So, Iggy says he’s ready to pull the plug on the Conservatives by defeating Harper in a confidence vote this fall.
What do the rest of you hosers think of this? They’re (Grits and Conservatives) practically tied in the polls. I’ll hold my comments for now.
ETA: Any chance of a mod fixing my horrendous title typo?
I like the typo.
Really, I’d like to see the Alliance go down, & proof that a Grit/NDP coalition can do it.
I guess Canada’s political culture just doesn’t allow for minority governments. As soon as some party leader thinks he could improve his situation with an election, he finds a way to force one. It’s too bad, because I think minority situations could be a great opportunity.
I think Stephen Harper will have to resign if he cannot get his majority, and I don’t think he’ll be able to.
I rather like “federelection” as a nice portmanteau word! 
Let’s see; the possibilities are:
Ignatieff is blowing smoke, posturing for publicity.
Ignatieff has agreement to bring down the Harper government from the other parties.
The Liberals are acting unilaterally. In which case:
–A. The NDP doesn’t really have a choice: to back the Conservatives against the Liberals would be political suicide.
–B. The PQ (or do I mean BQ?) are in the catbird seat. Harper needs their votes to prevent losing a confidence motion. The Liberals need their votes to pass it.
Can Harper spin this to benefit the Conservatives – and maybe prolong his rather rickety hold on power?
Under any scenario, it seems to me that sectionalism benefits at the expense of Canadian nationalism – and that goes completely contrary to the attitude I see in Canadian non-political writers, that the panoply of Newfoundland-to-Vancouver Island as a single nation is something worth cherishing.
Interesting times!
Ignatieff just doesn’t have any appeal to me. If politicians were food, he’d be white rice. And I still don’t trust the Liberals because I still remember them funneling millions of dollars out of a fund for national unity and back into the party coffers.
What do the Liberals have to offer? I haven’t heard anything from them except how bad the Conservatives are. Let’s take a look at what Iggy was getting fired up about:
(Quote is from this CBC article)
Who are the “most vulnerable” and how has the current government failed to protect them?
How is the government supposed to create jobs? Seriously, how? There must be governments out there who have run successful job-creation programs before. Unfortunately I’m hearing a distinct lack of specifics from Mr. Ignatieff.
How is the current government failing to “defend” health care? This comes across as a total non-sequitor to me, almost as if Iggy is trying to latch onto the health care panic going on in the US right now. “Defend” health care from what?
And last but not least, Mr. Harper has failed to restore our public finances. So while he’s protecting our most vulnerable, creating jobs and defending health care (all of which cost money I assume) he’s also supposed to be restoring our public finances? With what? How do you spend money by the truckload and restore it at the same time? I guess you’d have to raise taxes, wouldn’t you? Good luck campaigning on that one, Iggy.
The only real card the Liberals have to play is the one they’re playing - claiming that Harper didn’t borrow enough money to stimulate the economy.
If that’s what this election is going to hinge on, then it’s all going to come down to what the economy looks like - and unfortunately for Mr. Ignatief, the facts aren’t on his side. The U.S. stimulus package was much bigger than Canada’s as a percentage of GDP, but our economy is doing just fine. The European governments that backed away from a big stimulus borrowing spree are recovering faster than is the U.S. There’s just no evidence that a bigger stimulus would have done anything other than increase the debt and distort markets.
Harper’s an economist. I think he’ll be able to play that one fairly well. It’s not a bad thing to be able to say, for example, “We are now officially out of recession. Had we listened to the Liberals, we’d also be out recession - but we’d be fifty billion dollars more in debt.”
OK, checking back in here.
There is no compelling reason to bring down the Conservative government at this point. This will be the 4th general election in 5 years.
To suggest that the Conservative government is either responsible for the fiscal imbalance this year, or to suggest that any other ruling party could have somehow managed to avert a recession of this calibre in Canada is ludicrous, and I sincerely hope that the voting population will get this. Unfortunately I think a lot of ill-informed people will see the current economic deficits and problems as being those of the Conservative party, basically because I believe that a lot of people don’t pay attention to the news. Ignatieff will throw out scary numbers and people will automatically think that a Liberal government could somehow have mitigated this global recession’s effects in Canada. I’m worried that we’ll end up with a Liberal minority and things will become much worse. Not to mention the needless spending on yet another federal election.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think so. Most people will look at the numbers and declare that the Conservatives needlessly squandered the Liberal surplus without fully realizing that the rest of the G8 countries are much worse off than we are here.
The liberals are being duplicitous here. They have two lines of attack that I’ve heard recently: One is that Harper squandered the surplus and took the country into deficit. The other is that he didn’t borrow enough money and spend even more on a stimulus.
Those two lines of attack are fundamentally contradictory.
