they can certainly prevent the Tories from becoming one in their place. But to break out of the box they’re in, they will have to be bold.

I’ve described the demographic and fiscal challenges we face as constraints. But they can also be opportunities for the party to define itself by its willingness to confront them. Why can’t Liberals lead the way in tackling health care reform, for example, rather than inflaming public fears over every proposed alternative? To be sure, most of the heavy lifting will have to be done by the provinces. But there is a role for the federal government, in promoting best practices, facilitating competition, and assuring portability across provincial boundaries.

Likewise, it’s entirely open to the Liberal party to be the party of productivity—if only by default. However we attempt to deal with the coming fiscal squeeze, whether cutting spending or raising taxes, it’s peanuts compared to the benefits from a sustained increase in national productivity—which would give future generations the wherewithal to pay for, ahem, my health care. Our current rate of productivity growth is abysmal. Yet nobody is really talking much about it, let alone acting.

To be sure, putting the brakes on corporate tax cuts hardly moves us in the right direction. And Liberal rhetoric suggests the party believes the issue is a matter of careful planning and the injection of targeted funds for “innovation.” But there’s still time to get it right. Liberals have more room than Tories, in a Nixon-to-China way, to liberalize restrictions on foreign investment, delivering much-needed capital, not to say a competitive kick in the pants, to such important industries as telecoms and transportation.

There’s much else the party could be doing that wouldn’t cost much but would help to distinguish it from the Conservatives: policies that would appeal to the West, yet are consistent with Liberal traditions (or at least self-image). Among other things, there are openings for the party to stamp itself as:

• The party of democratic reform. How we nominate candidates, how we choose leaders, how we elect members, how Parliament functions—there’s clearly lots of work to do here. This used to be a Conservative issue. Today, not so much.

• The party of individual rights. In 2006, Paul Martin proposed removing the notwithstanding clause from the Constitution. Less ambitiously, Liberals could propose shoring up our national commitment to freedom of expression, by abolishing the ban on hate speech (the “incitement to violence” provision is surely enough) and clipping the human rights commissions’ wings.

• The party of consumers. Every economist will tell you: protectionism is a conspiracy against consumers, notably our egregious tariffs on agricultural imports. More competition, domestic or foreign, is the best way to bring prices down, and productivity up.

• The party of taxpayers. Former Liberal MP Dennis Mills used to campaign vigorously for the flat tax, complete with postcard-sized tax form. A corollary would be reform of EI and social assistance, along the lines recommended by the impeccably Liberal Macdonald commission: a simplified, streamlined universal income guarantee.

• The party of pensioners. The Quebec Caisse de dépôt’s ill-fated plunge into asset-backed commercial paper shows the perils of trusting everyone’s pension savings to one big investment fund. Why wait for some similar misfortune to overtake the CPP? Liberals are talking now of adding a supplementary individual savings plan on top of the CPP, as a way of addressing pension shortfalls. Why not reverse-engineer the CPP on the same lines, breaking it up into individually owned plans?

Oh, and one more:
• The party of the environment. Yes, that means a carbon tax. It’s a good idea, the only way Canada is ever going to come close to meeting its carbon emissions targets, and everyone knows it. Was it the carbon tax, as myth holds, that doomed the Liberals in the last election? Or was it because it was poorly designed and poorly presented? A better plan, better presented—a real “tax shift,” as implemented by Gordon Campbell’s Liberal government in B.C.—might be a winner.

That’s asking a lot, perhaps. Indeed, there are more shocking ideas in the last half-dozen paragraphs than were heard in three days at Montreal. But if Liberals are to find a place in the political spectrum, or deserve to, they need above all to be the party of straight talk and hard choices. It’s not like they have much to lose.

 

[a_majoor]

Words of wisdom, and can be applied to any election (municipal, Provincial or Federal...)

 

[a_majoor]

Having the supposedly impartial arbitrators politicized or seeming to be politicized is a recipie for disaster, especially since it makes them targets or to risk being rendered irrelevant:

http://chasingapplepie.blogspot.com/2010/05/elections-canada-liberals-and-loans.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ChasingApplePie+%28Chasing+Apple+Pie%29

Elections Canada, Liberals and Loans

What's with Elections Canada, Liberals and loans?

First earlier this year Elections Canada gave failed 2006 leadership candidates 'till the end of 2011 to pay off their debt in which they really shouldn't have. It was the second extension granted. 

