Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘liberal party’

The bad news? Bob Rae is the interim Liberal leader.

The good news? He can’t be elected as long-term leader.

Well, the votes are in, and Stephen Harper has his majority government.

1. The right moves further to the right. The Tories, after spending five years walking all over Canadians as a minority, now get to walk all over Canadians even more as a majority. Harper believes – as he should, with these numbers – that he has a mandate from Canada to impose his agenda and move the government rightward. Forget the Shit Harper Did; what about the Shit Harper will do?
   
2. The left moves further to the left. The official opposition is now the NDP, not the Liberals. The same NDP who has campaigned on anti-Israel platforms; who cozies up to the labour unions; who believes that quota systems will provide equality.  The NDP is positioning itself as the de facto Tory alternative, and with nearly three times as many seats as the Liberals, it clearly believes that it is the voice of the left – or the potential leader of any merger or move to unite the progressive parties. Ironically, the jubilant Layton doesn’t seem to grasp that he had more power in fourth place in a Tory minority than he does in second place in a Tory majority.
   
3. The middle disintegrates. The Liberal party is in shambles. They lost over half their seats and most of their star MPs. They lost official opposition status. They will have to regroup and rebuild. And the common sense centre, the great balancing force against polarization, is severely crippled. Moderation is what suffers in this outcome.
   
4. A weaker official opposition. A Harper majority is a scary enough prospect. But now 102 NDP MPs – many of whom are complete political rookies – will be heading to Ottawa to serve as the official opposition. Even seasoned Liberal MPs would have had a hard time keeping the Harpers in check. There’s no way that inexperienced political neophytes from the NDP will be able to pull it off. Harper’s now got a majority with no strong opposition; he can basically do whatever he wants and get away with it.
   
5. Bloc collapses, but sovereignty gets a boost. The big news of the night was the Bloc Quebecois’s collapse from 47 seats to 4 amidst the Quebec “orange crush”, and Duceppe’s defeat and resignation. It should be good news for federalism? Right? Wrong. I’ve never seen so many Quebecers feel disenfranchised and alienated from the rest of Canada. This is going to provide a huge boost to sovereignty. I’m about as staunch a federalist as it gets, but even I have to admit that I see their point. Quebec voted overwhelmingly left-wing progressive NDP; the rest of Canada (except for Newfoundland) voted overwhelmingly Conservative. Is there any point in arguing that we’re not different here in La Belle Province?
   
6. Human rights? What human rights? With as many as four Supreme Court seats opening up to be stacked by Harper-crony Conservatives during this term. Abortion rights, gay marriage, rights of women, rights of minorities, immigrants’ rights… you name it, it’s on their agenda for attack.
7. No more funding for arts and culture. That is, unless the Calgary Stampede is your idea of a cultural event.
8. Technology and innovation? Not on Harper’s watch. With important issues facing our country around telecom consolidation, internet billing and metering, privacy, digital rights management… the only party who didn’t respond to Canadians’ concerns about internet and digital policy is the one now holding a majority in Parliament. Four or five more years for the rest of the world to advance while Canada lags behind? Will we even have an economy when Harper is done with us?
9. Canadians get slapped around; claim we fell down the stairs. We have a government who ignores us at every turn, walks all over us, and breaks the law with impunity. We get a chance to toss it out on its ear. Instead, we go crawling back to it. Domestic abuse on a grand scale, anyone? Basically, we’ve just sent Harper a message that he can get away with anything. And he will.
10. Harper plans to reward his “base”. The Alberta-native social conservative movement has been waiting a long time in minority to get rewarded for its efforts to put Harper in power. All this time, he didn’t revisit socially conservative issues because he didn’t have a mandate and knew that the opposition wouldn’t let him get away with it. Now, all these interest groups want their pound of flesh. Our flesh.

The silver lining is, it’s only 4 or 5 years. The question is, will we recognize Canada after all that time?

What does your party believe? I’d venture a guess that only a small number of Canadians who vote actually bother to read their party’s platforms… or the platforms of the other parties.  Even if we concede that politicians break campaign promises all the time, shouldn’t you know what your party is promising before casting your ballot?

Read the platforms here:

• Liberal Party of Canada
• Conservative Party of Canada
• New Democrat Party of Canada
• Bloc Quebecois (in French)
• Green Party of Canada

Then, when you’re done, check out the candidates in your writing. Read up on their voting records, if they are already MPs. Read their blogs, find their  Facebook pages, check out anything they’ve written or published. Make sure you know who you’re voting to send to Parliament on May 2nd.

An uninformed electorate gets the government that it deserves. So get informed.

The Liberal bill introduced in the House of Commons today to reinstate and entrench the long-form census, after the Tory government callously and summarily ignored an opposition motion on the same subject yesterday. But is it too little, too late?

