Wow, Don Newman doesn’t just school Baird on the clearly twisted logic of the Conservative talking points, but also shows every journalist in Canada how to do their jobs. Amazing.
This shouldn’t be an exceptional circumstance, the fourth estate needs to be separate from the government and not simply parroting their press releases. This also means that when the talking points are wrong or clearly contradictory, they need to have the Cons clarify or reject them by pushing harder. So when there are clear contradictions or falsehoods, they are pointed out so people can understand. It is foundational to a functional democracy.
I hope this won’t be the last time we’ll see this from the traditional media.
As part of the CTV/Globe and Mail’s ongoing effort to do everything within their power to stop this coalition and not be responsible journalists. I ran across this wild, Harper-obsessed story this morning:
Yesterday, Mr. Harper, normally just an average orator, knocked Mr. Dion around so badly in Question Period that had the verbal combat been a boxing match, the referee would have stepped in to avoid life-threatening injury.
Umm… I don’t know which parliament he was watching, but Dion went up one side of Harper and down the other. Since, apparently, the obsessed Harper-coalition of the unelected media and minority Conservatives completely forgot about something we have called youtube, an amazing tool which doesn’t allow them to spin blatantly to push their storylines.
However, that won’t stop our clearly fair and balanced media from pushing their own narrative. A negative, fear-filled narrative in the hope they can scare Liberals away from a coalition that we Canadians actually support, and is democratically appropriate for the circumstances of a minority which refuses to earn the support of the house..
Weeks of blasting the coalition - the Harperites being masters of negation - accompanied eventually by a dash of contrition, a greatly updated economic policy and a new budget earlier than one now proposed for Jan. 27 might turn a bit of public opinion. It might discomfort some Liberals who, when they splash some cold water on themselves, will realize what a losing political proposition it will have been, under the leadership of someone they do not want to lead them, to have cast their lot in with the NDP and the Bloc.
It is clear that a significant portion of the traditional media have put their hats into the ring with the unsupported minority party of the Conservatives. We need to get out there and let Canadians know the truth about this coalition.
It is democratic, it is supported by the majority of Canadians, and it is not a power grab. The coalition exists because Harper showed he is not willing to work within our parliamentary system for the good of Canadians as a whole.
Our coalition exists because Harper decided that since our 60%+ didn’t vote for him, we simply don’t matter.
I think this is the official notice of pants-wetting.
Oh yeah, and so we know exactly the tripe they are going to trot out in the next week. Here are the actual official talking points they are to repeat over and over.
Mr. Giorno’s message included very detailed scripts MPs are expected to follow while delivering radio interviews that include the following lines:
We’re not even two months removed from the last election, and a group of backroom politicians are going to pick who the Prime Minister is. Canadians didn’t vote for this person. We don’t even know who this person will be.
Not a single voter voted for a Liberal-NDP coalition. Certainly not a single voter voted for the Liberals to form a coalition with the separatists in the Bloc.
This is what bothers me the most. The Conservatives won the election. The Opposition keeps saying that the Conservatives have to respect the will of the voters that this is a minority and so on.
…how about Liberals, NDP and Bloc respecting the will of the voters when they said “YOU LOSE“.
And what’s this going to do to the economy. I’m sorry, I don’t care how desperate the Liberals are — giving socialists (Jack Layton) and separatists (Gilles Duceppe) a veto over every decision in government — that is a recipe for total economic disaster.
But how more phony could these guys be?
I mean, I follow the news, virtually every single day you have Harper or Flaherty out there telegraphing exactly what they plan to do with the economy. And not once did you hear the Liberals, NDP or separatists talking about toppling the government in response.
No — do you know what set this off. When Flaherty said he was going to take taxpayer-funded subsidies away from the opposition. Now there is a reason to try and overturn an election— because the Conservatives the audacity to say “Hey, it’s a recession, maybe you should take your nose out of the trough.”
And I wish the media would be more clear on this point — the opposition aren’t being singled out by this fact the Conservatives stand to lose the most money of all. The only difference is that Canadians are voluntarily giving money the Conservatives, so they don’t need taxpayer handouts. The only reason the opposition would be hurt more is because nobody wants to donate to them. They should be putting their efforts towards fixing that problem.