Now this,Elections Canada has decided they won't probe Liberal MP Marc Garneau for loaning himself  $20,000 for his election campaigns without a written contract. There is no paper trail, nada, nothing and he gets off?

Elections Canada has ruled that no investigation of Liberal MP Marc Garneau is warranted after he loaned his own election campaigns $20,000 without a written contract.
In March, a longtime member of the Liberal riding association of Westmount-Ville Marie submitted a complaint to the Commissioner of Canada Elections regarding the circumstances of a June 2009 payout of more than $20,000 from the riding association to Mr. Garneau. The MP-- a former astronaut and the Quebec lieutenant to Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff -- and his wife, Pamela Soame Garneau, had taken out a line of credit and made two $10,000 loans for expenses on two election campaigns during the fall of 2008.

The basis of the complaint of Daniel Sweeney, a director of the riding association, had been that no documentation exists for the loans.
In a March 17 letter to the elections commission, Mr. Sweeney wrote: "I have not been able to find any records stating that the Member of Parliament (the candidate at the time) had directly, in his name, loaned, or laid claim to $20,000, plus interest, to our association."

On Tuesday, Mr. Garneau told the Post that he made a pair of $10,000 loans in the fall of 2008, one to the riding association and one to his own campaign, which were to be reimbursed with interest later on.

"There's a complete paper trail available for all of that," he said. "I cannot understand why this person [Mr. Sweeney] has decided to do this."
However, in a phone call yesterday, Marc Laperriere, Mr. Garneau's official agent for the 2008 campaigns, admitted the loans were made on the basis of a verbal agreement alone -- which is not prohibited by the Elections Act.

In a decision letter written in French and addressed yesterday to Westmount-Ville Marie Liberal association president Brigitte Garceau, an Elections Canada official wrote that all loans made by the Garneaus to Mr. Garneau's own campaign were "duly reported."

Mr. Sweeney said Mr. Garneau and the riding association should have acted in a more transparent manner.
"They've admitted that there is no loan contract that was written between the MP and either the riding association or his campaign," Mr. Sweeney said, calling the agreement "unethical and not transparent, unprofessional and irresponsible in my view."

"It's ridiculous and absurd for the MP to go into an alleged loan agreement" without documenting the terms, he said.

"Duly reported?"  Huh?  With no paper trail just word of mouth?  How can that be?

On the other hand a couple of years ago the CPC got their office raided by Elections Canada concerning the "so called in and out scheme"something in which all parties have been engaged in and is legal. But it was just the Conservatives that got hammered.

How come all the special treatment for the Libs? If it were the  Conservatives, they  wouldn't be let off so lightly.  I bet Elections Canada would come down hard.
Are there different rules for Liberals than Conservatives?  Are there double standards?  That's what it looks like.  Elections Canada biased? Looks like that to me. What I'm saying is Conservatives wouldn't be allowed to get away with  what the Liberals are able to get away with.  Thankfully, the Conservative Government has introduced legislation that would restrict loans.

BTW. Where is the mainstream media with this story? Shouldn't they be all over it? If this involved Conservatives, they would.  Fife, Taber,etc and the whole CBC cabal would be on the case and make sure it was the top story. Will Tom Clark or Evan Solomon even mention it on their shows?  I highly doubt it.
Another thing, who holds Elections Canada accountable anyway?  Time to fire them all!

 

[a_majoor]

The attempt by "New Labour" in the UK to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats fell flat, our experience with an attempted left wing coalition should have been a warning to them, and their experience shows this isn't an isolated phenomena:

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/uk-chaos-labour-lib-dems-coalition-of-losers-angers-britain/?singlepage=true

UK Chaos: Labour, Lib Dems ‘Coalition of Losers’ Angers Britain

Posted By Mike McNally On May 11, 2010 @ 10:46 am In Column 1, Europe, World News | 18 Comments

Monday was not a great day for British democracy. Up until 5:00 p.m. London time, it looked as if Britain was to be governed by David Cameron’s Conservatives — comfortably the largest party following last week’s general election yet just short of an overall majority — with the support of Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats, who finished third.

That all changed when Gordon Brown announced he was stepping down as prime minister. Brown fell on his sword in a desperate bid to scupper any deal between the Tories and Lib Dems. A Labour-Lib Dem coalition suddenly became a possibility.

