Danny Williams puts Michael Ignatieff's leadership to the test

Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff has rejected a coalition with the NDP, and will instead lead his caucus to vote in support of the Conservative budget.

Now that's leadership!

But disconcertingly, Judy Foote and Scott Andrews, Liberal MPs from Newfoundland and Labrador, will vote against the budget, taking their cue from Premier Danny Williams.

So who leads the federal Liberal caucus?  I guess the jury is still out on that question.

Jack Layton starts attacking Michael Ignatieff

Jack Layton and the NDP are not just criticizing Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff's decision to support the Conservative budget.  They are spending money on radio ads that put Michael Ignatieff squarely in the crosshairs.

But I don't see these ads amounting to much.  If I think they're a waste of resources, then you have to think there are some in the NDP thinking the same thing.  Is that ultimately going to cause Jack Layton problems down the road?

Betrayal and Consequences: Jack Layton versus Michael Ignatieff

The Liberal-NDP-Bloc Quebecois coalition is dead!

The noise you hear is the chortling from the right, and though I'm pleased with this particular result, I want to focus on potential consequences that are both more interesting and more serious.

Who is in Jack Layton's sights now?  Stephen Harper?  Or Michael Ignatieff, the guy who just made sure Jack Layton is not going to have any significant face time with Barack Obama next month?

Michael Ignatieff delivers an budget amendment that measures his progress (or lack thereof)

Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff has brought down his momentous decision on the Conservative budget.

It will pass!

Well, not so fast.  Stephen Harper has to deliver a report every three months.

Ironically, these reports are not going to measure Stephen Harper's success as prime minister, but will instead focus on Michael Ignatieff's progress as Liberal leader.

For his sake, Michael Ignatieff is going to have to turn things around quickly, because he's already off to a bad start.

Fixing the economic engine

Maybe it's because I'm an engineer, and not an ideologue, but I'm not frantic over the budget.  Some bloggers from the right are going on about abandoned principles and promising to leave the party or never vote again or whatever.

Relax guys.  Just remember two points.  First, every engine runs down on occasion, victim of the inevitable accumulation of friction, or sometimes of a dramatic failure of an important part.

And second, when that happens (and it will happen), get a mechanic who understands what needs to be done, but who is not in love with the idea of tinkering with your engine.

Dwight Duncan gives no credit to Michael Ignatieff

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty and his finance minister, Dwight Duncan, are getting ready to cough up cash, a lot of cash, to meet Prime Minister Stephen Harper on infrastructure spending goals in the upcoming budget. 

That's because the expectation is that federal cash will be made available on a matching basis, and the Ontario government thinks that's fair.

That's very generous of the governing Ontario Liberals.  It is also very generous of the Ontario Liberals to give credit to the federal Conservatives for what will be in the upcoming budget.

On the other hand, the Ontario Liberals seem miserly when it comes to giving credit to Michael Ignatieff and the federal Liberals. 

Michael Ignatieff continues to construct excuses to vote for the Conservative budget

It's been interesting to watch Michael Ignatieff building up a collection of excuses with which to use to justify voting for the Conservative budget today.  It's important, because Michael Ignatieff wants neither to fight an election, nor be associated with the NDP and the Bloc Quebecois in a coalition.  The only other option is to allow the Conservative budget to pass, and Michael Ignatieff needs a credible way to let that happen.

I just received Michael Ignatieff's latest excuse by email.  It is very interesting on several points.

Michael Ignatieff's tough talk tells me he will support the budget

The headline sounds so ominous: "Opposition threatens Tories over tax cuts"

But really, the threat is so meaningless that anyone who bothers the read the article would wonder who would be impressed by Michael Ignatieff.

My guess is that Liberal partisans are the only ones who would be thrilled by this chest-thumping display.  But the fact that Michael Ignatieff is playing to them tells me he is still engaged in repairing the Liberal Party, and that means he will support the budget after all.

Masoda Younasy and Jason Kenney: Two heroes

This is one of those stories for which the Conservative government will be guaranteed not to get enough credit for the actions taken.

Still, in the hope that maybe things can change, let's highlight this story of how Jason Kenney and his people acted decisively to save the life of Masoda Younasy, a brave woman in Afghanistan.

Deb Frisch, the Eugene Police Department, and the Alton Baker Park rape

Deb Frisch has been keeping busy with her blog as the rest of us have moved on.  Long after her notorious run in with conservative blogger Jeff Goldstein, Deb Frisch continues to ply her trade in wild accusations and vicious diatribes.