I don’t want another election. But what I want even less is a surprise backroom Prime Minister whom I never even had the opportunity to vote for or against. What an insult to democracy.
Just remember, we are winning because we are keeping the pressure on and working together.
Whether the next government is a Conservative or a Liberal minority, chances are that historians will register this campaign as the most ideologically-driven in this country’s modern history.
Beyond the strategies, tactics, pooping puffins, powder-blue sweaters or invisible Conservative candidates, this campaign has been marked by a confrontation between the Tories’ neoconservative vision and the more centrist or left-of-centre policies of the Liberals, the NDP, the Bloc Québécois and the Green Party.
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On the other hand, this ideological narrative confirmed how divided the non-conservative parties were at the onset and how united the neocons remain. But now, with a possible second Tory minority, or perhaps even a Liberal one, one of two things could happen.
Harper and his mentor, Tom Flanagan, could get their wish of seeing the non-conservative votes remain hopelessly fragmented among four parties. Or, with the sovereignty issue out of the way at this time, and without getting into a formal coalition, Dion, Duceppe, Jack Layton and Elizabeth May could cut some productive issue-by-issue deals in the next Parliament.
With the financial world in turmoil, be aware of up coming forced mergers.
Hale Business Systems, Mary Kay Cosmetics, Fuller Brush and W. R. Grace Co. will merge to become Hale, Mary, Fuller, Grace.
3M will merge with Goodyear and become MMMGood.
Zippo, Audi, Dofasco, and Dacro will be known as ZipAudiDoDa.
FedEx and competitor UPS will unite as FedUP.
Grey Poupon and Docker Pants are expected to become PouponPants.
Victoria’s Secret and Smith & Wesson will merge. The new name? TittyTittyBangBang.
John Ivison: Oh noes! Everyone in the country has fallen under Dion-mania. So, I must parrot out the same old Conservative talking points everyone has heard time and again about how since Dion is a Liberal he must be planning to increase taxes. That should scare everyone back in line.
And many Conservative candidates have been missing in action. The Star assigned reporters to do profiles on all 47 ridings in the Greater Toronto Area. These reporters say that many Conservative candidates were hard to reach, dodging interviews and failing to return calls. There have also been reports of Conservative candidates boycotting all-candidates meetings. And all but one Conservative candidate in Ontario refused to reply to Premier Dalton McGuinty’s letter seeking their views on fair treatment of this province.
This overly controlled style of campaigning, with virtually all the messages emanating from one man, Harper, is a perversion of parliamentary democracy. Yes, Harper is the party leader and ought to be the main messenger. But other Conservative candidates – the successful ones, anyway – will also sit in Parliament and take part in debates and committee hearings. Restricting access to them during the campaign reflects poorly on Harper and his team.
The irony? Harper is right. Canada is in relatively good shape. What he doesn’t mention: Whatever cushion we might have had in the Paul Martin era is gone. Jim Flaherty gave that away when he cut the GST by two percentage points, at a cost of $60 billion to the treasury over five years. Have you noticed your GST savings? Likely not.
Will you notice the consequences of the deficits that begin to pile up next year if the global economy slips into a deep recession, as it likely will? Yes.
Jeffrey Simpson: I don’t think Dion has really turned this election around. This was just the Liberal brand standing on its own, compounded with Harper making some unfathomable mistakes. [Ed Note: I'd have to say this is the most level-headed discussion of the last few days of excitement.]
Lorne Gunter: I cannot believe that Stephane Dion and Jack Layton are using the public’s fear of losing their life savings to try and garner votes by promising to help them out during a recession. The economy isn’t that bad in Canada, ignoring the 2000 point drop in the TSX over the last week. The fundamentals of our economy are strong, right?
Tom Brodbeck: I came up with a cute story including a demographic for whom the carbon tax will have no noticeable effect. Therefore, I conclude the carbon tax won’t reduce reductions whatsoever. A small family paying heating bills won’t reduce their reductions to save money, thus corporations won’t bother either to try and save money. Isn’t that how this works?