However, widespread outrage [1] at the prospect of a “coalition of the losers” appears to have made the parties think twice. Clegg’s people are still talking to the Tories, and a minority Tory administration with limited Lib Dem support remains the most likely outcome. If, as reports suggest, the coup attempt fails, Britain’s two left-of-center parties will have sullied themselves further in the eyes of the electorate while gaining nothing.

Whatever happens in the next few days, yesterday’s events were an affront to the 29 million Britons who voted last Thursday. Brown was effectively forced from office by Clegg, whose party won less than a quarter of the vote and has 57 out of 650 MPs. Clegg had made it clear that he wouldn’t be able to work with Labour while Brown remained the leader, and Brown’s party, no strangers to putting power before principle, was happy to sacrifice him.

But Brown isn’t going just yet — he had one last gift to bestow on his benighted subjects. He said he would stay around long enough to try and form a “progressive coalition” with the Lib Dems, before making way for a new leader who will be chosen by Labour’s union backers and spin doctors, and not the British people. Under the British system political parties are fully entitled to choose their leaders, but the public don’t take kindly to having prime ministers foisted on them by the party in power.

As part of the deal, Labour offered the Lib Dems reform of the voting system, replacing the current “first-past-the-post” system with some form of proportional representation [2] (PR) which would ensure that the votes of smaller parties would more fairly translate into numbers of MPs.

Such a system would also undermine the link between MPs and their constituents, and ensure that the kind of backroom dealing and subterfuge in which Labour and the Lib Dems have been engaged would become a permanent feature of British politics. The Conservatives have offered the Lib Dems a referendum on the issue, although they oppose PR and would campaign against it.

Clegg, you may remember, shot to fame in the first of the televised leaders debates. His Obama-like paean to “change” gave the Lib Dems a boost in the polls, but had the unfortunate side-effect of causing voters to actually look at their left-wing policies. Far from changing the face of British politics, they ended up losing seats.

So it’s ironic that, despite their failure, the Lib Dems now hold the balance of power. And Clegg has made the most of his position, attempting to hold the country to ransom over voting reform — an issue which is far from a pressing concern for most of the British public, and one which should be considered soberly and in a spirit of cross-party co-operation, not used as bait in pursuit of a short-term political fix.

A weeks ago Clegg was the golden boy of British politics; now he seems like just another cynical and scheming politician. And the events of the past 24 hours have given the public a nasty taste of what to expect should his beloved PR ever be introduced.

Brown comes out of this equally poorly. The arrogance and dishonesty of his resignation speech befitted his short and undistinguished term in office. He talked about “stable and principled government” and “the national interest.” But any arrangement between Labour and the Lib Dems would not be stable, would be the polar opposite of principled, and most certainly would not be in the national interest.

Unlike a less-formal Conservative-Lib arrangement, a Labour-Lib Dem coalition still wouldn’t command an overall majority in the House of Commons, and would have to include Scottish and Welsh separatists and other minority parties.

Such a pact would be poorly suited to delivering the deep cuts to public services needed to reduce the national debt, particularly with key Labour ministers neglecting their duties to campaign for the leadership. The favorite, Foreign Secretary and Blair clone David Miliband, is likely to face a bitter struggle against challengers from the left of the party.

A coalition of the losers would likely fall apart sooner rather than later, paving the way for a second election. If Cameron does indeed become PM with Lib Dem support, Britain is still likely to be heading back to the polling booths later this year. But Cameron’s behavior and tone since election night have been responsible and statesmanlike, and will stand him in good stead.

It shouldn’t, however, have come to this.

Even if Cameron is installed in 10 Downing Street by the end of the week, many in his party are far from happy. Cameron delivered big gains both in terms of vote share and MPs, but running against a government that had been in power for 13 years and was led by an unpopular prime minister in a dire economic climate? He should have done better.

The key charge against Cameron and his clique of advisers is that in the process of trying to make his party electable again they cast aside core Tory policies on immigration and Europe and lost touch with traditional Tory voters. Tellingly, analysis [3] of the results shows that had the Tories not lost votes in key marginals to the anti-EU, tough-on-immigration United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), they would likely have won an overall majority.

Inevitably, pundits in the U.S. are analyzing the results in the context of the U.S. political scene and are trying to draw lessons for the November midterms. But comparisons are mostly useless. There’s no single UK issue which might generate mass opposition in the way health care has. Neither do we have the same conflicts over the size of government or over federalism versus states’ rights.