But there is little chance a private member’s bill would be able to get through the Commons and Senate by the time the 2011 census process starts in March.

I’m not sure which is the saddest part of the story here: The Conservative disdain for and lack of understanding of the far-reaching implications of their decision? The fact that this is the first time in years that I can remember that the Liberals actually did something I can support? Or the fact that our government apparently can’t get even a single thing done in five whole months?

With Bob Rae’s withdrawal from the Liberal leadership race, looks like it’ll be Michael Ignatieff by acclaimation.

A strategist more than an idealist, Ignatieff doesn’t arouse much excitement among disillusioned and disenfranchised voters. He’ll be painted as a neo-con and Harper wannabe by the left and as a boring academic with no new ideas by the right, and his three decades spent in the US don’t exactly bolster his credentials to lead Canada.

The Liberal party’s saviour? Hardly. Better than Rae? Absolutely.

The inevitable result of the petty political squabbling has occurred: Parliament has been shut down to stave off a no-confidence vote that would have been scheduled for Monday, where the opposition was trying to take over the country in what essentially would amount to a bloodless coup.

Looks, it’s quite simple: You don’t have to like who’s elected, but you have to respect the will of the electorate. A power grab “just cause we can” is the last thing that the country needs.

Dion, Layton and Duceppe need to back off from the brink, cool off, and find a way to at least give the Conservative minority government a chance to work. For the good of everyone. Because Harper may have been elected by a minority, but that’s more people than the zero who voted for the proposed Liberal-NDP coalition.

Now that Parliament has been suspended, maybe it’s time to lock all four of them in a room together and force them to work out their issues and get back to the task at hand: Running the country.

They’re calling for his head on a platter from all sides, but Stephane Dion won’t quit yet:

The Toronto Star had cited Liberal party insiders who said Dion would make the announcement on Thursday and then stay on as leader until a successor is chosen.

But a spokeswoman for Dion said the Liberal leader would make no such announcement on Thursday and that her office would inform the media when Dion is ready to speak.

[ . . . ]

The paper quoted one well-connected party member as suggesting that if Dion didn’t announce his departure promptly, the party should move the furniture out of his office.

“How do you do a putsch on a guy who doesn’t understand he’s being putsched?” the Globe quoted the unidentified Liberal as saying.

Erm… Milton?

Seriously, though, while I think that Dion knows all too well that his days as Liberal Party leader are over, I think it’s disgraceful how he’s being treated by the media and his own party. He led a bad campaign, was the victim of circumstance, and unfortunately has the charisma of a turnip, but I don’t think Dion is a bad guy.

Dion took on the party leadership at a difficult time and dared to lead an environment-based campaign in a time when people were voting with their pocketbook. I think Dion was an ineffective leader, but is overall a smart man, and deserves a lot better than what he got.

Even he knows his time is up, though. This stand is just for the media. I doubt he’ll keep it up for longer than a few days.

(Via Damian Penny).

Update 10/20: That didn’t take long. Dion has announced his resignation.

17.

That’s the number of seats where the Liberal-Green combined vote total was higher than the vote total for the winning candidate.

Of those 17 seats, 9 were won by the Conservatives. The remaining 8 went 5 to the Bloc and 3 to the NDP.

Of course, it’s illogical to assume that all or even a large portion of the Green Party’s votes would have gone to the Liberals. Despite both parties having run on “green shift” platforms, they are quite different, and many people who voted Green did so largely because they did not want to vote Liberal.

And yet… With all the discussions around vote-splitting, I can tell you that Stephane Dion is eyeing those 17 seats today and wondering whether his “friendship” with Elizabeth May was worth it.

As for May, she probably understands a bit better how Ralph Nader must have felt in 2000.

Is a Liberal-Green alliance really such an outlandish idea?

The Election Prediction Project is forecasting 125 seats for the Conservatives, 94 for the Liberals, 51 for the Bloc, 36 for the NDP, and 2 for Independent candidates. They’ve been pretty dead-on in past elections, so we’ll see if that trend continues this time.

Voting is our most fundamental right and privilege. Regardless of your politics, make sure to exercise that right today and vote. Remember, if you don’t vote, you can’t complain about the results.

A CBC reporter was caught red-handed playing favourites among federal political parties:

A Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reporter who covers Parliament will be reassigned because she inappropriately wrote questions for an opposition legislator, the public broadcaster said on Monday.

The ruling Conservative Party — no fan of the CBC — complained that television journalist Krista Erickson had given the questions to a Liberal member of a committee examining the dealings of a former Conservative prime minister.

Whatever your politics, you have to admit that this is a new low for the CBC. Our tax dollars at work.