Sinclair Stevens: It’s up to Canadian voters to block a Harper majority.
Harper entered politics with a mission. He wanted to transform Canada into a loose confederation of autonomous provinces with the federal government limited to foreign affairs, defence and an arbitration role among the provinces.
He felt it could be done without a constitutional change. “Just a willing federal government,” he said. He even suggested there should be a firewall around Alberta, his province of choice.
To execute his plans, he needed a majority in Parliament.
Steven Patten, associate professor of political science at the University of Alberta, states in a new book, The Harper Record: “He hasn’t wandered far from the ideological beliefs that first motivated him to engage in politics. He surrounds himself with conservatives who share his strong ideological beliefs and when he compromises on policy or the membership of his team, it is typically a strategic move designed to bring him closer to winning a majority government.”
Greg Weston would like everyone to try to ignore their fears of a Harper majority (a real possibility), and instead concentrate on their fears of a Dion minority (an incredibly improbable outcome.)
At some point, if our democracy is to truly reflect the will of Canadians, we will have to decide whether our party system should change, or our voting system should change. In the meantime, political leaders of all stripes are asking voters to patch over this problem through something called strategic voting. Strategic voting asks people to pretend there are only two parties, even when there are four or more on the ballot.
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If you go to the polls next Tuesday contemplating a vote for somebody you do not like, just to stop someone who you believe is worse, please take a moment to think how much better our democracy could be.
Make this the last election where your choice will be ruled by negatives, instead of by a positive choice.
James Travers points out how vote splitting is naturally incorporated into party strategy and how it can cause incredibly random and undesired results (like a Harper majority).
Every party is counting on the splits to help them somewhere, somehow. Conservatives, after squandering their Quebec edge, have the most to gain where it still matters most, Ontario and B.C. With a solid base and sophisticated database they are best positioned to take maximum advantage of minimal shifts, notably in Ontario’s 905 and 519 area code ridings.
Where Conservatives are poised to be opportunists, Liberals are vulnerable. Stéphane Dion’s much improved performance this week, including a confident speech to the joint Empire and Canadian clubs in Toronto yesterday, helps re-establish Liberals as the Conservative alternative and protect against NDP and Green vote poaching. It doesn’t fix a strategy that isn’t effectively focusing on ridings where the splits will be decisive.
That tilts the election toward Conservatives and is a critical error in a campaign where so few ballots can mean so much. If an 11th hour blitz scatters the vote to his party’s political left, if Harper can bring himself to connect emotionally with deeply worried Canadians, Conservatives will regain some grip on a victory now slipping away.
Hicks on Six does a good job at explaining the credit crisis in a clear manner.
What’s the difference between a stockbroker and a pigeon?
A pigeon can still leave a deposit on a Porsche.
Tom Brodbeck seems to fail to realize that giving a party $1.25 per vote is not a “tax” but rather a way of supporting the party you vote for, regardless if they get elected or not. By his standards, Manitobans are paying a undemocratic “MP tax” for parliamentary members they didn’t directly elect (They pay a lot more in MP salaries than by this new $1.25/vote plan). Either his math is pretty messed up or Manitoba is in a worse state than I think when he says that $1.25 per vote will somehow prevent families from putting food on their table. [Ed note: $1.25 means a maximum of $1.25 per person who can vote in the province every election (ie. four or five years).]
Haroon Siddiqui: Democracy and transparency is finally catching up to Harper as Canadians see what he is really like.
Harper is in trouble in hard-hit Ontario, which is losing manufacturing jobs and $20 billion a year in money transfers from Ottawa. But he doesn’t seem to care. Worse, his finance minister, Jim Flaherty – ironically, an Ontarian – has been badmouthing the province as a bad place to invest.
Besides having a tin ear, Harper has cornered himself politically. Having said that the fundamentals of the economy are strong, Harper cannot now say they are not. He is right to argue that our economy is sounder than America’s. But it is not recession-proof, as he implies.
We are at a critical juncture in Canadian history. The 14th United Nations Conference of Parties to the Climate Change Convention will be held in December in Poland and COP15 will follow next December in Copenhagen. It is at this latter meeting that a post-Kyoto global warming treaty will be proposed. It is critical that Canada play a constructive role in negotiations leading up to this event.
