The underlying myth in this debate about whether there will be an election this fall is that the Conservative Government must attract the support of at least one of the opposition parties to survive. They’re wrong. There is another option.
Conservatives set an historical precedent when we abstained from voting on the Liberal’s 2005 budget, allowing Paul Martin’s minority government to survive. At that time, our leader Stephen Harper said there were many aspects of that budget we fundamentally couldn’t vote to support. Yet, we respected the will of Canadians which strongly indicated they didn’t want an election.
Mr. Dion, as leader of the Official Opposition, could take the same, responsible course of action now. Canada’s economy is performing very well. Unemployment is at its lowest in 32 years. Taxes are down. Consumer spending remains robust and Canada is regaining its good reputation on the international stage thanks to the strong and decisive leadership of Prime Minister Harper.
Instructing his Liberal caucus to abstain from the vote on the Throne Speech is a lifeline that Mr. Dion may wish to grasp … and, more importantly, one that will save Canadians from an unwanted, unnecessary and expensive trip to the polls.
My take (from a comments section post over at another blog):
“Tough call for your guys. Which is worse — a potentially winnable, potentially disastrous immediate election, or a pause that gives time for even more trouble to start up?
“Gut check time — which sounds like it’s more likely to go to the better case scenario?
“Funnily enough, as much as I’m enjoying watching the Liberals in spasms right now, I do think that your leader has it in him to do a gut check and pull things together, perhaps even well enough to beat my party’s leader. That’s why you picked him, I imagine — the man who had the courage to take on the separatists solo, in public, when everyone else thought it was hopeless.”
I still think that Dion has the potential to come back. He mightn’t — but he has it in him to do so…
You know how I was having fun with the forecaster the other day?
Try this one on for size.
Dion craters. 10% of the Liberal vote goes to the CPC. 20% goes to the NDP.
Duceppe has no raison d’etre. 30% of the Bloc vote goes Dipper, 20% goes CPC.
Layton holds, Harper holds.
What you end up with is this:
Conservatives — 41.4% of the vote, 215 seats, including, in a neat bit of symmetry, 54 seats in Quebec.
New Democrats — 26.7% of the vote, 55 seats. (10 in Quebec including Laurier-St. Marie)
Liberals — 21.2% of the vote, 36 seats.
Bloc — 5.2% of the vote, 1 seat.
Independent — 1. Andre Arthur, I think.
***
That is when, officially, everyone’s heads would explode, and people would storm Ottawa, demanding a constitutional amendment.
Padres lose, Rockies win, Mets win, Phillies win
All four teams finish 89-73, meaning the NLDS cannot begin until Thursday. Mets visit Phillies on Monday to determine East champion.
The Rockies, Padres and Monday’s loser remain tied. The Rockies have the best head-to-head record among the three (regardless of whether Mets or Phillies lose). The Rockies either can choose to play a home game Tuesday and, if they win, a home game Wednesday, or they can opt to let the Padres and the East runner-up play Tuesday, with the winner hosting the Rockies on Wednesday.
If the Rockies choose to play Wednesday on the road, the Padres would host the Mets or visit the Phillies on Tuesday, with the winner hosting the Rockies on Wednesday for the wild card.
If the Rockies choose to stay at home, the Phillies (if they lost to the Mets on Monday) or Padres (if the Phillies beat the Mets) would choose to play Tuesday at the Rockies, then (if they win) Wednesday at home against the Padres or Mets, OR simply play Wednesday at the winner of Padres-Rockies or Mets-Rockies.
I was trying to find the baseball rules for this sort of thing — until this weekend, it looked like a five-way tie was even possible…
The fact that the coin-toss is still a major method of determining who has home field is interesting. And it’s fun watching MLB scramble as unforeseen scenarios become more and more possible.
Liberals lose 4% of their 2006 votes to the CPC, 4% to the NDP.
Bloc lose 30% of their 2006 votes to the CPC.
Results:
Conservatives at 40.6% of the popular vote and 172 seats. (Including over 40 in Quebec.)
Liberals at 27.2% of the vote and 83 seats.
NDP at 18.7% of the vote and 37 seats.
Bloc at 7.3% of the vote and 15 seats.
1 Independent.
***
If you take that Bloc decline and apply it as 20% CPC, 10% NDP, then you have:
CPC 155, PLC 84, NDP 37, BQ 31, IND 1.
Realistically, though, take 10-15 seats off the CPC total, whatever it is, to account for losses in Atlantic Canada and the Prairies, which cannot be modelled in the forecaster.
I kid, I kid. Essentially, Kennedy has been serving as an elections observer in eastern Ukraine, in the Russian-dominated region that is a Party of Regions stronghold. As there is a PR system in place, extra ballots and extra voters in this region mean that the Party of Regions is (as expected) cheating. (In the 2004 presidential runoff, this became obvious when there was 97% turnout in some districts.)
Anyway, good on Kennedy for his work, but it sucks that the elections are not quite fair.
