Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘liberal party’

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.

No, not a merger, just some limited cooperation.

The deal between the Liberals and the Green Party that will see the Libs step back so that Elizabeth May can compete seriously for a seat, is, on the surface, a smart move for both parties. The Liberals have made it clear that, under Dion’s leadership, the environment is their #1 issue. The Greens have always made the environment their #1 issue. So they’re competing for the same pool of voters, and that pool is getting bigger every day as climate change has gradually shifted from being a “polls well but irrelevant on voting day” issue to an issue that can actually affect election results.

But will it backfire? If the Libs move left, will that just open up more space for the Conservatives to make gains in the middle? Conversely, it was arguably the Green Party that – despite a lack of elected MPs – elevated the environment to such a key voting issue in the first place.

The Liberal Party can’t afford to become a one-issue party, even if it is tempting for them to spend the entire next election campaign attacking the Harper government on its environmental record. (The ads are already in the can, I hear). That’s what fringe parties are useful for; bringing single issues to the forefront. But both parties that can govern – the Libs and the Tories – need to campaign on a range of issues representing the broad spectrum of governmental responsibilities. Anything less simply isn’t fair to Canadians.

He’s been denying it with lessening intensity each year, and now, as most people assumed he eventually would, Justin Trudeau will run for the Liberals in the next federal election:

Trudeau will run in the Montreal constituency of Papineau, currently held by the separatist Bloc Quebecois. Trudeau, like his father, opposes those who want independence for the French-speaking province of Quebec.

Liberal leader Stephane Dion welcomed Trudeau’s announcement, telling reporters in Montreal that “I’m very impressed by the courage of this young man.”

His public appearances with Dion during the leadership campaign make the timing of this announcement logical. Trudeau and Dion share the same pet issue – the environment – and Trudeau’s public profile will be a welcome boost for Dion in the next election.

Pierre Trudeau was one of the most loved – and hated – Canadian Prime Ministers in history. He was divisive, but he was a larger-than-life legend. Regardless of your opinion of Pierre Trudeau’s place in Canadian history, it will be very difficult for Justin to carve out his own persona away from his father’s shadow. At least Justin has his own credentials and issues on which to run. And he has good taste in music, too – at least, judging by his guest appearances on CHOM when Terry DiMonte lets him plug in his ipod.

As former Prime Ministers’ kids go, Justin Trudeau is probably the most qualified for this job. Certainly more so than Ben Mulroney. So before we bemoan the fact that we’re apparently adopting familial political dynasties in Canada now, à la Bushes, let’s just consider that it could have been much worse.

The Liberals’ post-convention surge in support is coming largely from the left, according to a new EKOS poll:

The EKOS poll, which surveyed 1,022 voters on Tuesday and Wednesday and is considered accurate to 3.1 percentage points 19 times out of 20, showed the Liberals picking up support mainly at the expense of the left-leaning New Democratic Party.

The New Democrats were at 10.2 percent in the poll, well below the 17.5 percent they picked up in the January election.

The Conservatives have dropped 3 percentage points since January’s election, but the NDP has dropped over 7, demonstrating that the Liberals are primarily making inroads on the left, not in the middle.

Needless to say, this is not a happy development. With the Liberals moving leftward, there’s nobody left fighting for a centrist vision for the country. How long can it be, I wonder, before we start hearing calls to “unite the left” and move to a two-party system like in the United States?

Interestingly enough, support for the Green Party is actually up, indicating that the attention being called to environmental issues is actually outweighing any support that the Liberals under Dion’s leadership (and that of his dog, Kyoto) might be shaving from that camp.

After Stephane Dion’s “surprise” win, the media and the opposition have been scrambling to make up for lost time by putting him immediately under a microscope.

They’re questioning his loyalty to Canada given his dual French citizenship, his commitment to centrist politics given his left-leaning tendencies, his ability to win support in Quebec given his long history of defending federalism and attacking sovereignty. (If you noticed that the first and third points seem a bit contradictory, you’re not alone).

We’re in that brief wide-open period in politics, when critics try on all sorts of different avenues of attack on a new leader, in attempt to find the ones that will stick the most. But this phase won’t last long. It can’t. The message is too diluted. Sooner or later, they’ll need to come up with a catchphrase, a means of attacking Dion that is equivalent to the Harper-is-Bush attacks heading in the other direction.

I give it about a week.