In the last two years, Canada has obstructed international efforts to develop policies to deal with global warming. At the 2007 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Uganda, Canada scuttled attempts aimed at getting consensus on a strongly worded commitment to greenhouse gas reduction.
Neil Waugh: The Alberta Treasury Branch was caught recently with $1.1 billion of junk investments, and the executives were forced to write down $253 million, and yet…
The day began when fictitious ATB employee Kirsten from Killarney was the justification given for ATB Financial CEO Dave Mowatt pocketing $1.6 million last year - a stunning $1.2 million in perks called “variation pay and post-employment benefits” - on top of his already sweet $406,000 base salary.
You’ve gotta love those golden parachutes.
Bob Hepburn: We have too many parties that I don’t support, they clearly are going to take votes away from the party I do support, so I say they should just go away and everyone should just vote for my party. [Ed Note: apparently he hasn't learned about voteforenvironment.ca , someone should drop him a note]
Paula Simons has a great article about Harper’s complete lack of respect for our charter and country.
For a fellow who likes to portray himself as a law-and-order candidate, Stephen Harper shows a remarkable disdain for the law that orders our Confederation — that pesky Constitution.
Last month, Harper attacked Alberta’s jurisdiction to control its natural resources, with his plan to ban raw bitumen from Alberta’s oilsands to countries that don’t conform to Canada’s greenhouse gas emission standards. This week, when the Conservative leader unveiled his party’s platform, he went even further, and suggested his government would also ban exports to countries with lower pollution standards in general.
…
Tuesday, Harper also pledged reforms to create an elected Senate. If Parliament didn’t pass such reforms, Harper vowed, he would abolish the Senate.
That’s quite the threat. … But whatever our impatience with the current Senate, a bicameral Parliament is a fundamental part of Canada’s history and democratic structure.
The Senate isn’t just there to be a retirement home for senior politicians. Nor is it only there to provide “sober second thought.” The Senate is also there to protect regional interests, to provide smaller provinces with a way to make sure the big provinces of Central Canada can’t control the national agenda. What Alberta needs to protect its interests isn’t fewer senators — it’s more of them.
More to the point, no PM can unilaterally ice the upper house.
Jeffrey Simpson believes we are heading into a phase change in Canadian democracy where coalitions and minorities will become the politics of the day and authoritarian majorities are history.
Don Martin: Harper desperately drags his own mother into the fray to try to stop the Conservative support from hemorrhaging any further.
The Prime Minister admits it’s unusual for him to drag a family member into the ugly political fray, but bizarre times call for desperate measures as the party tumbles dangerously into the low 30s in percentage of voter support.
“We’re getting this criticism that somehow I don’t understand the stock market or understand what people are feeling about the stock market,” he told reporters. “I use my mother as an obvious example because she is the person closest to me most worried about the stock market these days. Believe me, I get quicker updates from her on the stock market than from the Department of Finance.”
He might also want her advice on closing a campaign that has turtled.
Naheed Nenshi: If you want to know why a majority of Canadians don’t vote Conservative, just look at Stephen Harper.
I suggest, while people might trust Harper as a leader, they don’t trust him as a person. Or maybe they just don’t like him. The problem here, I submit, is one of his own making — he has been incredibly calculating, and Canadians have seen that.
Barry Cooper, a pro-Harper, pro-seperatist, global warming denier and politics professor from the University of Calgary, cannot stand the idea that Margaret Atwood would not want a Harper majority. He believes that Atwood saying she would vote for Duceppe is an conspiracy to convince Ontarians to vote against Harper. He defends this by creating an elaborate conspiracy theory where Ontario always votes how Quebec votes, and the voters in Quebec end up really running the country, in order to hurt Albertans.
Don Martin: Harper is doing too little, too late to pretend he cares about ordinary Canadians and the incoming economic storm clouds. Those cute blue sweaters just don’t seem to cut it anymore when your savings are being wiped out.