Another problem for the Liberals is that they were going to go after Harper for keeping soldiers in combat in Afghanistan. The problem now is that A) the current plan is for them to come home anyway, B) With Obama pushing the Afghanistan war hard, it’s going to be difficult for the Liberals to rile up the left about it, and C) Michael Ignatieff is a strong supporter of the Canadian mission in Afghanistan.
The most interesting part of this is that Ignatieff seems to be trying to attack Harper from the right.
Hell, I’d vote for him if I believed it. But I’m having a hard time understanding the strategy here. Ignatieff is going to cut spending and keep taxes down? How can that play with the Liberal base? Can he really try to win an election from the right of the Conservative party?
The cynic in me says that Ignatieff sees a recovery on the horizon, in which case revenues will rise and expenses will fall all on their own, the deficit will shrink, and he can take credit for it if he’s in power. But first he has to get INTO power, and this is either a very shrewd move, or it will play havoc with his base and prevent him from getting votes from the Greens and the NDP.
In any event, Ignatieff wouldn’t be a disaster for Canada - I suspect he’d basically continue most of Harper’s policies.
What I’ve never really understood, however, is why the Liberals want him as their leader. I guess the only explanation is that they simply want to be in power, and he’s the most likely person to get them there. This is a guy whose foreign policy positions are pretty much neoconservative. He’s an internationalist, he believes in military intervention for humanitarian and human rights reasons. He supported the Iraq war (and still does, although not the way it was carried out). He supports a continued engagement in Afghanistan. He’s pro-American, and he supports all of the Bush policies regarding indefinite detention, coercive interrogation, etc.
Economically, he’s pro-business, and has backed away from the more aggressive global warming policies the Liberals had in the last election. And now he says he wants to cut spending and leave taxes alone. It sounds like he and Harper would get along famously over beers. He’s basically an old-style Tory.
If there’s an election, Canada may have the highest combined IQ between the candidates that I’ve ever seen. Ignatieff is obviously wicked smart, and Harper is also a pretty powerful intellectual. It’ll definitely be interesting. Ignatieff is more charismatic, and that may make the difference.
But where does that leave the left? Do they sit this out? Can Ignatieff light the base up given his background? I’m not sure.
I think he’s full of shit.
Ignatieff’s a blowhard, and he blows hardest when there’s no risk. He’s talking big now - a month before any confidence vote could possibly take place.
When the time comes, he will have found an excuse not to hold an election, or else he will have his caucus make a symbolic vote if he’s sure either the NDP or Bloc plan to prevent an election (and both may have reason to.) The only thing that would cause him to force an election is if for some reason the polls suddenly swing heavily in his favour, which doesn’t seem at all likely.
…Would be perfectly correct. They may not be at fault for there BEING one, but they spent like drunken sailors *before the fiscal crisis hit. * Nobody seems to remember their bloated pre-crisis budgets. We may have to have a deficit but it could have been a lot smaller.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not supporting Michael Ignatieff. But Harper has disappointed me.
I think you may be right on all counts.
Ignatieff kind of vanished off the radar there for a few months, kicking off more talk that he wasn’t really interested in Canada and that he was basically an international carpetbagger. So suddenly he’s popped up and he’s getting all kinds of media attention. It’s possible this could just be a ploy to keep him in the news cycle and remind Canadians that he’s still around, and still engaged.
I still don’t understand why you would vote to throw a government out of power, when the replacement looks almost identical. I’m not seeing any big changes coming from a liberal party with Ignatieff at the helm. If anything I could see him actually increasing Canada’s military engagement in Afghanistan. And I don’t think he’s a tax-and-spend liberal, or a fan of heavy regulation of business.
It’s almost funny that you mention this now, but the Liberal Party became economically conservative decades ago. Chrétien and Martin cut every bit of government spending they could in order to balance the budget. Further to that, the Liberal Party has also been very pro-business, recognizing the need for a strong and healthy business community in order to have a strong and healthy country.
What the Liberal Party now stands for is fiscal responsibility, with mildly socially liberal policies. You get the economic benefits of the Reform Party, without all the bible thumping. And you get the socially responsible policies of the NDP without the hilariously outdated hippy-nomics that still plagues that party. What’s not to love? Unless you’re pro-taxes or anti-gay, it’s an opportunity to have a majority government that will do great things for about 6-8 years and then piss it all away.
But aside from all that, the reality is that Ignatieff HAS to do SOMETHING other than ride in the passenger seat. He’s got people that expect him to lead the party to a majority government. In contrast, the NDP are fine with a guy that talks loudly and accomplishes nothing.
My guess is that it’s been long enough since the Sponsorship Scandal, and the general public is tired of a minority government. Harper has been in power long enough to have some dirt on his hands that he’ll have to account for. As I said above, the Liberal Party represents a very common sense, middle of the road, unobjectionable platform. There just aren’t enough people that want taxes raised, abortion discussed, American style healthcare, more power given to unions, or to somehow undo same sex marriage.