I guess all this election speculation has suddenly come down to Dion and the Liberals. I’m no psychic, but the writing is on the wall now - it’s over, and the decision will be to take one for the team and lose an election now to be fired, or stay on to lose even bigger later.
Honestly, I feel sort of bad for Dion. I think he miscalculated what total sharks he was swimming with.
And you know what? If I was Dion and those options were put to me, I’d say, “Gee, thanks for all the support - I’ll stay on and you can all go with me”. But, he’s not me - so we’ll see.
Second, Dion believed his opponents in the leadership were in control of their teams. Another big mistake.
It was not the candidates that built their teams during the last Liberal leadership race; it was the other way around. Bob Rae, Michael Ignatieff and Gerard Kennedy were just icons co-opted by some groups to work their way back into the driver seat.
When their candidate lost, they kept working on their own personal agenda in Ottawa, in Ontario and, in this case, in Quebec.
In a nutshell, the people that created the mess during the Martin and Chretien era are still working full time. They’ve only changed their jerseys and are working with more discretion.
Rae, Kennedy and, most of all, Ignatieff are simply the new victims of an old feud.
***
In other words, no grand conspiracies.
Update the next morning:
Check out Bob Fife here. It’s a debacle. Some Liberal MPs are planning to be sick, others are urging Dion to take down the government, and the leader himself changes his mind constantly, based on whomever he last talked to — according to those close to him. In other words, caucus discipline seems to have broken down.
Ouch. I knew the Conservative line of “Stephane Dion is not a leader” had legs. What I didn’t know was that it actually might be true…
My base lifting weight now for flat-bed bench is now 155 lb — did three sets at 8-8-6 on Monday.
Today, did my first eight at that, then a set of four at 165, then did a single rep (can there be such a thing as a “single rep”?) at 185 lb. The last is above my current weight.
So, I can apparently now bench my own weight. This is awesome.
Finally, I had my spotter help me put up 200 lb, just to see how it felt. I could balance it just fine on my own, but when I brought it down to try to do a single rep, I couldn’t do too much with it.
Anyway, I find it really neat that I can bench my own weight and that the 200 lb milestone is edging ever closer and closer.
Am much stronger than in college, or in high school — this impresses me perhaps a little more than it should.
A college classmate of mine, Chinook, who is (coincidentally) learning how to fly Chinooks.
She’s class of ‘02 from my college, and she is awesome. She spent the five years after college first working in Africa for an NGO promoting sports abroad (in Africa), then working on various cruise ships all over the world.
I totally envy her life.
Went ocean-canoeing with her on a fall break Outdoor Action trip during my sophomore year.
At one point my local was the British Ex-Servicemen’s Club out on Kingsway. Cheap beer, decent pool table, a bunch of old guys who had, foolishly enough, fought for King and Country and rather liked popping in for an evening’s couple of pints and a cigarette or seventy. They came from a culture which, well, smoked cigarettes.
Unfortunately they were white and British. Which does not cut it any more. …
Essential for immigrants from hookah smoking cultures…right, well, England was a cigarette and pipe smoking culture. Working class Canada was a cigarette smoking culture. A bunch of Greek guys I know who own restaurants in Vancouver come from cigarette smoking cultures. Punk rockers are a cigarette smoking culture But, hey, they are not Muslims and are unlikely to, in the midst of their depression, blow something up. …
But the bigger problem is that we are granting to noisy newcomers the rights which we have taken away from men who fought for Canada or England. And that should worry all of us a lot.
The issue is equality — rights for all, or rights for none.
I’m a non-smoker. I don’t particularly care for the smell of cigarettes — I hate it, in fact. I do like the smell of pipe tobacco or of cigars, though. I’ll smoke a hookah, and I may yet learn how to smoke an old-fashioned pipe.
Anyway, as with any person of libertarian sympathies, I think that if a patron and his clients want to have smoking allowed, then smoking should be allowed. In a hookah bar, a Legion Hall, or a sleazy pick-up joint. No-one is forcing anyone to do anything — you’re free to go to another restaurant or bar, or to eat at home. (Me, I’m for the hookah bar or the Legion Hall. The former on slow weeknights, the latter on hockey nights.)
Reasonable accommodation involves setting up rules that apply equally for all citizens, and doing so in a way that is not gratuitously offensive. We all — well, most of us — are happy to accept newcomers. My parents were immigrants — the pater from Nepal, the mater from the States — and they were warmly received. (Well, there were some racist WASPs in my dad’s firm. But he made partner eventually, and, later on, his son went to the most British of schools in Toronto, a similar summer camp, and two of the most elitist colleges in the States. In other words, the yoke of Toronto WASPdom was not particularly heavy.)
If culture is a sufficiently grave consideration for certain newcomers, then it is sufficiently important for our old men. Still, an even older cultural artifact — the idea of living in a free country — may deserve similar tending and care.
This isn’t to set up a privileged class — though if anyone had earned it, it would be a Currie from Victoria. This is merely to assert that equality before the law was once considered a natural right. (Indeed, it’s a Charter right. Not that the Charter was all that much of an improvement on what we have considered our natural rights to be, for as long as we have been Canadians.)