Jeffrey Simpson: Everyone hates Dion and the Liberals and everyone really hates Harper and the Conservatives. So, who can they vote for? Obviously, no one since those are the only two parties running. Right? [Ed Note: obviously he missed the three other people at the leadership debate table.]
The illicit pot industry generates tens of billions of dollars for criminal groups - money that governments could be collecting in taxes, the report observes.
Think about that as you wince over Edmonton’s proposed double-digit property tax increase. Do you really care that your neighbour smokes pot? If you do, you poor deluded individual, does it bother you enough that you support Canada spending hundreds of millions of dollars yearly on ineffective drug enforcement?
Wouldn’t you rather your tax money go towards something that makes a difference?
L. Ian MacDonald discusses how Harper turned off so many Canadians, and likely will end up shrinking the number of Conservative seats come the 14th.
Rick Bell points out exactly why Harper is not fit to lead.
But Harper, the man who called this election to get a majority and his own way in governing, should know the people he wants to lead feel like they’re left out of the ark, screwed and not in control and not wicked.
And leadership isn’t about who has the biggest skull. A leader should be able to rally the troops, inspire the citizens, offer up something to give hope.
Whatever their stripe, that’s what politically successful number ones do.
What does Harper say?
He confesses he’s “not the most emotionally expressive guy.” Yes, we kind of get that.
He suggests, you know, “there’s probably some great buying opportunities emerging on the stock market.”
Yes, if somebody with cash comes around and buys the scraps left in your portfolio, they could make real dough down the line. The main man also says “stock markets do go up and down.” Thanks for the economics lesson.
At least, he didn’t tell anyone to eat cake.
Carol Goar discusses all of the party platforms for health issues — or the lack thereof.
The Green party comes closest to making disease prevention a centrepiece of its health policy.
It envisions a health-care system that addresses people’s physical, mental and social well-being. It would spend 1.5 cents out of every federal health-care dollar to keep people well. It would restructure medical training, curb the over-prescription of drugs and offer tax breaks to employers with healthy workplaces. It would give seniors, psychiatric survivors and people with addictions the support they need to stay out of institutions. It would launch an aggressive program to get products known to pose a risk of cancer, infertility and auto-immune diseases off the market.
But most voters aren’t aware Elizabeth May even has a health plan.
In the debates last week, Mr. Harper stuck to the message that Canada will be just fine — as long as he remains prime minister.
Yet, it is still a little early to get smug. Not only will this financial crisis have significant implications for Canadians, but we have also been part of the same culture of debt and deregulation that has driven the current U.S. crisis.
It is therefore time for the prime minister, as well as the leaders of all of the major parties, to take this crisis seriously and start telling Canadians how they are going to help us through this crisis and work to prevent future crises. Liberal Leader Stephane Dion’s promise of a five-point plan Wednesday night was a start but needs to be more ambitious and more specific.
Murray Mandryk: Harper’s bitumen export restriction is likely unconstitutional, violates a good number of our trade agreements, will hurt Alberta and Saskatchewan’s economies and is the closest thing to the National Energy Program proposed by any party during this election. Yet Brad Wall, the Conservative premier of Saskatchewan, is surprisingly silent. Some are left asking Brad Wall, “Who are you standing up for — Stephen Harper or Saskatchewan?”
It’s late, but it’s still there. Here’s the latest pundit review.
The fundamentals of our economy are strong (Stephen Harper)
Ian Robinson: Young people care about people other than themselves, still have dreams for the future (and aren’t completely destroyed by the ‘nihilistic hell that is my life’ obsession with paycheques and money), and thus don’t vote like me. I’m so glad that overall, they don’t vote. If they start voting, I say to hell with democracy.
The Province points out that the NDP has a real opportunity to take the middle ground and win big this election.
Kevin Brooker brings up the Security and Prosperity Partnership and points out that when a government makes a deal secretly, it is almost never for the public’s good.
Preston Manning, the former leader of the Reform Party (now known as the Conservative party) wastes newsprint letting everyone know that he is as much of a partisan as ever and that he thinks his successor to the mantle of the Conservatives is the best choice for Prime Minister. In other news, water is wet, Canada can be cold during the winter, and the pope is apparently Catholic.