A common target these days is the Eugene Police Department.   In this particular case, she is accusing the EPD, and particular individuals within the department, of dragging their heels in a case of the alleged rape of a 12-year-old girl.

Someone has to set the record straight.

Stephane Dion is out, and so is Elizabeth May

Michael Ignatieff has revealed his list of critics, and nowhere does former leader Stephane Dion appear.

Chuckle if you will about how far Stephane Dion has fallen, but I'm thinking about what this means to Elizabeth May and the Green Party.

Deb Frisch in trouble again

Deb Frisch is a familiar name to long time bloggers and blog readers.  She was a former associate professor who, just over two years ago, achieved notoriety when she wrote  hate mail to a conservative blogger.  The most infamous note (left as a comment on his blog) was the one in which she bragged that she would be unconcerned if the blogger's young son suffered the same fate as Jon-Benet Ramsey (a six-year-old girl who was murdered in her home on Christmas Day in 1996).

It was so over the top, even by the standards of the vitriol that many conservatives have had to put up with from liberals, the Frisch was fired (or forced to resign) and has been unemployed ever since. 

Why do I occasionally come back to her story?  Because I was sideswiped by one of her attacks on conservatives in the blogosphere.

Thanks to an insider leak, we learn about Michael Ignatieff's warning against insider leaks

Michael Ignatieff hosted a two-day retreat with the Liberal caucus this past week.  Thanks to a media leak from a Liberal insider, we have learned that Michael Ignatieff sternly warned Liberals against leaks to the media.

If irony caused global warming, polar bears would be applying suntan lotion right now.

The coalition? What coalition? Michael Ignatieff is not talking about the coalition

Hey, what happened to the Liberal-NDP coalition?  The National Post and other papers are carrying a Reuters report on Michael Ignatieff's latest statements concerning the upcoming budget, and nowhere in the report, or in Michael Ignatieff's quotes, does the word "coalition" appear.

Based on this story, Michael Ignatieff is of the mind that there will be a budget or an election -- nothing else.

So what exactly did Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff chat about on Monday?

Michael Ignatieff talks tough, but at En Famille, the Liberal Party is not talking election or coalition

In the few weeks since Michael Ignatieff was appointed leader of the Liberal Party without the bother of a leadership convention or a vote, you'd expect he'd be busy re-building the party.

And he has been working at it, but there is a long way to go.

So why is it that he keeps threatening, in very specific terms, to trigger an election that the Liberal Party is in no shape to fight?  And this is a relatively new thing -- over the weeks his rhetoric has shifted from working with the Conservatives to rolling the dice on tossing them from power.

The reason it seems so strange is that, under the covers at En Famille, where only Liberals are allowed to look, I don't see evidence of a party gearing for an election or for governance, but instead a party that has barely started on the process of rebuilding.

Obamaspam: Computers of Barack Obama fans are being targeted

I got some spam email today that didn't appear too spammy.  I followed the link to site that seemed sort of legit, but turned out to be a site dedicated to distributing a backdoor Trojan that makes your system vulnerable to being taken over using IRC.

What makes this site interesting is that it is a polished looking site dedicated to Barack Obama and Joe Biden.  Instead of aiming at desperately lonely men who are hoping to improve their performance with questionable drugs bought online, these criminals are trying get control of computers of Americans searching for information on Barack Obama. 

Reporters, politicians, financiers -- it's a bit scary.

Library and Archives Canada -- Blogs and History

I got an email late this afternoon from Library and Archives Canada that left me at a loss for words.  Apparently, blogs in general, and my blog in particular, have a historical value worth preserving.

Honestly, it's humbling.

Michael Ignatieff and the role of a coalition

Listen to Michael Ignatieff speak about a potential coalition government.  It always seems like he's talking about the coalition as a tool to bring out the best in the Conservatives, not a means of replacing them with Liberals and NDP MPs.

Makes you wonder how Jack Layton puts up with it.

Canadian Blog Awards -- Second Place

The 2008 Canadian Blog Awards have been coming to a close, and to be honest, I've been deliberately ignoring them.  But it wasn't because I didn't appreciate the nomination.  I just decided this year to not push for votes, and just let the contest run its course.

Truth be told, I was surprised by the result.

Questions about Peter Stoffer

NDP MP Peter Stoffer is in the news for having the temerity to suggest that Jack Layton dump the knee-jerk behaviour of a ideologue and replace it with considered thought and deliberation.

And immediately all sorts of questions come to mind.