Agreed with Buchanan’s comment at the end — the Dems really come across as the nanny-state party. They’re against lowering the drinking age, for a smoking ban (federally, if need be), and for teaching second-graders about gay relationships.
Leaves an opening for Giuliani’s campaign approach, I think…
I really don’t see anything wrong with what Bill O’Reilly had to say about black people and white Americans’ knowledge (or lack thereof) of black culture and the black experience.
What’s the issue? He was saying that really we’re all the same as Americans, that there’s no real difference — in spite of the view that the popular depiction of black culture might promote.
Update: Here’s the tape of the whole hour. There’s nothing remotely racist about what Bill O’Reilly has to say.
Calling Media Matters and MoveOn.org “the Gestapo” is a bit much, but it would be accurate to call their actions race-baiting and demagoguery.
O’Reilly is denouncing his own grandmother’s racism, promoting Motown, and pointing to contemporary black role models while criticizing the current portrayal of black Americans in the media.
This is nothing like Imus, who was acting like a boor. O’Reilly was trying to talk honestly about race, and about what many white Americans don’t understand about black America, and why that is.
Yes, media figures — and this includes Ignatieff — suffer from pronoun trouble. This often stems from a feeling that one is a citizen of the world, and beyond such arcane distinctions like nationality.
Myself, I’ll use “we” for both my countries, which also can lead to confusion.
***
I figure, a cosmopolitan identity isn’t terrible. I have one, actually: I see Canada and the United States as part of one larger family — that of the English-speaking peoples of the world, whose liberal systems of government descend from those that developed over the last millennium in England. I see no conflict of loyalties when serving in state service or the armed forces of any of those nations — the United States, one of the various Commonwealth realms, or the mother country itself.
I suspect that, historically, others have felt similarly — as can be judged from the number of Americans who entered Canadian or British forces while the United States remained neutral in the two world wars, or from the number of Canadians who enlisted to serve in Vietnam.
Cosmopolitanism is not the problem. No, the problem comes when said cosmopolitans no longer see the liberal societies that allow them to live such rich, cultured lives as being worth defending, and forget to be grateful to the rough men who stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
When Michael Ignatieff was in Britain and in the United States, I thought he had managed to square that circle — he had become the cosmopolitan citizen of the world who remembered to value the liberalism which had made his life possible. That seems less true now. (Though perhaps I should wait to judge him until such time that he becomes a leader in his own right.)
NEW YORK–Canada’s relationship with the United States is stalled thanks to an “unhealthy” trend in the U.S. toward nationalism and away from deeper economic ties, Prime Minister Stephen Harper told a prestigious foreign policy think-tank here yesterday.
He said he was “deeply concerned” that the political discourse in the U.S. had been infected by “populism, protectionism and nationalism in an unhealthy sense.”
That’s a shot at the Democratic Congress on its trade views and, more broadly, on the Lou Dobbs-influenced coalition of views.
Viz.,
He used Colombia as an example, noting that the U.S. Congress recently blocked a free trade agreement proposed by Bush because of concerns over the country’s human rights record. Harper travelled this summer to Colombia to meet President Alvaro Uribe and formally launch free trade talks.
“Colombia needs its democratic friends to lean forward and give them a chance at partnership and trade with North America,” Harper said. “I am very concerned that some in the United States seem unwilling to do that. What message does that send to those who want to share in freedom and prosperity?”
On the contrary, that’s entirely in line with the economic liberalism espoused by Wall Street Journal Republicans and Bill Clinton Democrats.
Or, to put it another way, let’s go back to Andrew Coyne’s 2005 pre-campaign column.
Even if the Tories pick up seats — let’s say they end up with 145-150 seats in the 40th Parliament of Canada — there is a problem. Once Dion, Layton, and Duceppe have put it out there that they just can’t support Stephen Harper, how will he cobble together the support necessary to govern?
If we go to the polls, is it majority or bust? (Actually, probably not — this is a policy issue, not a corruption issue. So compromises can probably be made. But it just got that much harder…)
I try to avoid name-calling, because I think it cheapens discourse. So no faux labels around here. But I’ll make an exception for the president of Iran.
I’ve always had a good opinion of President Bollinger, especially for this.
***
Would I have invited I’m-a-dinner-jacket to my school, if I were president of the top NYC university?
Yes, I think I would have. Would I have spouted off to him like President Bollinger? I don’t know. Though I wish I would have, I doubt it — I tend towards more polite approaches, even when they’re not warranted.
***
I like his support for the Columbia alumni serving in the military and his naming of Ahmadinejad as their enemy.
Sunlight — that’s what we need. So that’s why I think that Columbia University did just fine today — primarily because of their president. (I’m sure that many of their professors would have been the mealy-mouthed sorts one expects — this is why so many were surprised.)
That said, the first commenter here has it right — let ROTC back on campus and then all will be forgiven.
All in all, however, it was a good show by the Columbia president.
Update: I should also note that this sort of thing is valuable also in that it helps identify idiots at home, too.
Update again: Still, there’s Rudy’s view, which is a fair point.