Lawrence Martin bemoans the fact that the Canadian media gives the Conservatives a free pass on their sleazy, mud-slinging, zero ethics, win-at-all-costs politics.
The Tories took attack ads to a record frequency, running them year round. While promising an era of cleanliness, they were accused of surreptitiously engaging in money transfers - the “in-and-out” affair - that led to an RCMP raid on their headquarters. They produced a secret 200-page manual on how to disrupt the parliamentary process, then went about doing so, shutting down committees or blocking potentially damaging witnesses.
They mocked their own accountability legislation by turning access-to-information regulations on the Afghan detainees file and many others into barricades-to-information. Information Commissioner Robert Marleau reported that Mr. Harper’s own Privy Council Office was a leader in access-denial. He graded it an “F.”
The Prime Minister’s Office attempted to vet the communications of Auditor-General Sheila Fraser and no less than seven other independent officers of Parliament. The government silenced bureaucrats and foreign diplomats to degrees unseen. Its own cabinet members were often gagged in the Commons, queries to them being turned over to the party House leader, who was a specialist in ridicule. In Ottawa, normal journalistic avenues were cut off until recently. A huge government information registry was terminated.
The smearing of opponents was taken to new heights. The opposition was branded by the Prime Minister as anti-Israel and pro-Taliban and out to “screw” Canadians. MP Navdeep Bains was the victim of gross innuendo. Troubling ethical questions were raised by Dona Cadman on the alleged bribery of her husband; by the sole-sourcing of defence contracts, by NAFTAgate, by the Bernier affair. A long list of government pledges were openly defied, including on patronage and, most recently, on fixed-election dates.
The StarPhoenix wonders where all of the Conservatives are hiding.
Harry Sterling points out that Harper Conservatives are not your father’s Conservatives. [Ed: In fact, I'd find it hard to argue that they are anything other than Harris Conservatives on a federal level. Anyone remember the successes of the Common Sense Revolution?]
What distinguished Diefenbaker and Stanfield from Harper was their respect for Parliament and its role in promoting national unity regardless of the differing political views and policies of parties in the House of Commons and Senate.
Unlike Harper, who when heading the National Citizens Coalition several years ago famously said firewalls should be erected around Alberta to protect it from “… an aggressive and hostile federal government,” Stanfield and Diefenbaker were staunch supporters of a strong federal system for Canada. They would look askance at Harper’s constant efforts to dismantle federalism through stealth.
Janet Bagnall: Important fact: while only 4 people died in China from the contaminated milk product epidemic, 20 have died in Canada from the listeriosis outbreak.
Ian Gillespie visits a Psychic who predicts Dion will be the next prime minister of Canada along with many other interesting predictions.
The Toronto Star discusses the tactics Harper uses to actively mislead voters.
Greg Weston looks for leadership from Harper on the economy and all he hears is “The fundamentals of our economy are strong.”
Stephen Harper kicked off the evening of enlightenment by defining the real problem as he sees it from his privileged perch as prime minister.
“What Canadians are worried right about now is not the job situation, not losing their homes like in the U.S,” Harper said during the English-language confab.
“What they’re worried about is they see the stock-market problems.”
Those niggling problems, of course, include so many crashes in the stock markets in one month that pretty well every day of the week has now been called “black” at least twice.
Harper’s reassurance that Canadians are only worried about losing their shirt, not their home, is particularly comforting to those of us investors now suddenly looking at the Freedom 105 retirement plan.
The Windsor Star: The NDP populist economic platform of increasing corporate tax rates may not be the easiest thing to sell during a recession.
Conservative senator Bert Brown seems to be quite confused about the Canadian Senate. He complains that there isn’t a 50/50 split between the Conservatives and the Liberals in the senate regardless that there are more than two parties in government and that even though Liberals have been in power for a majority of the last 50 years they have appointed senators from every party in rough proportion to the number of seats held in the House. He sees that the senate has a job as a sober second thought to the House of Commons, but is upset that it is doing its job as a sober second thought now that the House is Conservative.
The Calgary Herald bemoans the lack of draconian police action in Calgary.
… when one crook shoots dead another crook, the result is one less crook … Not the highest expression of human empathy in any case, but for Calgarians such denial is becoming harder, and the case for draconic action easier to make.