Sid Ryan gets sidelined

Sid Ryan, the president of CUPE Ontario, has been on the receiving end of a lot of criticism regarding his announcement to pursue of ban of Israeli academics at Ontario universities unless they make a public denouncement of Israel's actions against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

But now on the CUPE Ontario website, history is being rewritten.  A call to boycott Israeli academics?  Never happened.  It was misunderstood.  Sid Ryan never meant it.

Polygamy: Outlawed for a reason (which few people will want to hear)

Polygamy is about to become the next great moral battleground in the legal war on marriage.  And as with gay marriage, the correct and logical conclusion on the issue of polygamy is that it is not a desirable form of marriage, and indeed, threatens society as a whole.

And as with gay marriage, I have no doubt that the people who will judge this issue will utterly ignore all of this, and decide the issue on an effort to maximize moral relativism.  In other words, the judgment will be designed to be as far from judgmental as possible. 

Indeed, it's only a religious person who cares about judgment, and a religious person is fit only to be ignored by the educated and the sophisticated, even when the religious person is making no mention of religion at all.

Canada's Next Great Prime Minister -- Not a great game

The definition of a great game is one that easy to play, but difficult to play well.  Underlying that truism is the notion that the rules of the game are consistent and predictable.

With that in mind, I wonder about Canada's Next Great Prime Minister, a CBC game show that pits concerned young Canadians in a competition in which they present their ideas for how the country should face the future.

I've been in touch with someone who is telling me that the rules are not being applied consistently or predictably.  Not only is she hurt by this, the game is undermined, which hurts the other contestants as well as CBC viewers following the competition.

Can the Liberal Party stand the strain?

Under Stephane Dion, the Liberal Party made a move to the left.  During the election, Dion and the Liberals promised billions in spending on social programs, funded by a carbon tax designed to appeal to environmentalists, while making a de facto alliance with Elizabeth May and the Green Party. 

Now Michael Ignatieff is in charge, and the few statements that he has made sound decidedly conservative.  I wonder how the Liberal Party can stand the strain from this dramatic change in direction.

Sid Ryan, Janice Folk-Dawson, and the Thought Police

Sid Ryan, president of CUPE Ontario, and Janice Folk-Dawson, chair of the university workers committee, are demanding that Israeli professors be expelled from Ontario university campuses in light of the fighting in the Gaza Strip.

I'd like to say that this echoes a similar proposal to ban Palestinian scholars until Hamas stopped firing rockets and mortars into Israel, but try as I might, I've not been able to find such a resolution reported.

But then the two things aren't the same.  See, the difference is that Hamas is right and Jews are wrong and bad and need to have their heads examined.

Hey, that's not my opinion.  That's what Sid Ryan and Janice Folk-Dawson are saying.

The ghost of Stephane Dion still lingers in the machine

On December 10, Stephane Dion was shown the door as Liberal Party leader.  Indeed, such was the rush to be rid of the man, the Liberals simply installed Michael Ignatieff as the new leader, forgoing a leadership campaign, and planning to simply confirm his appointment next May (when a leadership convention was supposed to have occurred). 

I'm surprised, therefore, that the Liberal Party still authorizing a website in which Stephane Dion speaks as the leader of the party on a wide range of issues, including promoting the Green Shift carbon tax that has been soundly rejected by Michael Ignatieff.

NDP makes no mention of coalition in its New Year's Greeting

I know the Jack Layton and the NDP are supposed to be committed to the idea of a coalition with the Liberals.  After failing to dislodge the Liberals in the last election, despite the advantage of going up against Stephane Dion for the hearts and minds of Canada's left-of-centre vote, Jack Layton threw everything into the coalition plan.

But it's curious that last week's New Year's Greeting from Jack Layton made no mention of the coalition.  I wonder if that's significant.  It might be.

The Stephen Harper Fire Engine Conspiracy Theory

Critics of Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper are often marked by their penchant for hyperbole.  Harper is often compared to a dictator (either generically or to specific historic figures - I don't think I need to name them).   Harper is excoriated for his support of Israel, for his environmental policies, or for the economic direction he is following.

The criticisms are defensible (there are always two sides), and if these people could learn to stop throwing in references to Attila the Hun (or much worse) in their comments, more people might listen.

But my friendly advice would be useless for one person.  The commentary on this blog, if not some sort of strange and humourless joke, is disturbing, and if you removed the weird stuff, there'd be nothing left.

Seriously, this one rings an alarm bell for me.  That's actually a bit of a joke on my part, since as you will see, alarms figure prominently in this story.

Angry in the Great White North by Steve Janke is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License. Based on a work at stevejanke.com.