Monthly Archive: November 2008

This coalition that might take power in Ottawa is probably legal, but it is also a crappy piece of work.

The Governor General is not obligated to hand power to a crappy would-be government.

That was Stephane Dion's position just three weeks before the election.  I guess he was lying.

If the reports are true and the Conservatives are planning to eliminate the public subsidy to political parties, requiring parties to raise money solely through individual donations, the Liberals in particular are in a bind.

If they support the motion, or abstain from voting against it, the party's budget will be devastated, since the Liberals have failed year after year to expand their donation base.

But if they vote the motion down, and the other parties do as well, then we trigger an election.  I think a coalition is very unlikely.  But who will lead the Liberals in that election?

No more subsidies for political parties!

Yeah, it's coming tomorrow.  And more than that, it's going to be a confidence measure.  The Conservatives are going to dare the Liberals, the Bloc, and the NDP to demand millions in handouts while Canadians are worried about their jobs, or to fight an election over free money for politicians.

That's a winner.

A disease that targets white men, killing them off early?  Apparently that's a disease that doesn't need a cure.

Or so the Carleton University Student Association seemed to say.  Now facing protest, the CUSA has backed down.  No apology, of course.

The Canadian Human Rights Commission has been slapped hard by a report that it commissioned itself.  Richard Moon has come back with a surprise recommendation -- remove Section 13.

That's great going forward.  What about looking back, though?

It's no secret, of course, that Bob Rae was not always a Liberal.  The contender for the Liberal Party leadership was a member of the NDP, and indeed Ontario's only NDP premier.

In a column today, I read about how Bob Rae has not been vocal enough about his change in parties, given that this change would be some evidence that Rae would not trash the Canadian economy the way he did Ontario's from 1990 to 1993.

And then I realized that Bob Rae's long-term plans preclude him from doing so.

Many of the Liberal Party seem to have abdicated control of their own party to the Conservatives.

The Liberal Party leadership campaign had barely started, when Bob Rae blew a gasket over a Q&A session that would not be open to the media.

Many say Bob Rae overplayed it. 

And now someone is in the process of making a website out it.  Of course, the story is a bit old now.  Perhaps then Bob Rae ought to take this as a warning that if he is seen as going over the top again, there is an online presence ready to milk it for all it's worth.

Liberal Party leadership candidate Bob Rae got a boost yesterday when Charlottetown MP Shawn Murphy declared his support for Rae to be the Liberal Party leader.

But Murphy's choice of words makes me wonder just what Murphy thinks Rae is good for, exactly.

This story would be disturbing just on the count of the monitoring of people's conversations.  At Queen's University in Kingston, trained busybodies will be tasked to listen carefully to conversations, and then jump when something politically incorrect is said to gently engage in some sort of corrective dialogue.

What can I say?  it's Orwellian. 

But never stop reading an article until you hit the last line.  Besides cracking down on what people say, these facilitators are going to make sure that you go to parties.  Your religious beliefs are bothering you?  Perhaps you don't drink, and being at a kegster makes you feel miserable since your faith precludes you from participating?

Too bad! 

What the...?!

The Liberal Party leadership campaign opened with a spat between Bob Rae on one side, and Michael Ignatieff and the Ontario wing of the Liberal Party on the other, with Rae refusing to participate in a private Q&A session because the media was not invited to participate or even observe.

The Liberal Party must be open to the people, declared Bob Rae.

So when Bob Rae kicks of his high-tech Internet-savvy campaign today, he is making certain to be open to the online media.

Curiously though, only certain online media have been invited.

Remember the good ol' days, when an utterance of Elizabeth May, the leader of the Green Party, would be reported in the major papers from coast to coast to coast?

OK, it was only a month ago.

But since the election, in which Elizabeth May led her party to win exactly zero seats, in which she blew party resources on her ridiculous run against Conservative defence minister Peter MacKay, in which she made repeated calls for people to vote strategically (that is, not to "waste" votes for her own party), I've noted that Elizabeth May has been getting far less press attention.