But that’s not stopping lefties like E.J. Dionne [4] from making mischief by suggesting that Republicans need to embrace Cameronesque centrism to succeed in November. Democrats would love to see the Republicans, like the Tories, detached from their base but failing to win over enough independents. However the polls, and the success of the tea party movement, suggest neither will happen.

Republicans have woken up to the fact that moderation is not an option when you’re in a battle with extremists; it’s a lesson the Tories need to learn, and fast.

There is, however, one factor which Republicans might want to take note of: Labour, with the help of large amounts of cash from its union paymasters, was able to get out the working class (blue collar) vote in northern cites where the Conservatives were targeting seats.

The relationship between Labour and the white working class in particular (although fewer and fewer of them are actually working these days) is similar to that between U.S. Democrats and black voters: when they’re not ignoring or abusing them, they’re exploiting them. But come election time they’re cajoled and frightened into the voting booth by dire warnings of what the other side will do to them.

It’s entirely fitting that the abiding memory of Brown’s first and last election campaign as PM will be his calling an archetypal working-class voter a bigot [5]. His remarks revealed his utter contempt for the ordinary men and women who have helped to keep Brown and his colleagues in power for 13 years — and still, they voted for him in droves.

There’s certainly a lesson for U.S. conservatives there: if the left stays in office for long enough, no matter how badly they govern they’re extremely hard to get rid of.

Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com

URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/uk-chaos-labour-lib-dems-coalition-of-losers-angers-britain/

URLs in this post:

[1] widespread outrage: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/liberaldemocrats/7709067/Liberal-Democrats-behaving-like-every-harlot-in-history-says-David-Blunkett.html

[2] proportional representation: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/8644480.stm

[3] analysis: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/ukip/7693877/General-Election-2010-Ukip-challenge-cost-Tories-a-Commons-majority.html

[4] E.J. Dionne: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/07/AR2010050703713.html

[5] bigot: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article7111086.ece

 

[Edward Campbell]

Here is yet another poll, this one from EKOS:

BQ:  10.8%
Cons: 34.4%
Greens: 12.0%
Libs: 25.1%
NDP: 15.3%
Other: 2.5%

I ‘plotted’ that polling data under a bell curve with eight standard deviations: Extreme Left through Extreme Right (0.1% each) with Centre Left and Centre Right in the middle with 34.% each. I then ‘allocated’ Conservative, Liberal and NDP voters to each standard deviation so that their shares equalled their current share of voter preference as expressed in this poll:

• The Cons got 0% of the Extreme Right vote, 15% of the Hard Right vote, 85% of the Right vote, 63.5% of the Centre Right vote and 2.5% of the Centre Left vote.
• The Libs got 2.5% of the Hard Right vote, 5% of the Right vote, 10.25% of the centre Right vote, 55% of the Centre Left vote and 2.5% of the Hard Left vote.
• The NDP got 2.5% of the Centre Right vote, 25% of the Centre Left vote, 35% of the Left vote and 65% of the small (2.1% of Canadians) Hard Left vote.
• That left 25% of the vote for all other parties. I did not consider the Greens, at all, because I believe their vote will collapse, during an election campaign, to 6 or 7% and a I ignored Québec/BQ because I believe a solid majority of Québecers (65%?) do not vote for Canada but, rather, they vote for Québec’s delegation in Ottawa, it’s embassy to Canada, if you like.

The outcome that I found interesting is that the ‘room’ left for the parties to find new votes is:

• On the Left and Hard Left; and
• In Québec.

At the risk of repeating something I say over and over again the Conservatives, if they really want to govern Canada, must learn how to do so without Québec.

But Québec cannot be left alone. To govern with a majority the Conservatives need to:

• Hold the West;
• Make a Big Gain in Ontario;
• Hold at least half of its Québec seats; and
• Make a Small Gain in Atlantic Canada.

To make the big gains in Ontario the Conservatives need to help both the Liberals and the NDP in order to allow Conservative candidates to “come up the middle” in closely contested ridings. This means that wedge politics, carefully targeted, riding by riding and special interest by special interest, policies and campaigns.

The Conservatives should want to do the same, albeit to a lesser degree, in Québec . Québec does not vote like the rest of Canada. It is, broadly, more left than the rest of Canada and it should be good ground for the NDP but the BQ is both a Québec nationalist and a left wing party. The Conservatives should try to help the NDP, in Québec to eat away at the BQ’s left wing vote, making the overall federalist side more representative of the rest of Canada.