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No reasonable Canadian aspires to a police state, nor some Minority Report world in which people are convicted upon suspicion. Yet, long before Albertans need grapple with the dilemmas posed by such extremes, they could find a comfortable balance of civil liberties with police powers sufficient to accomplish what most Canadians say they want — safe streets, and the worst criminals set to manufacturing licence plates for long enough to get good at it and perhaps even turn their lives around.
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It starts at the top. Work the police as hard as one can, but judges must be ready to jail felons, and governments prepared to build penitentiaries. A federal election is a perfect time to hear concrete plans towards these ends. We must demand it.
(Background: Maple Leaf meats released a lot of tainted lunch meat which led to the deaths of at least 17 people. Gerry Ritz, a Conservative, is the current agricultural minister. During a recent teleconference, he referred to the deaths as “death by a thousand cold cuts”, and upon hearing of another death in a Liberal-held riding, he asked if the death was the Liberal MP for that riding, all while laughing.)
Lyn Cockburn somehow finds a way to turn Gerry Ritz’s heartless comments about the Listeriosis deaths into an attack on the Liberals and NDP — All of this propensity for coverage of political gaffes is fundamentally unfair to the Conservatives, none of the other parties gaffe like this. If the other parties show their insensitivity and gaffe more, then the coverage will be fair again.
Tom Brodbeck really hates the NDP and Jack Layton, but mostly Jack Layton. Why? Jack Layton supports the NDP premier of Manitoba, but not the Harper’s Conservatives. He defends this hatred by comparing apples to oranges and claiming they are bananas.
Rick Salutin mourns the slow demise of the cultural community in Canada at the hands of Conservative censorship. He believes that grants for culture are nonpartisan long term endeavours to improve life for all Canadians. Harper believes that art grants should be morally vetted by whomever happens to be in power at the time.
Father Raymond J. De Souza believes that because the OHRC (Ontario Human Rights Commission) believes that doctors shouldn’t be allowed to selectively treat their patients based on their personal prejudices (eg. only treating straight couples who want to conceive.) then obviously all doctors will be forced to do abortions.
(Background: Harper recently stated that he believes Canada is becoming more Conservative over the last 20 years.)
Janet Bagnall takes on Harpers claim that Canada is becoming more Conservative and thoroughly tears it to shreds and also demonstrates out the hypocrisy of Harper claiming to be fiscally Conservative.
Harper recognized in his Fredericton remarks that the Canadian public is not “necessarily as conservative as everyone in our party.” He said the Conservatives would have to move toward Canadians “if they want to continue to govern the country.”
This is a tacit acknowledgment that two in three voters - a large majority, in other words - do not intend to vote Conservative. The fact is that the Conservatives will likely win anyway. But that is emphatically not because Canadians have drifted rightward. The problem is that the non-Conservative vote is divided among four parties in the centre and on the left, the Liberals, the Bloc Québécois, the NDP and the Green Party.
Susan Martinuk trots out the same old Conservative talking points about the Green Shift — concentrating entirely on the carbon tax and ignoring entirely the massive cuts to income tax.
Jeffrey Simpson searches for what it mean to be Liberal — What is the Liberal brand? — and comes up empty handed.
Charged with ensuring the prime minister’s safety, the RCMP security service has instead been forced to become the Conservative party’s armed public relations agency for the election campaign.
Last week, the Mounties were used to corral a television crew doing their job. Yesterday morning, it was about a dozen angry autoworkers losing their jobs who threatened Harper’s sound bite of the day, and wound up on the wrong end of the Horsemen.
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All of the federal leaders have RCMP bodyguards for the election, but none we have ever seen has been forced to do political dirty work like the squad assigned to Harper.
The best bodyguards in the business — and always nice to me — they are now being forced to use their authority to protect Conservative photo ops.
(Don’t blame the officers — they’re just following orders, and my bet is most are embarrassed all to hell at having to dirty their hands in political swill.)
Murray Mandryk is tired of Conservatives and the NDP telling him what they don’t like about Dion’s “Green Shift.” He wants t
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