It's gotten pretty low.  Today, her pronouncements on the Conservative Party plans to work with the new US administration showed up in The Canadian, a socialist paper of no particular importance.  And that's it.

The Liberal Party leadership campaign is off to a rocky start.  Candidates Michael Ignatieff and Bob Rae are sniping at each other over whether or not this weekend's planned leadership forum in Mississauga was supposed to be covered by the media, or if it was a Liberals-only affair.

So I checked into it a bit, and though it's hardly conclusive, I wonder if Bob Rae was right when he says he was led to believe that this meeting was meant to be open to the media.

Green Party leader Elizabeth May has been in he news.  Not because of any remarkable insight into global warming or what not.  But because of an election report in which she seemed to blame anything that didn't go well on the people surrounding her in the Green Party, and seemed to credit any successes to herself personally.

There are two versions of that report, and the differences are interesting.

Jason Kenney gave a great speech on the way the Conservative Party has been winning votes.  The secret? 

Respect.

Go figure.

I've done a pretty exhaustive search, and Michael Ignatieff's nasty comments are simply not being published anywhere else but on the pages of the National Post.

Frankly, I find that to be a terrible abrogation of the responsibility of the media to keep Canadians informed.

I can't help but think that this is deliberate, but the Liberal Party leadership is shaping up to be a replay of the final few minutes of the 2006 Liberal Party leadership campaign.

As if the goal is to replay the tape, but this time get the right result.

Is Elizabeth May fundamentally dishonest?  Maybe, but then it's not my opinion that I'm writing about.

Well, the suggestion that she is power hungry is mine.

We're a bit behind the curve here on Elizabeth May's post-election analysis.  Though most of us were reading it for the first time yesterday, it had in fact been circulating among the Green Party for short time now, and in that time, the response has been, well, not environmentally friendly is one way to put it.

Elizabeth May has prepared an analysis of what went well and what went badly in the recent election campaign for the Green Party.  I'll summarize it for you.

What went well: Elizbaeth May

What did not go well: Anything that wasn't Elizabeth May

Sorry, but I don't have $50,000 to give away, but I do know someone who does.  The people at Canada's Next Great Prime Minister are looking for applicants.  You have until November 19 to apply.

As people who have been reading my blog for while know, when I go quiet for a few days, there is usually a major technical change in the works.  This was no exception.  Welcome to the leaner, streamlined, Angry in the Great White North.

As the Liberal Party gets ready to kick off yet another leadership campaign, the lack of funds has made many MPs call for a shortened, cheap campaign.  Those calls are expected and reasonable, but are also going to cost the Liberal Party down the road.

I'll be on The Michael Coren Show tonight at 8pm.  This marks my third appearance, and my second on a Monday roundtable discussion.  Tonight I was fortunate to be on with John Turley-Ewart of the National Post, and Peggy Nash of the NDP.

The show airs at 8pm on CTS.  Check your local listings.

To the casual observer, Elizabeth May seems to be speaking inconsistently.  On the one hand, she says the Green Party increase in votes was a good thing for Canada and for environmental issues.  On the other hand, she says that the NDP is responsible for letting the Conservatives win another minority because they split the vote.

But when you look carefully, Elizabeth May makes sense, but she isn't being entirely up front about whose vote was split.

Columnist Margaret Wente has come into some controversy in refusing to savage Dick Pound over his comments about savages.

Of course, that makes her a target for the professional protester.  He thinks he is clever by proving his point by using Google to quote himself.

The latest returns for the Liberal Party are in, and between July and September of this year, the Liberals pulled in less than the NDP.  Again.

In some ways, there is no news here, which has to be very depressing for Liberals everywhere.  But when you look into the returns in detail, things pop out at you.  In this case, there is a remarkably large transfer from the riding of Chambly-Borduas, a solid Bloc Quebecois seat if there every was one.