Atlantic Canada will be tough. The politics that work, the old Liberal model, is to throw good money after bad. There is some, faint, hope that the Conservatives will actually be responsible – a winning policy in Ontario, where it’s needed most – and will gut the regional development (pork barrel) programmes like the Atlantic Canada Opportunity whatever – a losing policy in Atlantic Canada.

In the much longer term, waaaay beyond 2010, Québec must either:

• Be reconciled to Canada; or
• Leave Canada.

Neither will be quick or easy.

 

[Rifleman62]

Or Alberta leave Canada. Or Alberta/British Columbia leave Canada. Then see how Quebec survives which it does only with huge amounts of Canadian dollars.

No comment on Altlantic Canada. SH said it before and got in the shidt.

Time Canada got serious with the take, take, take entitlement of Quebec.

 

[Edward Campbell]

This, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail is good economic news but, for Stephen Harper’s Conservatives it is much better political news:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/harper-scores-foreign-policy-victories-in-lead-up-to-summits/article1594274/

Harper scores foreign policy victories in lead-up to summits
On funding for maternal health, a proposed bank tax and efforts to combat climate change, the agendas of the June summits reflect Canada’s priorities, leaked documents show

John Ibbitson

Despite weeks of setbacks and scoldings, from allies as well as critics, Canada scored one success after another over the weekend in its efforts to shape the agenda of the G8 and G20 summits, thanks to Stephen Harper’s ability to exploit the swiftly transforming global balance of power.

Leaked communiqués and background briefings revealed that on the issues of funding for maternal health, a proposed bank tax and efforts to combat climate change, the agendas of the June summits reflect Canada’s priorities.

The briefings came on the heels of relentless lobbying by Mr. Harper and other government officials, and they reveal the determination of the emerging Asian powers to force the new G20 consortium of world leaders upon the developed world.

The Canadian Prime Minister’s recognition of this geopolitical realignment, and his ability to surf it, may have much to do with his recent string of foreign-policy accomplishments.

Mr. Harper took much criticism, not only at home, but from Canada’s U.S. and British allies as well, for his insistence that any new Canadian funding to protect expectant and new mothers in developing countries must not go toward abortion.

A draft copy of the communiqué that will be released at the G8 summit in Muskoka reveals that the maternal health initiative will focus on “better access to strengthened health systems, and sexual and reproductive health care and services, including voluntary family planning.”

“Much more emphatic was Mr. Harper’s victory on the bank tax. European leaders wanted the new levy on financial transactions, with the money to be used in the event of another banking crisis. ”

While the absence of any specific mention of abortion services is hardly surprising, it confirms that other world leaders weren’t prepared to embarrass Mr. Harper, the summits’ host, by insisting on language that his government couldn’t endorse.

Much more emphatic was Mr. Harper’s victory on the bank tax. European leaders wanted the new levy on financial transactions, with the money to be used in the event of another banking crisis.

The Obama administration was also interested in the tax, perhaps because the cash-strapped administration recognized that it could be an important new source of funds.

Who believes any government would raise a tax and then ship it offshore, losing control over it? Any bank tax would ultimately end up as part of every government’s general revenues, whatever politicians might promise.

But the Conservative government doesn’t think it needs the tax, and doesn’t want to punish banks, which weathered the crisis without help from taxpayers.

China, other Asian nations, Brazil and Mexico also have strong, well-regulated banks, partly because of previous financial crises that they endured and survived. Mr. Harper found them ready allies in his campaign to thwart the tax.

After discussions that were described by the South Koreans as “heated,” G20 finance ministers meeting in Busan late last week agreed that nations should pursue a “range” of options in reforming their financial-services sector to prevent future crises.

“It was apparent that most G20 members do not support the concept of a universal levy,” Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said at a press conference.

What most countries thought never used to matter, provided that the Americans and Europeans were of like mind. No more.

Canada also appears to be getting its way on the issue of climate change. Mexico, which is hosting the successor to last year’s meeting at Copenhagen, joined with the Europeans in urging renewed commitment to fighting global warming.

But the leaked G8 communiqué says only that a country’s actions on climate change shouldn’t be at the expense of growth, which is exactly the Canadian position.