And although Harper is a good guy, and I’d love to support a conservative government, he’s the one that has to play to a base of crazy people that he inherited from Preston Manning. Added to that, you can’t discount the 8 years of conservative politics in the US that ended with a global financial meltdown.
Until Canada can buckle down and elect a majority government, there’s going to be an election every year or two. It’s just the way the system is. The simple fact that a government has a plurality does not guarantee that that government will win the necessary votes to remain in power.
If Canadians want a government that can remain in power for more than a year or two, one must be elected with sufficient strength to do so.
To be honest, I’m kind of liking these minority governments. It prevents the government from doing much of anything, and that’s exactly what I want from my government. In fact, our near-constant minority governments may be part of the reason why we’re in such good shape with respect to the debt and spending.
It’s just like the U.S. - when the U.S. government is divided, the country does a lot better. But when the Democrats or Republicans get a hammer lock on the seats of power, all hell breaks loose.
Keep those politicians on their toes, I say. Make them think twice about doing anything that doesn’t have widespread appeal. Let the social engineers and fundamentalists and all the other fringe figures stew while sane heads plod down the path most traveled and leave everyone else alone to manage their own affairs. Works for me.
This is the liberal stimulus plan
Declan
I respectfully disagree. It was 10 years of Liberal Party majority government that got Canada into “good shape with respect to the debt and spending.” And all that was able to occur because the PC party had a massive melt down leaving little to no opposition. I know a lot of people were unhappy by the end of Martin’s rule, but the real sour points seem to be the Gun Registry and the Sponsorship Scandal. Not exactly an Iraq war, Katrina, warrentless wiretaps, and financial meltdown.
Oddly enough, a few years with a Conservative minority and spending is way up at the same time that taxes were reduced.
In the end, I don’t think that a minority government is better than a majority. I think the real problems occur when there isn’t sufficient opposition. A good government should be scared going into an election–although that always seems to lead to massive increases in spending (I’m looking at you Harper).
The Liberals are idiots to be considering forcing an election. The last time they threatened an election they nosedived in the polls. Announcing their intentions months in advance was even stupider. Now the Conservatives are going to ensure that the first confidence motion covers the Home Renovation Tax Credit, which is pretty popular among the electorate
You won’t get an argument from me on that. I’ve given the liberals lots of praise for their reasonable fiscal policies. My main beef with the Liberals when they were in power is that I thought they treated Canada’s military shamefully.
The financial meltdown was not the fault of the Conservatives, or even the Republicans. It was an inevitable result of a whole pile of sequential bubbles, distortions, the collapse of private savings, and other things. I know some of you like to heap blame on some regulation or another, but in reality this meltdown has been brewing for at least a decade or more, spanning Liberal, Conservative, Democrat, and Republican governments. And it’s a worldwide crisis.
The Gun Registry was and is a useless boondoggle that has needlessly consumed billions of dollars and made lives harder for a lot of law-abiding gun owners. And that is 100% the fault of the Liberals. And of course, the sponsorship scandal showed that by the end of Martin’s term the Liberal party was shot through with serious corruption. Yes, it WAS a big deal.
Oh, come on. Let’s be fair. I’m no fan of some of the latest spending of the Harper government, but the surplus peaked as a percentage of GDP in 2000, and was declining before Harper took power. And it was Harper that resisted the liberal’s call for a much bigger stimulus, if you’ll recall. And also, the stimulus he did borrow for came because the Liberals were threatening a vote of non-confidence if he didn’t do something.
And let’s also be clear in acknowledging that Canada still has the healthiest economy in the G7, and so far has weathered the recession better than any other major country. Credit to both Liberals and Conservatives for that.
I just had a warm fuzzy feeling as we seemed to agree on everything.
I still think Ignatieff had no choice. The world is going to be a far better place in a year; GDP will have risen in every quarter, unemployment down, profits up, life will be good–and Harper will get all the credit. To call an election then would be disastrous. And to wait would show a lack of leadership on his part.
I personally think we’re better off having an election where there is a possibility of a majority government, either Conservative or Liberal. Sort of a roll the dice and see what comes up. I can’t help but feel the Bloc are going to have a hard time, and give seats to either the Liberals or the Conservatives.
There is also the very real possibility that people will vote for NDP. If they were to get enough seats we could see and actual coalition government.
And lastly, there is still the very real possibility that the Governor General will chose to not dissolve parliament, but instead insist that the Liberals form a coalition with the current opposition parties.
It’s almost weird to say, but I can’t help but feel the Conservatives and Liberals need to form a really kick ass coalition based entirely on sound economic policies. Think about it for a second, the two parties would clash over social issues, and hopefully cancel each other out. So no more wasteful spending on unnecessary social programs, but also no threat to civil rights or social liberties. In the end, the stuff they agree on are the very things the country needs most.
None of these possibilities are anything close to “very real”, but the first one is still a whole lot more probable than the second one.