Angry in the Great White North

CTV is breaking the news:

Gov. Gen Michaelle Jean has approved Prime Minister Stephen Harper's request to suspend Parliament, agreeing to put the government on hold until the end of January, CTV News has learned.

CTV's Ottawa Bureau Chief Robert Fife reported the development from outside Rideau Hall.

CBC is confirming it:

Gov. Gen. Michaëlle Jean has agreed with a request from Stephen Harper to suspend Parliament, the Prime Minister's Office told CBC News, a move that avoids a confidence vote set for Monday that could have toppled his minority government.

The announcement on Thursday comes after a two-hour meeting with Jean at Rideau Hall in which he asked her to prorogue, or suspend, the current parliamentary session until the end of January, when the Tories plan to table a budget.

So what happens now?  It's hard to say, of course, but then I get paid absolutely nothing to make pointless predictions, so here goes.

Stephane Dion is in a world of hurt.  His video presentation last night was an acute embarrassment for his party, and for his partners, the NDP and the Bloc Quebecois, in the separatist coalition.

Now Stephane Dion has to hold a coalition together for another four to six weeks, while the heat gets turned up from different directions:

• The Conservatives will unleash a shock-and-awe ad campaign that will make certain every Canadian knows that Dion would hand the keys to Canada over to Gilles Duceppe and the Quebec separatists, all to avoid becoming a trivia question ("Name the two Liberal leaders who never became prime minister").
• The NDP is taking heat for the association with the separatists.  Without the payoff of being in government and the chance of fulfilling every Marxist's dream to punitively tax working people, Jack Layton's supporters among the ranks of the deliberately unemployed (artists, permanent students, tenured professors, and the like) are going to be very upset.  What grief Jack Layton gets he'll aim at Stephane Dion.
• Gilles Duceppe is already upset with Stephane Dion, and now that Canada has reached a period of stability during which the heat can be turned down, Duceppe's goal of breaking up the country with the help of the hapless and power-hungry Liberals is put on hold, perhaps permanently.
• Liberal MPs are wondering what is next.  They are about to be at the receiving end of that Conservative ad campaign.  The whole point was to get into power without facing the electorate.  Instead, an informal election has begun, meaning the Tories can advertise as much as they like -- no limits.  If there is an election in February, lots of Liberal MPs are wondering if the shellacking they received in October will seem like a success compared to what is going to happen next spring.  They're going to blame Stephane Dion for this mess.
• Michael Ignatieff is going to be working very hard to extricate the Liberal Party from this separatist coalition.  Stephane Dion's intrasigence is in his way, and that means Stephane Dion will have to go.
• Bob Rae is going to be working very hard to cement the Liberal Party into this separatist coalition.   Stephane Dion's incompetence is in his way, and that means Stephane Dion will have to go.

I think we're going to see the Liberal Party cracking under the pressure that's going to be applied in the next few weeks.

Bonus thoughts:

• Elizabeth May doesn't get her Senate seat.  It doesn't get much better than that.  Back to figuring out how to get people to actually, you know, vote for her.
• If the coalition falls apart, what is he likelihood that the Conservatives will trigger another election?
• Where is Michael Ignatieff?

Very clever:  Now to divide the opposition:

Rosemary Thompson asks if he made a mistake, and how he will rebuild the trust of the opposition parties. He defends the initial move to pull public financing, and claims the public “never suppoorted’ it in the first place. And …he gives us his version of a timeline, but declines to acknowledge any mistakes were made. “We have to do some trustbuilding on both sides,” he says.

Right then.  Find the specific Liberal MPs (and maybe a couple of NDP MPs too) who are so frightened or disgusted by the separatist coalition foisted upon them that they will be willing to listen to anything reasonable (and that means the Conservatives have to be reasonable).  Pull them out of the separatist coalition, and like Jenga blocks, the whole thing falls down, taking Stephane Dion with it.