The G20 finance ministers’ meeting in Busan also saw the South Koreans, who will host the next meeting in November, pushing for a greater G20 role in development issues, something that was once the preserve of the G8. The G20 may also weigh in on the Middle East, Iranian sanctions and/or North Korea.

The G8 and all the other institutions established by the victors of the Second World War – including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund – are being eclipsed.

The new G20 is growing in strength and influence literally by the month, as the big emerging nations use it to stake their claim to a say in how the planet is run, even as European influence evaporates through internal squabbling and the incompetence of many of its governments in managing their economies.

We don’t know whether the new forum can achieve a consensus for action that, at its best, the G8 was capable of.

And the Canadian agenda for the summits is far from fulfilled, especially in the area of accountability – whether in actual dollar commitments on the maternal health initiative, or in transparent accounting when nations calculate their revenues and debts.

But while the Conservatives have often been criticized for the absence of a coherent foreign policy, Mr. Harper appears on this instance to have used his position as G20 chair skillfully.

On this geopolitical stage, at least, Canada is playing its supporting role to the hilt.

The media, predictably unwilling to give Harper and the Conservatives much credit for anything, will remain focused on:

1. the $1 Billion security bill for the G8/G20; and

2. (quite properly) on the vandals who will hijack the G8/G20 and turn the meetings into nihilist street theatre.

But, if, and it is still a big IF, we have an election in 2010, Canadian voters will notice that Euro-American pressure, including highly undiplomatic, indeed downright ‘unfriendly,’ bullying by Hillary Clinton, failed to move Harper of the right courses of action on the silly bank tax, abortion and the green thingy.

 

[vonGarvin]

But, if, and it is still a big IF, we have an election in 2010, Canadian voters will notice that Euro-American pressure, including highly undiplomatic, indeed downright ‘unfriendly,’ bullying by Hillary Clinton, failed to move Harper of the right courses of action on the silly bank tax, abortion and the green thingy.

This guy?

(This guy makes more sense than those other "green" things of which I hear)

 

[Old Sweat]

And what would the media do without speculation? The following story from the 7 June Hill Times is reproduced under the Fair Comment provisions of the Copyright Act:

Conservatives can't wait to 'get out of here and change the channel.'
By TIM NAUMETZ
Published June 7, 2010  View story  Email Comments To the Editor
       
Government and opposition MPs are targeting an early adjournment for Parliament's summer recess, with a leading pollster and one of the most politically savvy NDP MPs saying a fall election call is likely, possibly before the scheduled return in September.

If all goes as planned, and the government and Liberals are able to overcome NDP delaying tactics on the budget implementation bill in the House, Parliament could adjourn as early as June 18, rather than its scheduled recess the following week. Signs were abundant last week that an early departure for the summer BBQ circuit was in the works, with four committees holding in-camera sessions to complete reports on a range of bills and the House several times sitting beyond the normal evening adjournment time.

But after nearly three months of wrangling over the controversy of former Conservative MP Rahim Jaffer's unregistered lobbying and contacts with Cabinet ministers to allegedly get money from the government's $1-billion green fund, other confrontations over government interference with Access to Information Act document requests and pitched battles over the treatment of combat detainees in Afghanistan, New Democrat MP Pat Martin (Winnipeg Centre, Man.) said he believes the next clash will be on the hustings.


"I think the Conservatives can't wait to get out of here and change the channel and I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts we never come back," Mr. Martin told The Hill Times. "Sometime late in the summer or early in the fall, Harper will meet the governor general and say he's lost the ability to govern and we should go to the people."


Prime Minister Harper could be building his argument now, preparing to make the case, as he did prior to the 2008 October election, that his government faces a dysfunctional Parliament. His plea for a dissolution of Parliament by the Governor General would be based on the bitter battles that are taking place in two key Commons committees over ministerial accountability and a confrontation that has begun over whether Cabinet documents as well as Defence Department and Foreign Affairs emails should be subject to review by opposition MPs in the confrontation over detainee transfers and possible torture in Afghanistan.


Mr. Martin and Ottawa pollster Nik Nanos both say Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) would want to build as much momentum as possible after the world spotlight he and Canada will be under for the G8 and G20 summits beginning June 25—although Mr. Nanos said controversy over the mushrooming cost of those meetings could be a drawback for the Conservatives—and the fact that Canada suffered least among its trading partners from the economic downturn and fiscal crisis of the past year-and-a-half.

"That would be their first choice, because running a campaign on the economy by default aligns with the core Conservative brand, which is usually stronger than the Liberals on the fiscal issues," said Mr. Nanos. "The other thing that the Conservatives have in their favour is that it's pretty clear that the narrative in the public domain is that Canada has done better through the economic downturn basically than all of our other trading partners. We know that pocketbook issues drive people's behaviour."

"I think there's a very high likelihood of there being an election before the next budget," added Mr. Nanos. "And I think the Conservatives are going to want to time the election in synch with continued positive economic news, so I think there's a pretty high likelihood of a fall election, but that's in terms of what the Conservatives want."

Mr. Martin agreed a ballot-box question on the economy would be Mr. Harper's No. 1 preference. He said the government would obviously want to avoid a campaign battle over recent controversies that have boiled over in Parliament. They include allegations of unregistered lobbying and the use of government services and cabinet contacts by Mr. Jaffer, his wife Helena Guergis's (Simcoe-Grey, Ont.) dismissal from Cabinet over unknown, but apparently related actions, and the government's insistence that Cabinet ministers, not political staff, must appear to testify at committees over the Jaffer allegations and a controversy over political interference with documents that the Public Works Department intended to release under the Access to Information Act.

"I think Harper would love to run on the economy as opposed to scandal, the culture of secrecy or the irritants that are hounding and plaguing this session of Parliament," said Mr. Martin. "You know, have a nice cooling-off period over the summer, go to the people with some kind of a track record of economic security and stability and roll the dice there. If he lets it go on any longer, it can't get any better for them. They're taking some pretty serious body blows in terms of their accountability and transparency record."

Certainly, the kind of heated exchanges that took place last week in the Government Operations committee inquiry into Mr. Jaffer's lobbying activities might not be favourable for Mr. Harper before an election. The confrontation over whether three Cabinet ministers could appear as witnesses instead of political staff peaked as Transport Minister John Baird (Ottawa West Nepean, Ont.) appeared to lose the characteristic self-control he displays in Question Period and loudly and repeatedly yelled, "Point of order, point of order!" as he attempted to wrest control of the meeting from committee chair and Liberal MP Yasmin Ratansi (Don Valley East, Ont.).

When Mr. Baird turned his attention to Liberal MP Sibhoan Coady (St. John's South-Mount Pearl, Nfld.) the determined Newfoundlander refused to back down.

"You are trying to intimidate not just the chair, but this entire committee," Ms. Coady shot back at Mr. Baird after he sniped at her relative inexperience in Parliament.

"I've been in business for a very long time, been on lots of boards of directors, this is ridiculous," Ms. Coady continued, reiterating her insistence the committee had the right to later call ministerial staff even if it agreed to hear from Mr. Baird, Science Minister Gary Goodyear (Cambridge, Ont.) and Natural Resources Minister Christian Paradis (Mégantic-L'Érable, Que.) during the stormy meeting.

"The chair was ruling on that and then it disintegrated into this muck. Are you trying to intimidate me Mr. Baird? Because I will put myself up against you any day on intimidation factors. Don't try and intimidate me, ever."

 

[Edward Campbell]

More, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail, about <i><s>Iggy</s></i> <i><s>Iffy</s></i> <i>Icarus’</i> flipflop on the immigration issue, reported here, in the “All Eyes on Ignatieff” thread:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-notebook/kill-the-immigration-bill/article1594516/

Kill (the immigration) bill

Jane Taber

Monday, June 7, 2010


Jason Kenney is accusing Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff of putting politics over national interest by caving in to a bunch of “ideological hotheads” in his caucus who opposed reforms to the broken refugee system.

The Immigration Minister, appearing on CTV’s Question Period Sunday, thought he had a deal with the Liberals on a reform package; in fact, he had worked with Liberal immigration critic Maurizio Bevilacqua, who had Mr. Ignatieff’s blessing, for more than 14 months negotiating a deal.

Mr. Bevilacqua and Mr. Kenney had a good working relationship and were an example of how parties can work together in what has often been an acrimonious minority Parliament.

More bizarre – and evidence of Mr. Ignatieff’s precarious hold on his caucus – is that the MPs who convinced him to fold on this issue andwithdraw his support were among those who have previously hurt his leadership, including former immigration minister Denis Coderre, who quit in a fit of pique as Mr. Ignatieff’s Quebec lieutenant.

“By listening to (these MPs) he’s actually strengthening the hand of the those people organizing to screw him,” said one MP.

And now Mr. Kenney, who was poised to bring his bill back for third reading as early as this week, may end up pulling the bill entirely.

“So you know what? At the end of the day it’s all about, I think it’s all about politics on their part, which is unfortunate,” said Mr. Kenney during the broadcast. “I think Canadians expect us to focus on solutions rather than partisanship on an issue like this.”

This criticism of the Liberal Leader comes as his judgment is being questioned on another front: He mused this weekend about forming a coalition government, saying one would be “legitimate” but not until he sees what voters have to say in the next election.

There are some Liberal MPs who believe Mr. Ignatieff should be concentrating on putting forward policies that would propel his party to forming a majority government rather than musing about coalition governments.
And his decision last week to reverse himself on refugee reform also speaks to his leadership abilities.

Mr. Ignatieff had wholeheartedly supported the negotiations between Mr. Kenney and Mr. Bevilacqua. In fact, a senior member of the Opposition Leader’s office sat in on many of the negotiation sessions, indicating that the leader was supportive of the process.

But last Wednesday at caucus it all fell apart.

Several Liberal MPs, including Mr. Coderre and former leadership rival Gerard Kennedy, lined up behind the caucus microphones to condemn the package that would speed decisions about refugees by cutting appeals from those who come from countries deemed “safe.” The bill, which would have invested $600-million in the refugee system, also included a refugee appeal division.

A source said that Mr. Ignatieff did not say anything about the bill at the caucus. He simply listened. The next day, however, he issued a series of talking points, indicating the deal was off.

There is a view that professional jealousies are, in part, behind some of the MPs’ opposition to the bill, especially the issue of a refugee appeal division, which Liberals were not able to deliver when they were in government.

As well, there are many Liberals who are distrustful of Mr. Kenney and his right-wing views.

Says Mr. Kenney: “I would think the Liberal Party, if it wants to pretend to be a future government, should be addressing serious issues in a serious way, working with other parties collaboratively … rather than letting politics and ideological fancies ... override public interest.”

Explaining the Ignatieff about-face

Here are the talking points – issued to MPs and Liberal supporters – about the refugee reform bill:

Issue

» After consultations with caucus, the Liberal party has decided that it cannot support the government’s refugee reform bill in its current form.

Key messages

» Like all Canadians, we want a more effective refugee system. But like all Canadians, we also want it to be fair.
» When looking for that balance, Liberals will always err on the side of fairness when dealing with people’s lives.
» We negotiated in good faith with all parties to improve this bill, and our Immigration critic, Maurizio Bevilacqua, did an excellent job in trying to improve a flawed bill.
» Serious concerns were expressed by members of our caucus and by the vast majority of experts about the fairness of many aspects of this bill.
» After extensive consultations with our caucus, we came to the conclusion that this bill is not ready yet and that some serious issues must be addressed before it should be considered further. In particular:
• The significant changes to applications on humanitarian and compassionate grounds.
• The potential negative consequences of safe country of origin provisions.
• We believe that trying to deal with current bilateral diplomatic issues by drastically changing the refugee system with safe country of origin provisions is not the way to go.
• Unfortunately, Jason Kenney was boasting about a “deal” while discussions were on-going, showing that he was more interested in scoring political points than dealing in a responsible way with an issue Canadians care about.
• We remain open to discussion with all parties in order to improve the current refugee system but feel that this bill, even with some improvement, is not the one our country needs.

I think immigration reform is a “winner” amongst Canadians and if Kenny offers a strong, nearly xenophobic, bill and it is defeated by the Liberals then it will further erode Liberal support from the centre – some will go to the NDP but some will shift right, to the Conservatives. It could be worth two or three, maybe even more, seats.

 

[Fishbone Jones]

When it comes to immigration and the Liebrals, they are only concerned if the immigrants are going to create a larger base of voters for their party, IMHO

 

[Journeyman]

When it comes to immigration and the Liebrals, they are only concerned if the immigrants are going to create a larger base of voters for their party, IMHO

Did you just say 'Tamil Tigers Fundraiser'?

Canada remains the world's largest financial contributer to Tamil terrorism, and Liberal ministers routinely attend their fundraisers (despite CSIS repeatedly saying "WTF?!"), because the Tamil communities are in Liberal ridings.1


1. Stewart Bell, Cold Terror, Mississauga: Wiley & Sons, 2005: 70-74.